The Memoirs of John Evelyn. Volumes I, II, III, IV & V.

Tan calf spines with brown title plate and gilt decoration. Green marbled boards with matching endpapers.

This provides one of the best records of 17th century English court life. Evelyn's Diary remained unpublished as a manuscript until 1818 when it was issued in a quarto volume of 700 pages covering the years 1641 to 1697. It continued in a smaller book to within three weeks of Evelyn's death in 1706. Despite entries going back to 1641, Evelyn only actually started writing his diary much later, relying on almanacs and accounts of other people for many of the earlier events. A selection from this was edited by William Bray, with the permission of the Evelyn family. Other editions followed, the most notable being those of H.B. Wheatley (1879) and Austin Dobson (3 vols, 1906)

John Evelyn FRS (31 October 1620 – 27 February 1706) was an English writer, landowner, gardener, courtier and minor government official, who is now best known as a diarist. He was a founding Fellow of the Royal Society. John Evelyn's diary, or memoir, spanned the period of his adult life from 1640, when he was a student, to 1706, the year he died. He did not write daily at all times. The many volumes provide insight into life and events at a time before regular magazines or newspapers were published, making diaries of greater interest to modern historians than such works might have been at later periods. Evelyn's work covers art, culture and politics, including the execution of Charles I, Oliver Cromwell's rise and eventual natural death, the last Great Plague of London, and the Great Fire of London in 1666. Evelyn's posthumously "rival" diarist, Samuel Pepys, wrote a different kind of diary, covering a much shorter period, 1660–1669, but in much greater depth, within the same era. Over the years, Evelyn's Diary, first published in 1818, has been overshadowed by Pepys's chronicles of 17th-century life. Among the many subjects he published about, gardening was an increasing obsession of Evelyn's, and he left a huge manuscript on the subject that was not printed until 2001. He published several translations of French gardening books, and his Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees (1664) was very influential in its plea to landowners to plant trees, of which he believed the country to be dangerously short. Sections from his main manuscript were added to editions of this, and also published separately.