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: 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.

Every diary has its longueurs, and Kilvert’s is no exception. An amateur, sub-Wordsworthian poet, he’s always going into raptures over the landscapes he crosses on his long walks around the countryside. These are fine in small doses, but as a dedicated urbanite, I find beautiful scenery kind of blah. Give me a nice, flat parking lot to look at, a strip mall— anything but some boring old mountain.Conradi, Peter J (17 July 2009). "Book of a Lifetime: The Diaries, By Francis Kilvert". The Independent . Retrieved 2 May 2016. years ago, in January 1870, Francis Kilvert began his diary - the finest ever insight into rural living, says Mark Bostridge Eventually in 1877, after a brief period as vicar of a neglected parish not far from Rhayader, he accepted the living of Bredwardine in Herefordshire. For the first time, Kilvert had a home of his own, with 20 acres and four servants, a Regency vicarage which still stands, romantically situated overlooking a river. This year marks the 70th anniversary of the first publication of one of the most enchanting portraits of English rural life ever written. In 1937, the poet and novelist William Plomer made a momentous discovery in a pile of manuscripts at the offices of Jonathan Cape in Bedford Square, where he worked as a reader. His attention was seized as soon as he started to read the contents of two bound Victorian notebooks, filled with a spiky sloping script that was difficult to decipher.

From the Roundabout, I head north downhill, leaving the Begwyns behind in favour of lusher ground below. At Pentre farm, I cut across two hedge-lined fields to Bachawy brook. I find no evidence of the ford marked on the map, so make do with a hop, skip and jump. Oh, as I watched them there came over me such a longing, such a hungry yearning to have one of those children for my own. Oh that I too had a child to love and to love me, a daughter with such fair limbs and blue eyes archly dancing, and bright clustering curls blown wild and golden in the sunshine and sea air. It came over me like a storm and I turned away hungry at heart and half envying the parents as they sat upon the sand watching their children at play. This seems more than a common or garden nightmare, and the reader is perhaps inclined to fear for the balance of his mind. On January 23 rd 1875 he records laconically: The Reverend Francis Kilvert (1840-1879), whose steps I am following, knew the value of a contemplative rest. Reading his diary entry for February 1870, I imagine him gazing at this very view: “Beautiful Clyro rising from the valley ... dotted with white houses and shining with gleams of green on hills and dingle sides.” Alas, it never did all come right, though he continued to moon over her. As late as July 3rd 1874 he writes: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.

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-10-26 17:19:44 Associated-names Plomer, William, 1903-1973 Boxid IA40274624 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Quite apart from his dismal love life, there is a strain of melancholy running through the diary. He records mysterious illnesses –‘face ache’ features quite often, for example – and has some terrifying dreams, which might be indicative of depression or worse. For example, on October 14 th 1872 he records ‘a strange and horrible dream’, or more exactly a dream within a dream, in which the Reverend Venables (the vicar with whom Kilvert lodged and who was effectively his boss) tried to murder him, and he in return tried to murder Venables: At last, too, Kilvert had found a wife. He was married to Elizabeth Rowland, who he had met on a trip to Paris three years earlier, in August 1879. He was educated privately in Bath by his uncle, Francis Kilvert, before going up to Wadham College, Oxford. He then entered the Church of England and became a rural curate, working primarily in the Welsh Marches between Hereford and Hay on Wye.As his book, Kilvert’s Diary, attests, Clyro (or ‘Cleirwy’ in Welsh) is a fine starting point. Stroll a mile south and you hit the beautiful Wye river, William Wordsworth’s “wanderer through the woods”, whose gentle banks lead upstream along the Wye valley walk. Downstream, you’re on Offa’s Dyke, chasing the Mercian king on a crisscrossing journey through the Welsh Marches. On August 11th 1874 (a mere month after he’d last mooned over Daisy) he met Katharine Heanley at a wedding. He was 33, she ten years younger, the daughter of a well-to-do Lincolnshire farmer.