Kilvert's Diary, 1870-79 (Penguin)

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They used to be stuck with spouses for life, yet you really notice an incredibly casual attitude with regard to choosing them in the past.

Two days later he and a friend are earnestly discussing whether or not he should marry her and getting all excited about what a good idea it all is. 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.Given that the book is only fragments of the original diary ( to an extent positively reduced to a manageable size) there is a great deal in here about rural life, Victorian mindsets, and the landscape, and incidentally the class system, to maintain interest. I would have liked to have known more about his courtship and marriage but it seems that these diaries were sadly destroyed by his wife. One of the bearers on the right side was very short, so short that he could not properly support the coffin level.

The great bell boomed high overhead and the deep thrilling vibration hung trembling in the air long after the stroke of the bell. He was born at Hardenhuish, or Harnish, near Chippenham in Wiltshire, on the 3rd December, 1840, the second child of the Rev. The series is/was a set of beautifully filmed short episodes, reflecting Kilvert's often brief diary entries. Out of print since 1970, the three-volume indexed edition was reprinted in 2006 by O'Donoghue Books.While he generally comes off as a pretty sympathetic narrator, he often walks the line between a romantic appreciation of feminine beauty and being kind of a creeper. Harmons in Radnorshire, and in November, 1877, became vicar of Bredwardine, on the Wye in Herefordshire. Robert Kilvert, rector of Langley Burrell, Wiltshire, and Thermuthis, daughter of Walter Coleman and Thermuthis Ashe. Of course it was no fault of hers but the Royal yacht was travelling too fast through the crowded waters of the Solent.

A new edition of the abridged 1944 Diary was published in 2019 by Vintage Classics to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Kilvert starting his diary, which fell in January 2020. He then entered the Church of England and became a rural curate, working primarily in the Welsh Marches between Hereford and Hay on Wye. FK seems to be a fascinating person, one that you would like to meet until you realise that he died 139 years ago. It's fun to look up all the history Kilvert is living through, but the best parts come when he describes his 11 mile hikes to farms and hermits and villages.The diary format, working as a mosaic composed of random little slivers of colour, creates a curious, sometimes jarring effect -- one minute Kilvert is in a cottage hearing some gruesome gossip of death and disaster and madness, the next he's sauntering off down the lane noticing poetic things and about wildflowers. 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. 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). Many people were openly stripping on the sands a little further on and running down into the sea and I would have done the same but I had brought down no towels of my own".

The owl hooted all night in spite of their putting it up the chimney, before the looking glass, under the bedclothes, and in a circle of lighted candles which they hoped it would mistake for the sun. My only complaint is that I'd have liked more general narrative and character background (I kept wanting to flip to the end to see how the story ended, but it never became a real story. The sense of a human chain stretching all the way back, though all but a short section of the preceding chain in lost to sight.

He fondly talks of rural life of the time and he is particularly fond of underage girls which as a father of a daughter was difficult to read, however he didn't seem to act on this and indeed tried to marry once or twice. Kilvert is so lovely and enjoys his life to crying at the beauty of it - all the pretty children he loves and the trees and fields he loves and his funny welsh parishioners who tell him such great stories. You get the sense he was quite the charmer, but even so it couldn’t have been easy for an upright, single clergyman to get laid back then.