Samuel Pepys led a colourful life, to be sure, but unfortunately this book is more in black and white than glorious technicolour. It’s obviously been diligently researched, but it is quite dry. I know that academic tomes have to be on the serious side, but that doesn’t mean they have to be boring. Unfortunately, this book was.

Thank you to NetGalley and Yale University Press for a review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I received a free electronic copy of this history from Netgalley, Margaret Willes, and Yale University Press in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me.

This is an excellent biography of but Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. Though their ideals and expectations were completely at odds, it was astonishing how often they joined together to make life more secure and safe for the common man. These were two extraordinary statesmen who worked for the cause of humanity.

This was a delightful little niche book about Early Modern England, Pepys is a popular figure and his diaries are famous. Willes books takes on Pepys from another angle, which is refreshing and fun to read.

Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn are two of the most celebrated English diarists. If Pepys was a well-known figure from Restoration, John Evelyn was mainly known by those interested in garden history. They lived in a turbulent age such as the Restoration, an age marked by the regicide, the revolution, the plague and the Great Fire that destroyed the city of London. Pepys and Evelyn are two important witnesses and active participants to an age that completely bouleversed the English political scene internally and overseas. They came from two different backgrounds, but were brought together when they were recruited on the Commission for Sick and Wounded Men to relieve the suffering of sailors injured and impoverished by the Anglo-Dutch Wars. Their diary is not only a first-hand account of political matters but also a record of personal life and activities. Diary-keeping had become a custom for some by the end of the 17th century and as a form of moral account for the perfect Christian. Nowdays, diary-keeping has been replaced by blogs and social networks, but they lack of privacy. Maybe reading this book can encourage someone to write again his own diary. I hope so.

Margaret Willes’s The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn packs in a lot of information into a rather short work. As a reader, I could appreciate the well-researched nature of the book, and I could tell that Willes enjoys the subject matter. I have never read any biographies about Pepys or Evelyn, and while Willes says this was not the purpose of the work, I feel now that I have read a biography about both of them more than finding out about the curious world they lived. I would recommend this book to others because of the amount of information and the fact that it was an enjoyable easy read, but I would caution that I do not feel the book actually achieves the author’s goal.

Thank you, NetGalley and Yale University Press for the copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

"The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn" is a biography of both Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. The author quoted from their diaries and personal correspondence, but she generally summarized what was said (probably because that's easier to read and understand).

She divided their lives into several themes: public careers and wider context of what was going on, descriptions of their family and major friends, their involvement in the Royal Society and interest in science, Pepys' interest in the theatre and music, Evelyn's interest in gardens and gardening and his books on horticulture, and their libraries (books, ballads, prints, etc.). The author also threw in some information about tea, coffee, and chocolate along with other imported consumer goods (including flowers and other plants).

These men lived through the Restoration of Charles II, the plague, and the Great Fire of London in 1666. It was interesting to see their views on what was going on and to get a sense of what life was like at that time. It's a quick look at what was happening and what some people's attitudes and interests were like. Overall, I'd recommend this book to those interested in this time period in England.

An interesting topic and lots of information crammed into this book but it feels disjointed and unstructured throughout. Willes asserts that she's not writing a dual biography of Pepys and Evelyn, but it's not as clear as it could be what her intention is: she uses the conceit of a 'cabinet of curiosities' which seems to be an excuse to jump from topic to topic at will.

So there are abbreviated sections here about the lives of both men, about the Anglo-Dutch Wars, the execution of Charles I, the New Model Army, the Great Fire and so on - but it all feels haphazard and superficial. I kept feeling that I was still reading a kind of general introduction even when I was 50% into the book...

Lacking an overall argument or thesis, this ends of being a jumble of information - interesting but frustratingly unstructured and disjointed - I really wanted some kind of organisation to relate the various strands to each other.

This well-researched book delves into the minutiae of the 17th century. Friends Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn were prodigious letter writers and diarists, and provide much information about life in London, including firsthand accounts of the Great Fire, the plague, the Restoration, and the introduction of “the trio of exotic beverages” tea, coffee, and chocolate. We also learn a bit about each man’s passion: for Evelyn, it was horticulture, and for Pepys, music and theater.

A valuable edition to the literature of the period.

Willes explores how Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, diarists and observers of Restoration London, came to see the world in two parallel but distinctly different ways--Pepys as a scrappy social climber and worker of the state bureaucracy, Evelyn the wealthy and cultured courtier with exile cred. Unusually, the two crossed paths during the Anglo-Dutch Wars as they both worked on a charity to aid disabled sailors, becoming friends but still distinctly different lenses through which to view Stuart England. There's not much new here if you've read the Tomlinson or Darley biographies, but seeing them deliberately in tandem is interesting. Also, I had forgotten that in the Great Fire, as the flames threatened his house, Pepys ran outside to bury important papers, some money and a large wheel of Parmesan cheese in the back yard.

A fabulously substantial and readable work that roots out the most interesting private and public aspects of two of the foremost diarists of the seventeenth century, The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn is a fascinating book about the murky world of the Restoration period, which, at over three centuries in our past shows that some surprisingly modern issues were considered by the period's men and women of letters: John Evelyn, for instance, was horrified by the noise and pollution in London, and wrote about it in his pamphlet Fumifugium, in which he recommends planting more sweet-smelling trees to overcome the foul stench of the coal smoke.

Willes begins with a background on the two men, combined with a history of the period they were writing in and of. Both Evelyn and Pepys were fully involved, in one way or another, in the world of the seventeenth century, and they had opposing backgrounds and views: Evelyn came from a wealthy family, where Pepys' father was a 'tailor to the legal community' – not a family of abject poverty, but nonetheless one that saw its fair share of financial and social struggles. On the execution of Charles I, the distinction in the views of the two is clear. Of the event, Evelyn writes that the execution, "struck me with such horror that I kept the day of his Martyrdom a fast, & would not be present, at that execrable wickednesse", whereas after attending the execution, Pepys "returned to school and told his friends that if he had to preach a sermon on the King, it would be 'The memory of the wicked shall rot'."

But despite their differences in views and backgrounds, the two men were friends, finding common ground in their love of knowledge and irrepressible curiosity.

The diarists' observations throw a chilling eyewitness light onto events such as the Great Plague of London: "June 1665 was very hot, and Pepys noted in Drury Lane how he saw 'two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and "Lord have mercy upon us" writ there – which was a sad sight to me, being the first of that kind that to my remembrance I ever saw'"; while Evelyn "noted 'all along the Citty & suburbs ... a dismal passage & dangerous, to see so many Cofines exposed in the streetes & the streete thin of people, the shops shut up, & all in mournefull silence, as not knowing whose turne might be next'". Pepys and Evelyn also witnessed the Great Fire of London, in the year following the Great Plague, and both vividly diarise also that event.

No less interesting than accounts of these tragedies of history are the lives of the men themselves – the very personal accounts of men who were born almost four centuries ago. Often, personal histories must be constructed using scraps of evidence that gives an incomplete and unsatisfying picture of people's lives (though future historians may yet have a field day with the Internet and Social Media), but in the cases of Pepys and Evelyn, we have not just each man's own personal day-to-day account of his life and thoughts, but that of his close friend, giving a second perspective on the times, and even on the men themselves. Willes puts this to good use in part two of the book, which delves into the private lives of Pepys and Evelyn.

Pepys had difficult in-laws: his wife Elizabeth's father was, in the words of Balthazar, Elizabeth's brother, "'Full of Wheemesis' – schemes to make money through inventions such as a machine for perpetual motion, and taking out patents for the perennial problem of curing smoky chimneys". Of Balthazar himself, Pepys' biographer wrote that if he had not existed "'only Dickens could have invented him'", and long after the connector between the two men, Elizabeth Pepys, was dead, Balthazar continued to plague Pepys for money and favours. Both men's lives were full of curious, colourful characters, from extended family members like Balthazar, to the servants in Pepys' life whom he befriended and in many instances cared for, even remembering particular favourites in his will.

Domestic intrigue, affairs, crises and grief dogged the marriages of both men, and though she remains exact and scholarly, Willes also writes about the personal lives of Pepys and Evelyn with empathy, noting upon the Evelyns' loss of three of their children, that "It has been suggested that parents in seventeenth-century England were inured to the sudden death of their children, but the outpouring of grief from both Mary and John give the lie to this."

The third and final part of the book digs deep into what is probably the very reason for their many years of close friendship – their interests, including a fascination with science and their involvement in the nascent Royal Society. Pepys was a sociable man who seemed to have a knack for discovering the most interesting – and prescient – people, such as William Petty, a self-educated Anatomy Professor and Cromwell's physician-general, among other things, who counted among his considerations "a prototype National Health Service", and "proposals of a decimal coinage".

The two men's interests took in music – Pepys was a quite accomplished musician, but Evelyn could not find any real talent in this area despite taking lessons and being a keen listener of other people's musicianship; the theatre; horticulture, an area in which Evelyn excelled, and for which he had a deep love, which took in the consideration, in Acetaria, Evelyn's book on salads, that "vegetables were a healthy addition to the diet".

With a chapter on the new beverages in Seventeenth century London of coffee, tea, and chocolate (in order of popularity), and the new coffee houses that began to spring up in the 1650s, and a chapter on the fashion of the time, which was extending to incorporate exotic clothes and, as an aside, even more exotic pets (Pepys mentions that he has a pet monkey in his diary), Willles covers pretty much all the changes in taste and fashions that took place in the lives of Londoners in the seventeenth century, including, of course, the cabinets of curiosities, after which the design of which Willes' own book is modelled. And Evelyn and Pepys enjoyed them all to the full.

The final chapter is devoted to Evelyn's and Pepys mutual love of books. Both had large libraries and numbered their books in the thousands. Whilst Evelyn's collection is now spread across several collections, including the British Library, since it was sold off in the late 1970s, Pepys library is housed intact at Magdalene College, Cambridge University.