Kilvert and social media

Francis Kilvert was a rural Victorian cleric. He looked the part: all frock coat and Biblical beard.

But he was by no means a stereotype. He doesn't fit easily into conceptual boxes, and keeps popping out when you least expect it.

He was quite an adventurer, and had travelled. He had a child-like (not childish) interest in the world around him, and liked new technologies.

Two key characteristics, for me at least, are that he was a prodigious walker who could really cover the ground and must have been astonishingly fit, and also that he was above all else, a natural communicator.

He spent a lot of time thinking, but the rest of his waking hours seem to have been spent in talking and listening to people. He was a social animal, knew how to party (well, decorously, of course), and felt at ease in filthy hovels where a gentleman would not usually be seen, as well as in the formal social arrangements in the large country houses of the rich and influential. 

And, of course, he voluminously recorded his days in the diaries, where his excitement and joyous enjoyment of living bursts through.

Pondering this, and wondering how Kilvert would have survived today, it seems to me that he would have been a most active Twitter presence, might have kept several blogs, might even have ventured onto YouTube to record his church activities, and would certainly have left a mammoth cache of emails. (As it was, he delighted in a postal service which, in the 1870s, meant that he could write a letter in the morning, and hope to post a response to the reply that same evening.)

He has so many short, unexplained and maybe inexplicable passages in the diaries that would have made fascinating tweets:

An angel satyr walks these hills.

How about:

It was a place for owls to dwell in and for satyrs to dance in

Or

The madness, cloud and delirium I trust has passed away at length. ‘And it came to pass that when the devil was gone out the dumb spake’. I can write again now.

He'd have to knock about 20 characters out of the last one of course.

His blog - well, it is there already in the diaries. He'd have cut out some of the very personal material, for sure, but it's easy to imagine a blog taking shape from the pages. He would have been prolific.

Frank Kilvert loved art. He visited galleries and took huge pleasure in seeing famous, celebrated, or just plain good art. He had an eye for images, and maybe that's why he spends so much time describing the visual in the diaries. His blog would have had the most exciting images he could find: colours, sensuousness, line - he admired them all, and if the technology had allowed him an i-phone or camera he would have packed his pages with the things he saw, and which other people missed.

Yes, he would have fitted in pretty well in 2017.