The Kilvert Society

Kilvert’s Diary

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 eventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some record as this, and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me. (3 November 1874)

Kilvert’s Diary records the life of Francis Kilvert between January 1870 and March 1879, when he was in his thirties. Robert Francis Kilvert was born in Hardenhuish, Wiltshire, on 3 December 1840, elder son of the Revd Robert Kilvert and Thermuthis Mary née Coleman. He had four sisters and one brother. Most of his childhood was spent at Langley Burrell, Wiltshire, where his father was given a living by a relative of Mrs Kilvert. After school in Bath, Francis took a degree at Wadham College, Oxford and was ordained priest at Bristol Cathedral in 1864. He spent two periods as curate to his father, the second recorded in the Diary, but his happiest years were as curate in Clyro, Radnorshire between 1865 and 1872. There, he gloried in the beauty of the countryside, taking long walks in the Black Hills and enjoying the hospitality of local farmers, millers and cottagers. His Diary records talks with old people, from whom he learned what it was like to be a soldier in the Peninsula War, or in the Crimea, or what a maidservant saw of the coronation of George IV in London, or that an eighty year old wore a tall Welsh hat till she was grown up. He visited the poor and destitute, organising blankets, medicine and nursing care, as well as prayers and Bible readings. He found life entertaining and often funny. He was popular as a guest amongst the local gentry at dinners, parties and picnics, and travelled on holiday to Cornwall, Devon, the Isle of Wight and the Gower peninsula. In London, he visited theatres, the Crystal Palace and art galleries. He was briefly vicar of St Harmon, Radnorshire and then, from the end of 1877, vicar of Bredwardine and rector of Brobury in Herefordshire.

The Diary records three love affairs, two of which were brought to an end by relatives of the lady because of Kilvert’s poor financial position. In August 1879, he married Elizabeth Anne Rowland of Wotton-by-Woodstock, Oxfordshire. Tragically, he died of peritonitis six weeks later on 23 September 1879, less than a fortnight after their return to Bredwardine from the honeymoon. Mrs Kilvert destroyed those parts of the Diary that referred to her. When the notebooks containing the Diary eventually came to his nephew Percival Smith, there were two gaps as well as the abrupt ending in March 1879. Percival sent sample notebooks to the publisher Jonathan Cape, where author and editor William Plomer saw their potential and made selections which were published in three volumes between 1938 and 1940. The wartime readership was entranced by the lyrical descriptive writing and the evocation of Victorian country life. Unfortunately, publication of all the notebooks was made impossible by Kilvert’s niece, Frances Essex, who destroyed what she inherited from Percival. Only three notebooks, that she had given away, survive.

Kilvert wanted to be an author. His poems were rejected by a commercial publisher and privately published by his family after his death. But it is his Diary that revealed his quality as a writer and continues to be loved.