Abstract
The impending war between the English and Dutch saw a catastrophe preceding and then playing out in tandem with the outbreak of plague that swept London in 1665. While largely separate tragedies, war and pestilence became a meeting point between two early modern diarists, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. Amidst the dual challenges posed by these calamities, the famous diarists, who each described life in Restoration England, took up a mutual correspondence. In these letters, they navigate an ever-changing nation, finding common ground in their connected professional challenges due to the war. It is impossible to predict the enduring friendship that would develop between Evelyn and Pepys upon reading their initial correspondence, the first letters of which may be traced to April 1665. As a Sick and Hurt Commissioner, Evelyn was charged with caring for sick seamen and prisoners of war. In 1653 and in response to the First Anglo Dutch War, the Sick and Wounded Board was instituted to oversee the care of the sick and wounded and to manage care for prisoners of war.
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- 1.
Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman 1200–1860: A Social Survey (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1970), p. 96.
- 2.
Gillian Darley, John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 192. (Darley 2006)
- 3.
Darley, John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity, p. 192. (Darley 2006)
- 4.
Lloyd, The British Seaman, p. 96; Gillian Darley notes: “The commissioners were expected to be superhuman”. Darley, John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity, p. 193. (Darley 2006)
- 5.
John Evelyn, Particular Friends, ed. by Guy de la Bédoyère (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 1997), p. 33. (Evelyn 1997)
- 6.
Beatrice Saunders, John Evelyn and His Times (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1970), p. 75. (Saunders 1970)
- 7.
In the margin: ‘which belongs to all 4 Commissioners and not to my care alone’, Evelyn, Particular Friends, p. 39. (Evelyn 1997)
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- 9.
Saunders, John Evelyn and His Times, p. 72. (Saunders 1970)
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Chambers, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Chambers 2004)
- 11.
Chambers, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Chambers 2004)
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- 16.
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- 17.
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- 18.
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- 19.
Chambers, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Chambers 2004)
- 20.
Esmond Samuel de Beer, ‘Introduction’, in The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. by Esmond Samuel de Beer, vol. I (1955), p. F71. (de Beer 1955)
- 21.
De Beer, ‘Introduction’, p. F75. (de Beer 1955)
- 22.
‘Introduction’, in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and William Matthews, vol. 1, pp. xvii-cxxxvii (p. xcvii, c). (Pepys 2000)
- 23.
‘Introduction’, in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 1, p xcviii. (Pepys 2000)
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Bédoyère, ‘Introduction’, p. 18 (including text from footnote). (Bédoyère 1997)
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Bédoyère, ‘Introduction’, p. 18. (Bédoyère 1997)
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Bédoyère, ‘Introduction’, pp. 12, 18-19. (Bédoyère 1997)
- 27.
Guy de la Bédoyère, ‘A Note About the Texts’, in Particular Friends, ed. by Guy de la Bédoyère (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 1997), pp. 17–25 (p. 20). (Bédoyère 1997)
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Middleton and Dekker, ‘The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary: or, The Walks in Paul’s’, p. 186. (Middleton and Dekker 2007)
- 30.
Healy points out that Henoch Clapham called upon the book of Samuel in his 1603 plague tract, An Epistle Discoursing Upon the Pestilence (1603), sig. B2v., describing ‘famine, sword and pestilence, are a trinitie of punishments prepared of the Lord, for consuming a people that have sinned against him’. Margaret Healy, ‘Discourses of the Plague in Early Modern England’, in Epidemic Disease in London, ed. by J. A. I. Champion (London: Centre for Metropolitan History Working Papers Series: 1993), pp. 19–34 (p. 20).
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Kate Loveman, Samuel Pepys and his Books: Reading, Newsgathering, and Sociability, 1660–1703 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 92. (Loveman 2015)
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Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, vol. 3, p. 395. (Evelyn 1955)
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Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 6, p. 93. (Pepys 2000)
- 39.
Bédoyère, Particular Friends, p. 29. (Bédoyère 1997)
- 40.
Evelyn, Particular Friends, p. 31. (Evelyn 1997)
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Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 6, p. 108. (Pepys 2000)
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Evelyn, Particular Friends, p. 37. (Evelyn 1997)
- 43.
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Porter, The Great Plague, p. 116. (Porter 2009)
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- 48.
Darley, John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity, p. 193. (Darley 2006)
- 49.
BL Add Ms 78431, John Evelyn to Mary Evelyn. The letter is quoted in, Darley, John Evelyn: Living for Ingenuity, p. 194. (Darley 2006)
- 50.
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- 54.
In ‘Style and Rhetoric in John Evelyn’s Letters’, Michael G. Ketcham explains that ‘The letters while he served as Commissioner for the Sick and Wounded, in particular, show the frustrations of the realm of waste over which he has no control. Evelyn describes the wretched state of the hospitals, yet, because he has no control over allocating money for them, he must subordinate himself to those who do have some degree of power’. Michael G. Ketcham, ‘Style and Rhetoric in John Evelyn’s Letters: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Correspondence’, Papers on Language and Literature, 19.3 (1983), 249–262 (p. 253).
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Evelyn, The Letterbooks of John Evelyn, vol. 1, p. 383. (Evelyn 2014)
- 57.
Evelyn, Particular Friends, p. 48. (Evelyn 1997)
- 58.
For a comprehensive examination of dissection in Renaissance England, see, Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London; New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 75. (Sawday 1995)
- 59.
David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, ‘Introduction’, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. xi–xxix (p. xiii). (Hillman and Mazzio 1997)
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Hillman and Mazzio, ‘Introduction’, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, p. xiii. (Hillman and Mazzio 1997)
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Mayo Clinic Staff, ‘Plague: Symptoms and Causes’ <www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/plague/symptoms-causes/dxc-20196766> [accessed 8 September 2015]. (Mayo Clinic Staff 2016)
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Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 6, p. 224. (Pepys 2000)
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Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 6, p. 231. (Pepys 2000)
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Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 6, p. 210. (Pepys 2000)
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- 71.
Evelyn, Particular Friends, p. 39. (Evelyn 1997)
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Evelyn, Particular Friends, p. 46. (Evelyn 1997)
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Miller, K. (2016). Pestilence and War. In: The Literary Culture of Plague in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51057-0_6
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