Who was Francis Kilvert ?

There are not many extant photos of Rev Francis Kilvert. Another, similar to this one, has recently surfaced in Australia (cf Kilvert Society Journal Vol 44, Spring 2017).

He was a fascinating mixture of contradictions: socially conservative but in some ways startlingly contemporary; a moralist but infinitely kind; an indefatigable visitor of the poor and an eager guest at great houses; a prodigious walker who loved travelling by train.

He married for the first time at 38, and died within weeks of the marriage, shortly before the first successful operation for peritonitis, which was the condition that killed him.

He is best known for his diaries, and less well known for the mysterious disappearance of the majority of them, dramatically diminished by his wife after his death, and the remaining volumes quietly disappeared by someone whose motives we can only guess at.

Some of Kilvert's writing is awful. He was, for example, an indifferent poet, but satisfied enough with his work to publish it. And parts of the remaining diary are prosaic. What diary can escape that charge ? What made Kilvert's diary special was the ability to describe places, people and events memorably and in a way that puts the reader exactly into the situation he was describing. 

His writing was surprisingly candid. Perhaps that is what upset his wife who carefully excises chunks of it with a sharp blade.

His writing comes alive most powerfully when he is describing nature: he revelled in the natural world, the things he saw and heard while out walking. He was a man whose joy you can feel through what he wrote.

There are times when he is so entranced that his adjectives - already unruly - begin to riot. On one occasion he has a chain of 12 adjectives before a single noun, and even  when relatively calm he is a profligate user of adjectives.

I love his work because he brings to life a world that has gone. Brings it to life as no historian could, as no research could. He is there, in the moment, and he lets us see, hear, and sense exactly what he saw, heard, sensed. It was a world of privilege and poverty, of the vast contrast between the hovels and the grand houses, in both of which he was a frequent and much welcomed visitor.

He knew love and heartbreak, and his exploits were sometimes rather surprising for a Victorian cleric - and those are just the ones we know a little about.

If you haven't read any Kilvert, don't. Don't, that is, unless you are ready to be entranced, hypnotised, drawn in, addicted. Once into Kilvert, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.