When we read Kilvert today, we can imagine ourselves restored to a vanished Arcadia, to a world of beauty and peace, where only the threshing machine and steam engine puncture the countryside’s silence, to a society where the ties of community are still interdependent and strong.’ 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. He certainly liked nothing better than a deserted road. ‘I had the satisfaction of managing to walk from Hay to Clyro by the fields without meeting a single person’, he wrote in 1871, something he regarded as ‘a great triumph and a subject for warm self-congratulation’.

The Kilvert Society

You may also notice the curious prescience of the words, from the Book of Hebrews, engraved on Kilvert’s white tombstone: ‘He being dead yet speaketh’. After a century and a half, there is still no better guide to this stunning corner of the Welsh Marches than Clyro’s erstwhile curate. Just this once, however, I ignore his lead in favour of a refreshing pint.His grave is in Bredwardine churchyard. If you visit, you may notice that Kilvert’s widow is buried at some distance from her husband. In the intervening years between Kilvert’s death and her own, two sisters, the Misses Newton, who had been very fond of their vicar, had been buried on either side of him, leaving no space for poor Mrs Kilvert. Bennett, Alan (2007). The Uncommon Reader. London: Faber and Faber and Profile Books. ISBN 978-1-84668-049-6.

Kilverts Diaries by Kilvert - AbeBooks Kilverts Diaries by Kilvert - AbeBooks

In late 1871 he fell in love with Frances Eleanor Jane Thomas, the youngest daughter of the vicar of Llanigon, a parish not far from Clyro, and asked her father for permission to marry her. Because of Kilvert's position as a lowly curate, Frances' father looked unfavourably on the request and refused it. After receiving this rejection Kilvert wrote in his diary that "The sun seemed to have gone out of the sky". Frances, who was referred to as Daisy in the diaries, would die a spinster in December 1928. Shortly after the rejection, in 1872, Kilvert resigned his position as curate of Clyro, and left the village, returning to his father's parish of Langley Burrell. [1] From 1876 to 1877 he was vicar of St Harmon, Radnorshire, and from 1877 to his death in 1879 he was vicar of Bredwardine, Herefordshire. Throughout the diary, Kilvert reveals his susceptibility to young female beauty. Should we find him posthumously guilty of paedophilia? Probably not. His prolonged celibacy and the strict propriety that governed his relationships with adult women, together with his romantic temperament, led him to find an outlet for his feelings in his fondness for pre-pubescent girls. Such impulses may have been erotic in origin, but were almost certainly innocent in fact. The notebooks were then returned to Essex Hope. Plomer called to see her some time in 1954 and she told him that she had to go into a home and leave her house. She had therefore cleared out a lot of papers and had destroyed the notebooks as they contained private family matters. He recalled he could have strangled her with his bare hands. But she later produced one of the notebooks and gave it to him. It was the Cornish Holiday. Despite Kilvert's niece's actions she ironically was a Vice-President, and an avid member of the Kilvert Society for many years up until her death in 1964.

Kilvert, Robert Francis (1989). Alison Hodge (ed.). Kilvert's Cornish Diary: Journal No. 4, 1870: from July 19th to August 6th Cornwall. Alison Hodge. ISBN 978-0-906720-19-6. Before her death, Elizabeth Kilvert removed all references to herself, and many to his ill-fated affair with Ettie, from her husband's diary. This amounted to the excision of two lengthy sequences, the first from September 1875 to March 1876, the second from June 1876 to the end of 1877; it is more than likely that she also destroyed a final part, dealing with the months leading up to their marriage in August 1879. The diary halts suddenly on March 13 1879, but since Kilvert was continuing to write poetry of a personal nature as late as the end of May (his final poem foretells that "his songs will soon be o'er") it is reasonable to assume that it possessed a concluding section which no longer exists.

Walking the Welsh Marches with a Victorian clergyman Walking the Welsh Marches with a Victorian clergyman

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 ] Eventually in 1877, after a brief period as vicar of a neglected parish not far from Rhayader, he accepted the living of Bredwardine in Herefordshire. For the first time, Kilvert had a home of his own, with 20 acres and four servants, a Regency vicarage which still stands, romantically situated overlooking a river. 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. She later gave one notebook to Jeremy Sandford, the playwright, because he had written a piece about Kilvert for the radio which she liked. That was the notebook for April to June 1870. The third notebook was given to a Mr Harvey from Birmingham who had corresponded with her for some time. These three notebooks are the only remaining originals of Kilvert’s Diary.

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This year marks the 70th anniversary of the first publication of one of the most enchanting portraits of English rural life ever written. In 1937, the poet and novelist William Plomer made a momentous discovery in a pile of manuscripts at the offices of Jonathan Cape in Bedford Square, where he worked as a reader. His attention was seized as soon as he started to read the contents of two bound Victorian notebooks, filled with a spiky sloping script that was difficult to decipher. At last, too, Kilvert had found a wife. He was married to Elizabeth Rowland, who he had met on a trip to Paris three years earlier, in August 1879.