Kilvert's Diary, 1870-79 (Penguin)

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He was educated privately in Bath by his uncle, Francis Kilvert, before going up to Wadham College, Oxford.

One of the bearers on the right side was very short, so short that he could not properly support the coffin level. But we both got into it and I think this really is an important document that should be better known. The first entry in Kilvert's diaries in which he records his naked bathing was for 4 September 1872, at Weston-super-Mare. As I came down from the hill into the valley across the golden meadows and along the flower-scented hedges a great wave of emotion and happiness stirred and rose up within me.

It's an actually lived version of some charming, fascinating rural material more usually seen in fiction, and Kilvert is so much like both a real three-dimensional person (being a real person and all) and a stereotypical Victorian in some respects. So there are a lot of impassioned descriptions of pretty women where the poor guy’s longing is embarrassingly obvious. 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. 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. It's fun to look up all the history Kilvert is living through, but the best parts come when he describes his 11 mile hikes to farms and hermits and villages.

On Mrs Kilvert’s death in 1911 the remaining twenty-two notebooks were passed to Kilvert’s sister Dora Pitcairn who in turn left them to her niece Frances Essex Hope, n ée Smith.She later gave one notebook to Jeremy Sandford, the playwright, because he had written a piece about Kilvert for the radio which she liked. So the clergy and choir came to meet us at the door, then turned and moved up the Cathedral nave chanting in solemn procession, `I am the Resurrection and the Life saith the Lord'. Francis Kilvert also published pleasant but conventional poetry, republished by the Kilvert Society in Collected verse : 3rd December 1840 - 23rd September 1879 by the Reverend Francis Kilvert in 1968.

She had therefore cleared out a lot of papers and had destroyed the notebooks as they contained private family matters. The Reverend Francis Kilvert kept a diary from January 1870 for nine years until his premature death. It took either Kilvert or me a little while to get into it -- diaries can sound so self-conscious, and be rendered so much less interesting because of it. 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.

You know that weird, poignant vibe you get from old photos—all those smiling people, so interesting and life-like, and all so dead, dead, dead? In the 1950s, whilst Plomer was contemplating further publication of the remaining journals, it was found that the majority of the surviving diaries had been destroyed by their then owner, an elderly niece of Kilvert's, who claimed to have done so to protect "private family matters. 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. The great bell boomed high overhead and the deep thrilling vibration hung trembling in the air long after the stroke of the bell.