Mrs Frances Essex Theodora Hope (1879 - 1964) was Frank Kilvert's niece.
I wish she hadn't been.
After Kilvert's death his widow took scissors to the pages to remove material she clearly did not wish to preserve for posterity. We can only guess what was on her mind.
22 notebooks then passed, after his widow's death, to Percival Smith, Kilvert's nephew.
It is these 22 notebooks which William Plomer edited in the late 1930s, removing two thirds of the content. The three-volume diary we now have is what Plomer shaped from the 22 notebooks.
He wrote:
If it had been published as it stood it would have filled nine stoutish volumes, running to well over a million wordsWilliam Plomer managed to lose the typescript copy of the whole of the contents of the 22 notebooks, and Mrs Hope received the originals after Plomer had done with them.
In the 1950s Mrs Hope set about disposing of the materials passed to her. She destroyed 19 of the original 22 notebooks, and distributed three to people she knew, against Plomer's advice.
These three notebooks are all we have of the unedited originals.
The silver lining, as paltry as it is, is that these volumes can be compared with Plomer's edited version in the three-volume diary. We get to see the original, which is a treat, but we also get to see something on Plomer's editing technique. Lastly we get a tantalising picture of the sheer quality which he chose to omit from his three-volume edition.
The three surviving notebooks have all been published. They are:
April to June 1870 ed Kathleen Hughes and Dafydd Ifans; The National Library of Wales 1982
June to July 1870 ed Dafydd Ifans; The National Library of Wales 1989
July to August 1870 (Kilvert's Cornish Diary) ed Richard Maber and Angela Tregoning; Penzance: Alison Hodge, 1989They are well worth tracking down.
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