Kilvert's Diary, 1870-79 (Penguin)

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When we read Kilvert’s Diary 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. That is without doubt one of the diary’s great pleasures. 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. 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. The diary runs from January 1870 until just before his death on 23 September 1879. We believe the diary filled about twenty-nine notebooks. Mrs Kilvert removed all the notebooks from 9 September 1875 to 1 March 1876 and 27 June 1876 to 31 December 1877, we believe for personal reasons. She removed all mention of herself. On Mrs Kilvert’s death in 1911 the remaining twenty-two notebooks were passed to Kilvert’s sister Dora Pitcairn who in turn left them to her niece Frances Essex Hope, n ée Smith. On August 11th 1874 (a mere month after he’d last mooned over Daisy) he met Katharine Heanley at a wedding. He was 33, she ten years younger, the daughter of a well-to-do Lincolnshire farmer.

On 3 March 1878, Kilvert wrote lyrically of the view through the south porch: ‘the fresh sweet sunny air was full of the singing of the birds and the brightness and gladness of the spring. Some of the graves were as white as snow with snowdrops… the whole air was melodious with the distant indefinite sound of sweet bells.’ They kept up a friendly relationship, mostly by post. There's some suggestion that her mother raised objections to her writing to an unmarried man (though I'd have thought that her writing to a married man would be even more suspect). They probably became engaged in 1876 (we don't know for sure, for reasons I'll mention later), but eventually it all petered out and once again Kilvert's hopes of a wife and a happy family life came to nothing.

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He does accept rejection by his beloveds' parents rather easily, however. His sense of honour and propriety was evidently acute, but perhaps he should have fought his corner more persistently; after all, as he pointed out himself, his own father had overcome initial rejection. He did however eventually marry, which I'll come to a little later.

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’. When I went to bed last night I fancied that something ran in at my bedroom door after me from the gallery. It seemed to be a skeleton. It ran with a dancing step and I thought it aimed a blow at me from behind. This was shortly before midnight. 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. 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. 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’s Diary

Every diary has its longueurs, and Kilvert’s is no exception. An amateur, sub-Wordsworthian poet, he’s always going into raptures over the landscapes he crosses on his long walks around the countryside. These are fine in small doses, but as a dedicated urbanite, I find beautiful scenery kind of blah. Give me a nice, flat parking lot to look at, a strip mall— anything but some boring old mountain. 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. 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.

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. 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.’ 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."

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. There is then a certain irony today, when walkers and ramblers – to adopt friendlier terms than ‘tourist’ – pursue a Kilvert Trail in search of places mentioned in the diary. Smith, Alison (1996). The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality, and Art. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-4403-8.

In 1870, country parson Francis Kilvert began a diary of his ‘uneventful life’. The result, says Mark Bostridge, is sublime

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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.