Kilvert's Diary, 1870-79 (Penguin)

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As a book it is awful and I found it too a long time to read but then it is a diary after all with a lot of editing by his wife who I suspect did not want people to know what he go up to.

I especially enjoyed his accounts of dining and drunkeness, and the carefree way people of leisure spent their free time. 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.

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.

The Reverend Francis Kilvert kept a diary from January 1870 for nine years until his premature death. As I came down from the hill into the valley across the golden meadows and along the flower-scented hedges a great wave of emotion and happiness stirred and rose up within me.They're undifferentiated from each other and have no personality apart from being lusciously innocent and good. The diaries of Robert Francis Kilvert (1840–1879), kept from 1870 to 1879, are a unique treasury celebrating the Welsh and English countryside and the variety of characters inhabiting it. Initially, from 1863 to 1864, he was curate to his father at Langley Burrell, and in 1865 he became curate of Clyro, Radnorshire. Kilvert is a keen observer of place (in this case, mostly the Hay valley area of Wales) and a great describer, and often quite amusing. When it was safely deposited we all retired to seats right and left and a verger or beadle, in a black gown and holding a mace, took up his position at the head of the coffin, standing.

Kilvert has touched and delighted (and mildly shocked) readers of his diaries ever since they were first published. The first entry in the published version starts on 18 January, so we do not know if he gave a reason for starting to keep a diary on that particular date. It's the weird thing where sexual attraction gets mostly sublimated into waxing lyrical about rosy cheeks and angels, which, because there's nothing in it that's specific to the qualities of adult women, gets lavished on little girls too, even though to our eyes it seems so clearly sexual. Francis Kilvert is so full of foibles and so matter-of-factly recounts even the most gruesome scenes that the writing seems surprisingly modern. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.The account of a mass brawl between men of neighbouring communities is unusually vivid, though reported second hand. The diaries of Robert Francis Kilvert (1840–1879), kept from 1870 to 1879, are a unique treasury celebrating the Welsh and English countryside and the variety of characters inhabiting it, seen through the perspective of a sensitive, lyrical and witty young clergyman. Kilvet's diary paints an excellent picture of Victorian country life; as a clergyman, he interacted with pretty much all classes, and he was sympathetic to the problems of the poor (which is not exactly a given with the Church of England in the 19th Century). Some of his actions and thoughts seemed a little suspicious and if he had been around now the guy would be locked up. He was educated privately in Bath by his uncle, Francis Kilvert, before going up to Wadham College, Oxford.

The nature writing is very strong, as are the descriptions of rural life and the memories of the elderly parishioners he visits, some of whom remember back into the previous century. train but while Henry Dew and I were running along the line to the station we heard the train coming behind us and it glided past close blazing with lamps into the station where it stopped half a minute and was off again to Hay in spite of Henry Dew’s running and hooting. At last he faced round on his chair half wheel and pronounced solemnly and formally, ‘My best respects to you, Sir. It's good to see the picturesque country setting and the quaint but changing community free of the need to fulfil the thematic demands of fiction.

I know not why I was so happy, nor what I was expecting, but I was in a delirium of joy, it was one of the supreme few moments of existence, a deep delicious draught from the strong sweet cup of life. It didn’t help that googling for articles about Kilvert I found myself on a blog that I suddenly realised was attempting to normalise sex between adults and children. 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. Heywood's yacht the Mistletoe in Stokes Bay with a loss of three lives, the master, the mate and Miss Annie Peel, the sister of Mrs. The great bell boomed high overhead and the deep thrilling vibration hung trembling in the air long after the stroke of the bell.