Hitherto in this series the Anglican authors I’ve covered published work themselves which has become recognised, one way or another, as ‘classic’. My subject this time is someone who didn’t publish anything in his lifetime. He died relatively young, but evidently had literary ambitions, which found an outlet in a remarkable diary he kept for nearly ten years of his adult life, and in poetry which now reads as rather conventional and trite, but which was surely deeply felt. A small volume of poems was published three years after his death. Francis Kilvert (1840-1879) was a son of the vicarage, his father Rector of Hardenhuish, now effectively a suburb of Chippenham in Wiltshire. He followed his father into the ministry, after studying at Oxford. There followed a series of relatively short positions – curate to his father for two years, curate (this was ‘curate’ as in permanent assistant, rather than today’s idea of a training period) in Clyro, Radnorshire until 1872, four years back with his father, then vicar of St Harmon, Radnorshire for just a year, until he became vicar of Bredwardine for two years until his death.
There was nothing remarkable about this clerical career, on the surface. Although the mid-Victorian Church of England was undergoing a process of reform which overhauled its administration and its pastoral effectiveness, the national standards of stipend, working conditions and expectations, and regulatory processes which we accept today (even if they do sometimes seem a little ramshackle) were far in the future. Although the career prospects of junior clergy like Kilvert were gradually improving through the nineteenth century, as reform took effect, a clergyman hoping to make his way in the Church still might depend on family support, and even on influential patrons. There was nothing unusual about a career made up mostly of assistant roles. Hundreds, if not thousands, of parish clergy experienced something similar. For clergy in this situation, marriage was often not possible until a certain level of income could be guaranteed. Kilvert, as we know from his diary, was desperate to marry, but was disappointed repeatedly in love, and didn’t marry until just a few weeks before his death. He worked hard, took his duties seriously, lived out his faith to the best of his ability. But, if it weren’t for his diary, he would be forgotten today.
The diary did not come to light until almost sixty years after his death. The writer and publisher William Plomer was given sight of it, and realised what a treasure it was. Twenty-two notebooks, amounting to around a million words, gave an astonishing insight into the passions, the joys, the ambitions, and the daily routines of a country clergyman who, in an absolutely characteristic nineteenth century way, combined a profound sense of religious duty with a Romantic appreciation of the natural world. Because Kilvert had literary ambitions, the diary is not just a record of things done or seen, but an essay in description. Sometimes it may seem a bit sentimental for modern tastes, but it is always acutely observed. Kilvert’s ability to empathize was remarkable – there’s a spirit here of real, human warmth in his encounters with people across the social scale.
Plomer hoped to publish all the diary, but in the end edited it down to a three-volume edition which appeared in 1938 and covered around a third of the whole. For reasons I’ll come to later, we don’t know what he cut out in many cases. Readers were instantly struck by the quality of the writing, and also by the engaging character of Kilvert himself. I have a sense, though, that the contemporary reception rather sidelined Kilvert’s Christian beliefs and the wider clerical context. He was seen first and foremost as a writer on nature and on social customs and social conditions, with a marvellous eye for telling detail, and his interest in young women and girls – which has an innocence about it that is, unfortunately, quite easy today to read instead as shading into the inappropriate – and his romantic disappointments gave added poignancy to the picture of Kilvert which emerged from Plomer’s presentation.
But I think Kilvert’s Diary has as good a claim to be an Anglican classic as anything else I’ve covered in this series so far. First, it is one of the finest presentations of the Anglican pastoral ideal I can think of. Kilvert loved the people he served, and – without theorising things this way – he seems to have conceived of his ministry as service to all the people in the places in which he found himself. Time and again, and even when he deplores the actions of individuals he encounters, it is evident that he is able to understand the difficulties in which they have found themselves, as well as their joys. People and landscape for him fuse in a rich local ecology, in which he places himself, not as an alien presence doing things ‘to’ and ‘for’ people, but sharing their lives and helping them as much as he could. He had – and many times acknowledges this – the Wordsworthian love of nature and the sublime, but like his idol Wordsworth too, he does actually see the hand of God – the generosity of God – everywhere he goes. You could not find, I think, a finer expression of the love of place, which included the people of the place.
But, second, the diary is a record of what a diligent and committed country clergyman of the 1870s, inclined to a High Church but not Ritualistic position, thought about how his responsibilities were to be fulfilled. In a sense, almost all of the encounters in the diary – except, perhaps, for his family relationships – arose as a result of his pastoral duties. He seems to have had a finely judged sense of what was needed religiously, but also, on the other hand, when it might be best simply to make a social call. We see things only through his eyes, of course, so we can’t really assess how his visits were received. But he visited the poor and broken down as readily as he did the better educated and gentry with whom he could converse about the things he was really interested in. It’s difficult to think of anyone who fulfilled better George Herbert’s ideal of the parish priest in A Priest to the Temple (aka The Country Parson).
And, third, the diary is a record of changing times and movements in the Church of England. We don’t have access to Kilvert’s sermons, or to any other publications, to assess fully his theological convictions, but there is enough in the diary to show us a young clergyman aware of new trends, and of conflicts in the Church. He warmed to High Church views on the whole, and was intrigued by the person of Joseph Leycester Lyne, or ‘Father Ignatius’, an eccentric, early Anglican Benedictine who founded a community which became Llanthony Abbey, near Capel-y-ffin, not far from Clyro, but was also rather sceptical of him. He went with the more ‘Liberal’ opinion on the Athanasian Creed, i.e. content to see its removal from regular worship, and in this offended some Ritualist friends. But he eagerly carried the ‘Blessed Sacrament’, as he called it, to sick and dying parishioners. His father was acquainted with Henry Moule, the Evangelical vicar of Fordington in Dorset who seemingly evangelised and transformed his parish over a fifty-year incumbency, and he quoted stories about the Moule family with relish. The contrast with another dedicated country clergyman who kept a diary, James Woodforde (‘Parson Woodforde’, 1740-1803), is very striking, since Woodforde, who could not be faulted for neglect of his pastoral duties, nonetheless does not convey the same passion and spiritual conviction as Kilvert, who was after all a child of the Victorian revolution in clerical devotion. Reading Kilvert’s diary along with, for example, Owen Chadwick’s Victorian Miniature (1960) with its extraordinary account of a country clergyman’s battles with the local squire – probably a book I’ll look at in a future episode of this series – and some of the biographies of slum priests, is as good a way as any of getting familiarised with the local complexities of the Victorian Church.
But perhaps it’s best to give just a flavour of the writing, for those who haven’t come across the diary. Here he is, on 4 March 1872, recording a visit to a mentally distressed elderly parishioner, with a tone which some might think rather condescending but which I read otherwise:
“At the Homme [I think this is now rendered as Hom, a small settlement near Clyro] the door was unlocked but the downstairs rooms empty and the only sounds in the silent house were the scratching of a little fox terrier shut up in a closet and the horrible moaning and growling of the madwoman upstairs. Presently Meredith her brother came in and in some trepidation invited me upstairs to see her. She was in bed, very quiet. ‘Read to me about God and Jesus, please, dear,’ she said in a whining voice. When I had read five minutes, ‘You may go now dear,’ she said, ‘I am tired, I want to sleep. But you may pray for me first.’ The wind roared round the old house, shaking the doors and rattling the bedroom windows, and directly I had gone down the poor mad creature began her moans and growls again interrupted only by a vacant meaningless gibbering and a shout for ‘my brother John’.”
Kilvert was no straight-faced puritan. Here he is, visiting an alehouse in late February 1872, to have lunch and to gather the words of local songs:
“Mrs. Phillips, the landlady of the Sun, was much frightened when I asked for her husband, uneasy and nervous lest I should have come to apprehend him for having been in a row or doing something wrong. But when I said I wanted the words of an old song, she was greatly relieved and said at once, ‘Oh I know who you are. You are the gentleman from Clyro.’ I laughed and she began to smile. Mrs. Phillips took me into the parlour where I sat down, tore a leaf out of my pocket book and write with my address a request that Phillips would send me by post 1. the song about our Saviour, 2. the song about Lazarus, 3. the song about King James and the Tinker. Mrs. Phillips brought me a pint of excellent light bright beer, some hard sweet homebaked bread, and some hard cheese, carrying the bread and cheese in her arms as she ran in with it, as I was in a hurry to push on.”
One of my favourite passages is from Easter Day, 1876, here back in Hardenhuish, after the morning service, when he had noted the local tradition for dressing graves as well as the church with flowers, and with an echo of Thomas Gray’s famous elegy:
“When all the people had left the Church and no one remained but the Clerk putting away the sacred vessels I walked along round the silent sunny peaceful Churchyard and visited the graves of my sleeping friends Jane Hatherell, Mary Jefferies, Anne Hawkins, John Jefferies, George Bryant, Emily Banks, John Hatherell, Limpedy Buckland the gipsy girl, and many more. There they lay, the squire and the peasant, the landlord and the labourer, young men and maidens, old men and children, the infant of days beside the patriarch of nearly five score years, sister, brother, by the same mother, all in her breast their heads did lay and crumble to their common clay. And over all she lovingly threw her soft mantle of green and gold, the greensward and buttercups, daisies and primroses. There they lay all sleeping well and peacefully after life’s fitful fevers and waiting for the Great Spring morning and the General Resurrection of the dead. John Hatherell, the good old sawyer, now sleeps in the same God’s acre to which he helped to carry the gipsy girl Limpedy Buckland to her burial more than sixty years ago.”
What a fabulous evocation of the communion of saints.
It’s all the more disappointing, then, that the history of the diaries has been such a tale of loss and destruction. The twenty-two notebooks Plomer first saw had already had some material excised by Kilvert’s wife, Elizabeth Rowland – probably the parts that referred to her. The full typescript Plomer had prepared, and from which he made his three-volume selection, went missing and has never been found. The notebooks themselves remained in the family’s possession, but sadly one of Kilvert’s nieces burned all of them bar three of the early volumes in the 1950s, possibly because of concerns about Kilvert’s interest in young women, and presumably too because she assumed the full typescript was still available. Those three surviving notebooks were eventually published in full in the 1980s. Mark Bostridge said this many years ago, and so I merely repeat it, that what is sorely needed is a full scholarly edition of what remains, i.e. the three surviving notebooks supplemented by Plomer’s original three-volume selection. The Kilvert Society have regularly published research articles which could be drawn on for a full edition with the usual critical apparatus of a full introduction, and references. Work on the social, economic and religious history of the areas Kilvert served, on the networks of gentry and clerical families with whom he mixed, and on popular customs and beliefs, could all enrich further what remains. Incidentally the same service could and should be done for another great Victorian clerical diary, that of Benjamin Armstrong (1817-1890), vicar of Dereham in Norfolk for thirty-eight years from 1850, whose remarkable diaries – not however by any means as imaginative and literary as Kilvert’s – again have only been published in various selective and largely unreferenced editions, but do survive in their entirety in the family’s possession.
Ad fontes 