Kilvert's Diary, 1870-79 (Penguin)

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In late 1871 he fell in love with Frances Eleanor Jane Thomas, the youngest daughter of the vicar of Llanigon, a parish not far from Clyro, and asked her father for permission to marry her. An amateur, sub-Wordsworthian poet, he’s always going into raptures over the landscapes he crosses on his long walks around the countryside. 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. At last he faced round on his chair half wheel and pronounced solemnly and formally, ‘My best respects to you, Sir.

From 1876 to 1877 he was vicar of St Harmon, Radnorshire, and from 1877 to his death in 1879 he was vicar of Bredwardine, Herefordshire.

Kilvert has touched and delighted and (mildly shocked) readers of his diaries ever since they were first published. 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. Also, even making allowances for how people wrote about children in the Victorian era, Kilvet may well have been a pedophile, whether he acted on these impulses or not.

They got people to do introductions for the most minor Graham Greene novels, and this is more something that deserves putting in context. As well as mourning the untimely end of the man - a very Goth feeling - I was impressed by his deft descriptions of people and place and have remained so during a few sporadic partial readings since. 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! It's good to see the picturesque country setting and the quaint but changing community free of the need to fulfil the thematic demands of fiction.Mrs Kilvert removed all the notebooks from 9 September 1875 to 1 March 1876 and 27 June 1876 to 31 December 1877, we believe for personal reasons. 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 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. and later a one-volume selection Kilvert's Diary, 1870–1879 (Jonathan Cape, 1944—corrected in 1960, and with an abridged and illustrated version for children published as Ardizzone's Kilvert in 1976). Then there are his love affairs- we only get the earlier ones in detail as his wife seems to have censored some of it eg leaving an 18 month gap!