Kilvert's diary, 1870-1879: An illustrated selection [Hardcover]

That Kilvert's Diary: 1870-1879 has gone through several different editions since its first appearance in three volumes in 1938-1940 is testimony to the classical quality of the diary. I think that perhaps someday I should like to obtain and read the entire three volume edition. This edition by William Plomer and published by David R. Godine of Boston is an especially beautiful edition, with illustrations and reproduced pictures of various buildings, settings and plant life of the border country of Wales and Wiltshire in England where the quiet, rustic action takes place. Kilvert was a thirty year old bachelor Anglican country clergyman when he began his diary and only thirty nine when death ended it. There is a charming innocence, purity, simplicty and yet depth in the diary entries. A poetic gift underlies and permeates the clear English prose of the writer. Francis Kilvert made his kindly, observant ways among all classes of his parishes, being particularly susceptible to feminine beauty. He died suddenly five weeks after finally marrying.

There is an international Kilvert Society devoted to the diary of this Anglican priest, devoted mostly to admiring the charming countryside that he lived in for the last decade of his short life. But there is much more in it than some of the most extended rhapsodizing about the English and Welsh backwoods, and much of it is the opposite of charming.

Kilvert was a conventional young man who seems to have taken seriously his religion, despite the blight it brought to him personally. And he appears to have taken his parish duties sincerely, unlike many clergymen of his time.

He was too poor a curate to ride, but he loved to walk, and the diary consists primarily of his tramps to visit his parishioners, enjoying the flowers, birds and trees along the way. He says he is a natural solitary, never happier than when walking alone in an empty country. "I have a particular liking for a deserted road."

This is disingenuous, or perhaps self-deceiving. Kilvert was social, endlessly sympathetic and unfailingly interested in the stories he heard at cottages. And he was also maddened sexually. As the diary as we have it opens, he is a 30-year-old bachelor, and his celibacy drives him to distraction.

He is constantly falling instantly and head-over-heels in love with girls of his own class, usually clergymen's daughters, but though he would never think of marrying them, he is also besotted with commoner girls, and very young ones, too.

The irony is that when he finally becomes a vicar and is able to marry, he dies within a few weeks.

His attitudes to his parish ring rather strangely in an American's ears. An American with similar sympathies would naturally become a do-gooder, but when Kilvert encounters tragedies, big and little, he shows no inclination to meliorism. He observes them sympathetically but that's all.

"Why do I keep this voluminous journal?" he asks himself on Nov. 3, 1874. "Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it almost 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."

And so it does, and not only his own life. Kilvert was not an antiquarian, but he always asked the old people about customs and was rewarded with tales of ancient crimes and disasters, rural habits and odd ways of speech. The endless mooning about pretty flowers would make the diary tedious without this.

Ironically, given his desire, his widow and a niece destroyed about 85% of his diary. Victorian fussbudgets owe a large debt to literary history. More of Kilvert's diary survives than of Richard Burton's but less than of Hawthorne's.

The three surviving (out of 22) notebooks were published beginning in 1938 and Plomer's abridgement in 1944. The 1986 Godine edition is almost sumptuous, with a gilded cover made to imitate blind stamping with a tipped on drawing of his vicarage, large quarto, heavy coated stock, contemporary photographs of Kilvert country and reproduced Victorian landscapes, color photographs of Kilvert country today, drawings of most of the many quaint buildings he visited and hundreds of color photographs of pressed
English wildflowers, ferns and leaves. The list runs to 68 species, although the photographs do not identify them.

Poor Kilvert.
He died a couple monthes after getting married. Likely a change of diet from his simple tastes. He LOVED beauty of flowers, snow showers, flower lined lanes, blue skies, bright eyes, lithe limbs and listened to the very old and the very young with great delight and love. He cared very much for all his parisheners but suffers in reputation because he was delighted in beauty of girls too much (He saw them as he saw daffodils...Is this within your comprehension?). He also showed a love of the strange ways of the old and the sad. This book is excerpts combined with pressed flowers and little water colors of houses, and some photos. There is almost nothing like this book to take one to another time and place and to breathe and to see the sunshine and also to see the hard suffering of another time (we have such security but so many cannot see the beauty Kivert wrote about when contrasted with such hard times and ice in the water in the morning).