Kilvert's Diary, 1870-79 (Penguin)

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An amateur, sub-Wordsworthian poet, he’s always going into raptures over the landscapes he crosses on his long walks around the countryside. This led to Kilvert's Diary being dramatised (eighteen 15-minute episodes) on British television between 1977 and 1978, with Timothy Davies in the title role.

It’s tragic that so many of the diaries were destroyed - so many stories are left unfinished and that is frustrating. 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.However, poet John Betjeman was among those who have since defended Kilvert, saying, "If there had been anything sinister in his attentions to them, he would hardly have written so candidly in his diary about his feelings". 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. Church was over, and someone said they ought to have used the tenor bell, but they were using the great bell and no mistake. If complete it would have made nine substantial volumes, but with war looming and paper shortages, no more could be printed.

Of course it was no fault of hers but the Royal yacht was travelling too fast through the crowded waters of the Solent. 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. 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). Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it almost seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record as this, and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me.

Once or twice I thought the whole mass of men must have been down together with the coffin atop of them and some one killed or maimed at least. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. 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. He then entered the Church of England and became a rural curate, working primarily in the Welsh Marches between Hereford and Hay on Wye. This had occurred during a clear out of various personal papers, prior to moving into a residential care home.

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. It came silently, suddenly, and it went as it came, but it left a long lingering glow and glory behind as it faded slowly like a gorgeous sunset, and I shall ever remember the place and the time in which such great happiness fell upon me. 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. The bearers were completely overweighted, they bowed and bent and nearly fell and threw the coffin down on the floor.

I liked the older people's stories of the olden days -- it's not just the Victorian's present that's different to ours, it's the past that they're most familiar with. They got people to do introductions for the most minor Graham Greene novels, and this is more something that deserves putting in context.

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. 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. a] The National Library of Wales, which holds two of the three surviving volumes, published The Diary of Francis Kilvert: April–June 1870 in 1982 and The Diary of Francis Kilvert: June–July 1870 in 1989.Robert Kilvert, rector of Langley Burrell, Wiltshire, and Thermuthis, daughter of Walter Coleman and Thermuthis Ashe. 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.