thumb|Photograph of Robert Kilvert (diarist's father) taken about 1870

Robert Francis Kilvert (3 December 184023 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.

Life

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.

He was educated privately in Bath by his uncle, Francis Kilvert. He matriculated at Wadham College, Oxford, in 1859, graduating B.A. in 1862, M.A. in 1866. He entered the Church of England and became a rural curate, working primarily in the Welsh Marches between Hereford and Hay on Wye.

Initially, from 1863 to 1864, he was curate to his father at Langley Burrell, and in 1865 he became curate of Clyro, Radnorshire. There on 1 January 1870 he started a diary from which it appears that he basked in his life within the Welsh countryside, often writing several pages describing his surroundings and the parishioners that he visited.

In late 1871 he fell in love with Frances Eleanor Jane Thomas, the youngest daughter of William Thomas 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. 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.

In August 1879 he married Elizabeth Ann Rowland (1846–1911), whom he had met on a visit to Paris, his best man was William Edward Thomas Morgan. Kilvert died from peritonitis on 23 September, aged 38, a few days after returning from his honeymoon in Scotland. His grave lies in St Andrew Churchyard in Bredwardine.

Diaries

Kilvert is best known as the author of voluminous diaries describing rural life. After his death, his diaries were edited and censored, possibly by his widow. Later they were passed on to William Plomer who transcribed the remaining diaries and edited and published a three-volume selection Selections from the Diary of the Rev. Francis Kilvert (Jonathan Cape, Vol I: 1870–1871 pub. 1938, Vol II: 1871–1874 pub.1939, Vol III: 1874–1879 pub.1940), and later a one-volume selection Kilvert's Diary, 1870–1879 (Jonathan Cape, 1944—corrected in 1960, and with an abridged and illustrated version for children published as Ardizzone's Kilvert in 1976). Published just before and during World War II, the first editions of the diaries were well received by the public when, in a period of bombing and rationing they provided an escapism back to the simpler and happier times of the mid Victorian era, still just within living memory.

A different selection from Plomer's abridgement was published as Journal of a Country Curate: Selections from the Diary of Francis Kilvert by The Folio Society in 1960. In 1992 a new selection was published under the editorship of David Lockwood, Kilvert, the Victorian: A New Selection from Kilvert's Diaries (Seren Books, 1992). Out of print since 1970, the three-volume indexed edition was reprinted in 2006 by O'Donoghue Books. In the 1950s, whilst Plomer was contemplating further publication of the remaining journals, it was found that the majority of the surviving diaries had been destroyed by their then owner, an elderly niece of Kilvert's, who claimed to have done so to protect "private family matters". This had occurred during a clear out of various personal papers, prior to moving into a residential care home. When confronted by this information Plomer was said to have recalled he "could have strangled her with his bare hands."

Sources

Further reading

  • The Kilvert Society
  • Film - Kilvert's Diary (1977)
  • Audio recording – Kilvert's Diary
  • Kilvert's Trail