Kilvert's Diary, 1870-79 (Penguin)

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Kilvert's Diary, 1870-79 (Penguin)

Kilvert's Diary, 1870-79 (Penguin)

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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: The local colour of the neighbourhood is interspersed with what was going in the world news-wise and there’s a lot about the medical problems that Kilvert is beset with, it was with real sadness that I discovered that he died at the age of 39, just one month after his marriage. The complete text, from the first entry in January 1870, written when Kilvert was curate at Clyro in Radnorshire, to the final one in March 1879, by which time he was the incumbent of Bredwardine in Herefordshire, came to well over a million words. Plomer decided to winnow it by about two thirds. "It simply creates that really unknown and remote period," he enthused to Elizabeth Bowen as he began work, drawing lines in red crayon beside paragraphs which were to be omitted. "I showed a bit of it to Virginia [Woolf]: she was most excited. I have insisted on editing it for myself . . . But it's going to be a great deal of work, especially for some poor typist, who will probably be driven blind and mad." In particular, Woolf applauded the comic perfection of the scene at Kilvert's cousin Maria's funeral in Worcester cathedral where, in a sequence of brilliant descriptive strokes, the pallbearers are depicted staggering under the weight of the "crushingly heavy" coffin, which threatens at times to topple over and kill or maim them. 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. Oh, as I watched them there came over me such a longing, such a hungry yearning to have one of those children for my own. Oh that I too had a child to love and to love me, a daughter with such fair limbs and blue eyes archly dancing, and bright clustering curls blown wild and golden in the sunshine and sea air. It came over me like a storm and I turned away hungry at heart and half envying the parents as they sat upon the sand watching their children at play.

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.years ago, in January 1870, Francis Kilvert began his diary - the finest ever insight into rural living, says Mark Bostridge

But try as I might I ended up disturbed by the passages about young girls. It didn’t help that googling for articles about Kilvert I found myself on a blog that I suddenly realised was attempting to normalise sex between adults and children. I felt contaminated and unhappy and blamed poor old Kilvert. I hate that I even feel I have to include this paragraph. I wish I could just say ‘different times’ and move on. I do think little children are beautiful and hope that in the end this is all he meant. 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. 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. 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." urn:lcp:kilvertsdiary1870000kilv_q8t8:epub:822ca8e0-026a-4ff6-9c20-76f7f13dc9d4 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier kilvertsdiary1870000kilv_q8t8 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9j51gt2v Invoice 1652 Isbn 0712665536So what makes Kilvert different? Well, unlike so many of us today for whom “blog” and “journal” are verbs, Kilvert just wasn’t that interested in himself. He didn’t waste a lot of time staring at the glittery snow globe of his inner life. The world was enough for him. It was a small, quiet, circumscribed world, but it gave him all the nourishment he needed. 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.

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:It was his rejection by Daisy Thomas, daughter of the vicar in Llanigon, that caused Kilvert to leave Clyro in 1872. He returned to Wiltshire to be his father’s curate for several years.

But a fortnight after his return from honeymoon, Kilvert was taken ill and died on 23 September, from peritonitis. He was 38. 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. Illness, suffering and death feature prominently, but grief isn't blunted by their familiarity. Some scenes are very touching. The account of a mass brawl between men of neighbouring communities is unusually vivid, though reported second hand. The church is very much integrated in the community - Kilvert, though a solid Anglican, is generally fair to Catholics and nonconformists, though I suspect wouldn't be very accommodating to sceptics or atheist, and he shows the Church world as varied in character and virtue as any other. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-10-26 17:19:44 Associated-names Plomer, William, 1903-1973 Boxid IA40274624 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier In early 1939, extracts from the diary were broadcast on the radio. With the onset of war, Kilvert’s Diary, reportedly widely read by both soldiers and civilians, became for some a symbol of a kinder and gentler existence, a version of an almost mythical way of life perceived to be under threat from the prospect of a Nazi invasion. “We owe everything to you,” Hedley Burrows, the Dean of Hereford, wrote to Plomer, “for having recovered for us… for the English-speaking world – this treasure of a true country parson.”

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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.’ A new edition of the abridged 1944 Diary was published in 2019 by Vintage Classics to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Kilvert starting his diary, which fell in January 2020. It includes a recently discovered photograph of Kilvert and a new introduction by Mark Bostridge. 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’. There is so much in this book that is wonderful - the lovely descriptions of nature, sunrises and sunsets, the quirky characters Kilvert meets on his daily rounds of the parish, the insights into everyday life in the 1870s.



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