It is hard to judge his partly paedophile proclivities from a current perspective - the dubious sentiments of older men for younger girls seem to have been more accepted then - if not acted on - though his belief that those subjected to his attentions always adored and felt comfortable with him, was not necessarily right. As with Lewis Carroll, the ambiguities are unlikely to be resolved. Further along, on the other side of the main road, is the village school where Kilvert taught the parish children their three R’s, and where he fell for the charms of ten-year-old ‘Gipsy Lizzie’. Additionally, members benefit from a twice-yearly journal and mid-year newsletter. These are full of articles that expand on diary entries with information about the people, places, and events that Kilvert recorded. But the diary is not just a mine of social history and folklore: what comes across is Kilvert’s human heart, deeply concerned for the well-being of his poorer parishioners and doing what he could to relieve the loneliness, squalor, and hunger that he witnessed. Kilvert’s attempts to write poetry are self-consciously artistic. His diaries, by contrast, often achieve poetic resonance artlessly in their descriptions of people, events, and the landscapes he loved.

Robert Francis Kilvert (3 December 1840–23 September 1879), known as Francis or Frank, was an English clergyman whose diaries reflected rural life in the 1870s, and were published over fifty years after his death. St Michael’s, the 12th-century church, extensively rebuilt in the 1850s, is much as it was in Kilvert’s time. Whenever I sit in the churchyard, with its avenue of yew trees leading to the lychgate, I think of that wonderful moment in the diary on Easter Eve: the graves, decorated with flowers, are described as looking like people asleep in the moonlight, ‘ready to rise early on Easter Morning.’ Hope did preserve three of the notebooks. She presented one to Plomer himself, another to Jeremy Sandford, who had written a radio play about Kilvert, and the final one to Charles Harvey, a Kilvert enthusiast. The survival of these originals today in the National Library of Wales and Durham University Library gives one a taste of the sad, irretrievable loss caused by this wanton destruction. The appeal of several episodes in these manuscripts, absent from the edited diary, suggest furthermore that Plomer's insistence that he had published the best of the diary in his three volumes was much too confident. As I came down from the hill into the valley across golden meadows and along the flower-scented hedges a great wave of emotion and happiness stirred and rose up within me. I know not why I was so happy, nor what I was expecting, but I was in a delirium of joy, it was one of the supreme few moments of existence, a deep delicious draught from the strong sweet cup of life. It came unsought, unbidden, at the meadow stile, it was one of the flowers scattered for us and found unexpectedly by the wayside of life. Easter primrosing; an extract from Kilvert’s diary Several modern writers have commented on passages in the diaries describing interactions with young girls which these days might raise suspicions of paedophilia. [7] [8] [9] However, poet John Betjeman was among those who have since defended Kilvert, saying, "If there had been anything sinister in his attentions to them, he would hardly have written so candidly in his diary about his feelings". [ citation needed] Modern adaptations [ edit ]very charming. I had no idea the late Victorians played such wild games of croquet (up to six games taking place on one lawn at once), and also I am a bit aggrieved that archery is never offered to me as a standard party activity. Kilvert is a keen observer of place (in this case, mostly the Hay valley area of Wales) and a great describer, and often quite amusing. Here is part of the first diary entry, about a woman who had a wood owl. "She wanted to call the owl "Eve" but Mrs. Bridge [her sister] said it should be called "Ruth." She and her sister stranded in London at night went to London Bridge hotel....with little money and no luggage except the owl in a basket. The owl hooted all night in spite of their putting it up the chimney, before the looking glass, under the bedclothes, and in a circle of lighted candles which they hoped it would mistake for the sun....Miss Child asked the waiter to get some mice for "Ruth" but none could be got." Plomer had had the commercial good sense to publish an abridged version of the diary, and the imposition of wartime paper restrictions made it unlikely in any case that the complete text could be published in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, Plomer had hopes that one day Kilvert's Diary might appear in its entirety. To his everlasting regret, though, he allowed the typescript of the full diary to go missing. Initially, this was not a matter of great concern. The original notebooks still existed, and a new text might be prepared from them. However, in 1958, Plomer learned from Essex Hope, to whom the originals had passed on the death of Perceval Smith, that she "had done away with most of the Diary". "I did not scold Mrs Hope," Plomer wrote at the time, but he admitted later that he felt like strangling her with his own hands. Take Clyro itself. ‘Beautiful Clyro rising from the valley… dotted with white houses and shining with gleams of green on hills and dingle sides.’ Bypassed in the 1960s by the A438, the current population of the village is less than it was in Kilvert’s time (when it stood at 842) and peacefulness descends as one walks the main street. Even today, though, the sparsely populated nature of the region means that one is still more likely to encounter sheep than people. And the countryside, quiet hamlets and remote churches of a low, squat design that Kilvert knew have changed so little and retain much of their former character.

Unfortunately, the section of the diary dating from September 9th 1875 to March 1st 1876 was missing by the time the manuscript reached Plomer, so the progress of the affair is mysterious. However, it seems that they met sometimes in secret in Bournemouth, and their relationship was probably passionate, perhaps even sexual to some degree. In retrospect Kilvert writes of their 'wild sad trysts', and when, on April 20th 1876 he received a letter from Etty's mother telling him to cease communicating with her he lamented 'I have been, alas, very very wrong.' He said a great many complimentary things about my "honourable high-minded conduct", and asked what my prospects were and shook his head over them.[At this stage of Kilvert's life, and for years after, he was simply a low paid curate.]He could not allow an engagement under the circumstances, he said, and I must not destroy his daughter's peace of mind by speaking to her or showing her in any way that I was attached to her. "You have behaved so well that I don't know which of them it is, unless it is Mary." "No, it is your youngest daughter." "Poor little child, she is so young." "She is nineteen." "Yes, but a mere child, and so guileless and innocent. . . . Long engagements are dreadful things. I cannot allow you to be engaged but I won't say 'Don't think of it.' Go on coming here as usual, if you can put constraint on your feelings and not show you like her more than the others." . . . Kilvert's lyrical nature writing was recognised for its Wordsworthian sensibility. Kilvert had relished his connection to Wordsworth through his friendship with the Dew family of Whitney Court, overlooking the Wye. Mary Dew was related to Wordsworth's wife, Mary Hutchinson, and the subject of the Wordsworth sonnet "To the Infant M.M.". Kilvert's art in capturing life on the wing - that uncanny ability, as VS Pritchett noted, of his eye and ear seeming always "to be roving over the scene and to hit upon some sight or word which is all the more decisive for having the air of accident" - also provoked comparisons to Hopkins and Proust. "For some time," Kilvert remarked in 1874, with self-conscious artistry, "I have been trying to find the right word for the shimmering, glancing, tumbling movement of the poplar leaves in the sun and wind. It was 'dazzle'. The dazzle of the poplars." I think my attraction is a result of three main factors: Kilvert's personality, his skill as a writer, and his portrayal of an interesting transitional period in English and Welsh history.Another is the opportunity of getting to know Francis Kilvert himself. The diary is the best example I know of a literary panacea. Its spirit is imbued with the joy that Kilvert found in his surroundings, a feeling of wonder never better expressed than in this passage from May 1875, on a walk near his birthplace at Hardenhuish: From the Roundabout, I head north downhill, leaving the Begwyns behind in favour of lusher ground below. At Pentre farm, I cut across two hedge-lined fields to Bachawy brook. I find no evidence of the ford marked on the map, so make do with a hop, skip and jump. There’s a lot of humour in his writing but also a lot of poetry in the shape of his beautiful descriptions of the surrounding countryside which he loved, and the rural traditions. It’s not all perfection though, I suppose human beings never change so there are multiple suicides, illegitimate children, murders, even child murder, fights between rival villages, ghastly relatives and broken hearts.

He was educated privately in Bath by his uncle, Francis Kilvert, before going up to Wadham College, Oxford. He then entered the Church of England and became a rural curate, working primarily in the Welsh Marches between Hereford and Hay on Wye. Robert Francis Kilvert started his famous Diary on 1 January 1870. The first entry in the published version starts on 18 January, so we do not know if he gave a reason for starting to keep a diary on that particular date. Fortunately he does say on 3 November 1874: ‘Why do I keep this voluminous journal? I can hardly tell. Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record as this, and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me’. Kilvert was probably thinking of family, not that his diary would eventually be read world-wide. As his book, Kilvert’s Diary, attests, Clyro (or ‘Cleirwy’ in Welsh) is a fine starting point. Stroll a mile south and you hit the beautiful Wye river, William Wordsworth’s “wanderer through the woods”, whose gentle banks lead upstream along the Wye valley walk. Downstream, you’re on Offa’s Dyke, chasing the Mercian king on a crisscrossing journey through the Welsh Marches. Kilvert, a 31 year old curate, was apparently on the verge of walking away from everything he’d known to follow a working-class ‘girl’ he’d known for less than an hour. How powerful his longings for a kind of life that was quite out of his reach must have been. He was evidently torn between these and his equally strong desire to be a good Christian and respectable gentleman. Perhaps this explains his writing, apropos of nothing immediately evident to the reader, on May 6 th 1874 ‘Though I be tied and bound with the chain of my sin yet let the pitifulness of Thy Great mercy loose me.’Quite apart from his dismal love life, there is a strain of melancholy running through the diary. He records mysterious illnesses –‘face ache’ features quite often, for example – and has some terrifying dreams, which might be indicative of depression or worse. For example, on October 14 th 1872 he records ‘a strange and horrible dream’, or more exactly a dream within a dream, in which the Reverend Venables (the vicar with whom Kilvert lodged and who was effectively his boss) tried to murder him, and he in return tried to murder Venables: Of all noxious animals,’ Kilvert continues, ‘…the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists the most vulgar, ill-bred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist.’

It would have been commercially impossible to publish the complete diary in the late 30s. Plomer made a selection from the first 20 months, which sold well, and consequently two further selections were published. In all, Plomer published about one third of the contents of the 22 diary volumes. He prepared a typescript (and presumably a carbon copy) of the text to be published for the printers to work from. (He once gave the impression that the typescript was of the whole of the diary, not just the selection that was printed, but this seems unlikely to be true.) The typed copies were lost, perhaps destroyed in wartime bombing, but the 22 original diaries still existed, in the possession of Kilvert's niece, Mrs Essex Hope.Conradi, Peter J (17 July 2009). "Book of a Lifetime: The Diaries, By Francis Kilvert". The Independent . Retrieved 2 May 2016. However, there was one type of individual, increasingly common with the spread of the railway network across Britain, who aroused his dismay and whom he treated with contempt - and that was the tourist. Kilvert - or Frank, as I tend to think of him, since I feel I know him so well via his diary - lead an outwardly entirely ordinary life. He was a curate and vicar in rural Wiltshire and the Welsh Marches, born in 1840 and died in 1879; he performed no notable acts, wrote no books, had no influence on the world at large, met no one famous,* was present at no historic events, wasn't an original thinker, didn't even leave any children to perpetuate his name. Were it not for his diary his name would be utterly forgotten now, as is the future fate of almost all of us. But his diary, although it records his very ordinary, mundane life, has made him immortal. urn:lcp:kilvertsdiary1870000kilv_q8t8:epub:822ca8e0-026a-4ff6-9c20-76f7f13dc9d4 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier kilvertsdiary1870000kilv_q8t8 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9j51gt2v Invoice 1652 Isbn 0712665536