Given that the book is only fragments of the original diary ( to an extent positively reduced to a manageable size) there is a great deal in here about rural life, Victorian mindsets, and the landscape, and incidentally the class system, to maintain interest. Kilvert is so lovely and enjoys his life to crying at the beauty of it - all the pretty children he loves and the trees and fields he loves and his funny welsh parishioners who tell him such great stories. This was a book I’d been planning to read for several years as some of my relatives are mentioned in it- my great grandfather was born in and grew up at Bridge House, Bredwardine and his mother was in service at Moccas Park. Kilvert has touched and delighted (and mildly shocked) readers of his diaries ever since they were first published.

I especially enjoyed his accounts of dining and drunkeness, and the carefree way people of leisure spent their free time. It might be because it was all just too low-key and a bit too arty for the BBC to bother much with - or it might be because Kilvert made no secret of being (apparently innocently) enchanted by the young girls among his parishioners. The first entry in Kilvert's diaries in which he records his naked bathing was for 4 September 1872, at Weston-super-Mare. The account of a mass brawl between men of neighbouring communities is unusually vivid, though reported second hand. At last by a wild effort and tremendous heave the ponderous coffin was borne up the steps and through the door into the Cathedral where the choristers, quite unconscious of the scene and the fearful struggle going on behind, were singing up the nave like a company of angels.Robert Kilvert, rector of Langley Burrell, Wiltshire, and Thermuthis, daughter of Walter Coleman and Thermuthis Ashe. The mice scurry rattling along the wainscot and Toby darts off in great excitement to listen and watch for them. As a country lad growing up in the middle of the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland of the 1960s/70s - a very rural place a lot more socially sedate than nowadays - Kilvert's world actually seemed very familiar to me and even more so now in nostalgic retrospect as a lot of the older ways died with the older folk (who would have had a lot in common with Kilvert's contemporaries) of my childhood passing. 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.

He also mentions historical events such as the death of Napoleon III, and gets the people he meets to reminisce about events that they experienced eg the coronation of George IV, when he refused to allow his wife Queen Caroline be crowned with him! Robert Francis Kilvert always known as Francis, or Frank, was an English clergyman remembered for his diaries reflecting rural life in the 1870s, which were published over fifty years after his death. The series is/was a set of beautifully filmed short episodes, reflecting Kilvert's often brief diary entries. She had therefore cleared out a lot of papers and had destroyed the notebooks as they contained private family matters.Kilvert barely knows there are such things as little boys, but he tells us all about the little girls in his parish.

His duties brought him into daily contact with the poor and infirm; he visited their homes, drank their tea and listened to their stories (and horrifying stories they are, too: murders, suicides, insanity—my God, the insanity: every other house in nineteenth-century England seemed to have a mad relative stashed away in some upsairs room). 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. 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.

Robert Francis Kilvert (3 December 1840 – 23 September 1879), known as Francis or Frank, was an English clergyman whose diaries reflected rural life in the 1870s, and were published over fifty years after his death. If complete it would have made nine substantial volumes, but with war looming and paper shortages, no more could be printed. That is the inescapable fact that comes to mind as you read the diaries of a man who died over a 130 years ago. Later they were passed on to William Plomer who transcribed the remaining diaries and edited and published a three-volume selection Selections from the Diary of the Rev. A country clergyman born in 1840, Kilvert spent much of his time visiting parishioners, walking the lanes and fields of Herefordshire and writing in his diary.

Harmons in Radnorshire, and in November, 1877, became vicar of Bredwardine, on the Wye in Herefordshire. 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). 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.

The bearers, blinded by the sweeping pall, could not see where they were going and nearly missed the Cloister arch, but at length we got safe into the narrow dark passage and into the Cloisters. An amateur, sub-Wordsworthian poet, he’s always going into raptures over the landscapes he crosses on his long walks around the countryside. Full of passionate delight in the natural world and the glory of the changing seasons, his diaries are as generous, spontaneous and vivacious as Kilvert himself.