Kilvert's Diary, 1870-79 (Penguin)

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However, next day Kilvert joins in the fun: "I was out early before breakfast this morning bathing from the sands.

Happily inconsequential to us now, though filled with birth, death, sickness, joys and disappointments. Many people were openly stripping on the sands a little further on and running down into the sea and I would have done the same but I had brought down no towels of my own".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.

The sense of a human chain stretching all the way back, though all but a short section of the preceding chain in lost to sight.I know not why I was so happy, nor what I was expecting, but I was in a delirium of joy, it was one of the supreme few moments of existence, a deep delicious draught from the strong sweet cup of life. 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 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.

The diary format, working as a mosaic composed of random little slivers of colour, creates a curious, sometimes jarring effect -- one minute Kilvert is in a cottage hearing some gruesome gossip of death and disaster and madness, the next he's sauntering off down the lane noticing poetic things and about wildflowers. As the procession moved across College Green to the Cloister arch, the men staggered under the weight and the coffin lurched and tilted to one side over the short bearer. Initially, from 1863 to 1864, he was curate to his father at Langley Burrell, and in 1865 he became curate of Clyro, Radnorshire. It came unsought, unbidden, at the meadow stile, it was one of the flowers of happiness scattered for us and found unexpectedly by the wayside of life.You get the sense he was quite the charmer, but even so it couldn’t have been easy for an upright, single clergyman to get laid back then. The coffin went out immediately and the pall bearers filed out in pairs after it, taking their places and holding each his pall tassel on either side. 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. Robert Kilvert, rector of Langley Burrell, Wiltshire, and Thermuthis, daughter of Walter Coleman and Thermuthis Ashe. 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.

The Cornish Holiday was also published in 1989, edited by Richard Maber and Angela Tregoning and published by Alison Hodge. The great bell boomed high overhead and the deep thrilling vibration hung trembling in the air long after the stroke of the bell. Kilvert was born on 3 December 1840 at The Rectory, Hardenhuish Lane, near Chippenham, Wiltshire, to the Rev. Romance and sexual attraction is where Kilvert is most Victorian, though there is a bit about his reaction to the Prince of Wales's illness which is pretty foreign. They used to be stuck with spouses for life, yet you really notice an incredibly casual attitude with regard to choosing them in the past.

The diaries of Robert Francis Kilvert (1840–1879), kept from 1870 to 1879, are a unique treasury celebrating the Welsh and English countryside and the variety of characters inhabiting it, seen through the perspective of a sensitive, lyrical and witty young clergyman. Francis Kilvert is so full of foibles and so matter-of-factly recounts even the most gruesome scenes that the writing seems surprisingly modern.