| dc.description.abstract | The purpose of this dissertation is to trace the development of Evelyn's manifold achievement and to show how he used with artistic skill an increasing authority in public causes which he took upon himself to support in the interests of general cultural improvement. To dissociate himself from expected upheaval he turned from the pervading agnosticism and from what he considered a debilitating democracy of the England he knew during his early adulthood; as a reactionary he became a champion of the traditional aristocratic virtues which he perceived to be part and parcel with the unchanging Roman Church. The conclusion of close observation is that, far from being a writer who "sold his inheritance [or 'bourgeois virtues’] for the aristocracy, the Catholic Church and the British Army,”1 Evelyn is finally revealed as an idealist whose incisive mind had foreseen various aspects of the British social personality tending toward some vague catastrophe and who stubbornly labored to prevent disaster.The method of this dissertation is to record the fullest account of Evelyn's career as it was placed before his contemporaries. News reports are included that give a satisfying picture of his activity, social and artistic, from his earliest beginnings as artist and writer when he attracted only a small audience to the time that his writing enjoyed a kind of national prominence. This procedure requires that the following pages be divided into various appropriate chronological periods of youth and adulthood, their aptness being determined by the several stages in bis intellectual as well as by his social evolution.The method entails the use of current reports as they materialized in school magazines and in newspapers, in both of which book reviews are actually of less importance than scattered news items and the very revealing gossip columns. I do not ignore later fugitive remarks that can be found in Evelyn's journalistic writing, in memoirs of his friends, and in secondary works, all the products of honest labor which have their bearing upon the matters at band; but I use them more for supplementary data and to guide research than to indicate facts accurately. I have discovered no memoir so reliable about events and dates that it cannot admit correction from the chronology of currently reported news items. Conversely, I have discovered that no newspaper gossip column which contains an inaccurate report is altogether devoid of value if used carefully. I must admit that the behests of the professional historiographer have not always been obeyed when the peripheral materials of gossip columns prevailed over caution: many items have been used for reasons other than to supply facts and to adjust chronology. | en_US |
