Kilvert's Diary, 1870-79 (Penguin)

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He knew the effect of his charisma on others. “It is a strange and terrible gift,” he writes, “this power of stealing hearts and exciting such love.” And yet there remains something enigmatic about him, not least in his blatant passion for under-age girls, the aspect of Kilvert that is most difficult for our own age. 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.

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’. A mile or so out of Clyro, I reach Lower Lloyney farm, a solid square-jawed place with a muddy yard. The workhorse building reminds me that this is hill farming country, as short on luxury as it is rich in weather. Neighbouring Herefordshire, with its rich fertile plains, is awash with grand farmhouses. Not so here. People build as they live: simply, without frills.

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On September 6th 1875 Etty Meredith Brown came into his life. She was the daughter of a very well-off man who owned several houses, and who had been a vicar but who had resigned his post, perhaps as a result of some kind of disagreement with the Church (the details are murky). He writes that she was: Intriguing source of information about mid Victorian rural Wales and England. Whilst in some respects Kilvert was a mainstream C of E clergyman, theologically conventional, in other respects he was quite a free thinker, highly knowledgeable about the natural world, observant of the human world, and, despite a few prejudices, flexible, energetic and sensitive in his activities. Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-beta-20210815 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9957 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-NS-2000494 Openlibrary_edition

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. 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. Additionally, members benefit from a twice-yearly journal and mid-year newsletter. These are full of articles that expand on diary entries with information about the people, places, and events that Kilvert recorded. But the diary is not just a mine of social history and folklore: what comes across is Kilvert’s human heart, deeply concerned for the well-being of his poorer parishioners and doing what he could to relieve the loneliness, squalor, and hunger that he witnessed. Kilvert’s attempts to write poetry are self-consciously artistic. His diaries, by contrast, often achieve poetic resonance artlessly in their descriptions of people, events, and the landscapes he loved.

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. This may be one of the happiest and most important days of my life, for to-day I fell in love at first sight with sweet Kathleen Mavourneen[his fanciful name for her]. . . . I fell in love and lost my heart to the sweetest noblest kindest bravest-hearted girl in England . . . How sweet she was, how simple, kind, unaffected and self-unconscious, how thoughtful for everyone but herself . . .She spoke of her favouriteIn Memoriam[i.e. Tennyson's poem, also a favourite of Kilvert's]and told me some of her difficulties and how deeply she regretted the enforced apparent idleness of her life, and I loved her a hundred times better for her sweet troubled thoughts and honest regretful words. 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. This isn't absolutely true: he did spend a few hours in the company of William Barnes, the Dorset poet, but he probably hardly counts as 'famous' either then or now. 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.