Kilvert's Diary

THE poet and novelist William Plomer, when working in his role as principal reader for the Bloomsbury publisher Jonathan Cape in 1937, excavated from a pile of manuscripts two bound Victorian notebooks sent in by the descendants of an unknown country clergyman from the Welsh borders.

- Francis Kilvert

The Revd Francis Kilvert, who died at the age of 38 from peritonitis, had kept a diary from 1870 up to the year of his death, 1879, and the notebooks were but two of a collection of 20 of varying lengths, containing the surviving parts of the diary not excised by his wife, Elizabeth.

Plomer immediately recognised the likely appeal of the contents and prepared the diaries for publication, editing out some of the more trivial passages. The first volume of Kilvert’s Diary appeared in 1938, with two further volumes following in 1939 and 1940. They struck an immediate chord with readers at a time when Europe was sliding into war, reminding them of a more secure, peaceful era in history that, for some of them, would still have been within living memory.

To turn the pages was to keep the company of a happy heart, a convivial character

As Plomer puts it in his introduction to the first volume, Kilvert had ‘spent a quiet, pleasant and useful existence in country places’. The Wiltshire-born son of a Church of England cleric, he attended Wadham College, Oxford, where he is rumoured to have met Lewis Car- roll. Like Carroll, he had an interest in young girls, references to whom pepper the diary. These range from mysterious ‘grand romps’ and woodland lily-picking with ‘sweet Georgia Gale’ to his overall susceptibility to young female beauty; they have made some squirm.