Kilvert's Diary

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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. In his diary entry for 2 January 1878, Kilvert records a visit from his parents. His father, the Reverend Robert Kilvert, rector of Langley Burrell (Wiltshire) and a keen antiquary, ‘especially admired the old Norman 12th- or 13th-century work in the Church and more particularly… the carving over the Devil’s Door’ (the north door, shown here).

The Kilvert Society | The Past

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 was born on 3 December 1840 at The Rectory, Hardenhuish Lane, near Chippenham, Wiltshire, to the Rev. Robert Kilvert, rector of Langley Burrell, Wiltshire, and Thermuthis, daughter of Walter Coleman and Thermuthis Ashe.Several hundred members belong to The Kilvert Society, united by their appreciation of the remarkable Diary of Francis Kilvert, who died in 1879 aged only 38.

The Kilvert Society

Plomer, William (1947). Kilvert's Diary 1870-1879 - Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert. New York: MacMillan. The Reverend Francis Kilvert (1840-1879), whose steps I am following, knew the value of a contemplative rest. Reading his diary entry for February 1870, I imagine him gazing at this very view: “Beautiful Clyro rising from the valley ... dotted with white houses and shining with gleams of green on hills and dingle sides.” Francis Kilvert also published pleasant but conventional poetry, republished by the Kilvert Society in Collected verse: 3rd December 1840 - 23rd September 1879 by the Reverend Francis Kilvert in 1968. Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. HB. Acceptable. Two tears in dustcover, and brief, light inscription. 8x5" app. 350 pp. 16/11/2015.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. 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. 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’. Ten minutes in and my walking companion is already recommending a rest. But I’m eager to get on. The sun is out, the skylarks are in song, and the hills of Radnorshire are calling. Yet I heed his suggestion. The Cornish Diary: Journal No.4, 1870—From 19 July to 6 August, Cornwall was published by Alison Hodge in 1989. [a] The National Library of Wales, which holds two of the three surviving volumes, published The Diary of Francis Kilvert: April–June 1870 in 1982 and The Diary of Francis Kilvert: June–July 1870 in 1989.

Francis Kilvert - Wikipedia

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. 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.

On the road out of the village lies the Baskerville Court Hotel. Formerly known as Clyro Court, this baronial-style house, with its impressive ceremonial staircase, was built by the local Baskerville squire and was the scene of the croquet and archery parties attended by Kilvert. 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. But a fortnight after his return from honeymoon, Kilvert was taken ill and died on 23 September, from peritonitis. He was 38.

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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. Yet I see no one until I crest the hill and reach the edge of the Begwyns. Stretching over 1,200 acres, this glorious upland moor is a favourite with local dog walkers and horse riders. Several cars are parked at the cattle-grid entrance; their owners dot the cloudless skyline. 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. Bennett, Alan (2007). The Uncommon Reader. London: Faber and Faber and Profile Books. ISBN 978-1-84668-049-6. 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.

Kilvert’s Diary

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.’