The Revd Francis Kilvert (1840-1879) was born at Hardenhuish Rectory, Langley Burrell, near Chippenham, Wiltshire, where his father was Vicar of St Peter’s Church. After being ordained, he served as his father’s curate from 1863 to 1864. From 1865 to 1872 he was curate at Clyro, Radnorshire, Wales, returning to serve again as his father’s curate from 1872 to 1876. He then became Vicar of St Harmon, Radnorshire, and, the following year, Vicar of Bredwardine, Herefordshire.
In August 1879 he married Elizabeth Anne Rowland, but tragically died of peritonitis, aged 38, just a month after the wedding, following the couple’s return from their honeymoon in Scotland.
From 1870 to 1879 Kilvert kept a diary which was published between 1938 and 1940. It has become a classic evocation of the English countryside in the mid-Victorian period and has been described as “the finest in the English language after Pepys”.
On 2 November 1874, Kilvert and his father visited his aunt, Emma Kilvert, who was a patient at Brislington House Asylum.
“By the 12.40 train I went down with my Father on our way to pay a visit to Aunt Emma at Dr Fox’s private lunatic asylum at Brislington…. As we walked from Keynsham to Brislington my Father told me he had heard his grandmother say she remembered the time in the middle of the eighteenth century when the only public conveyances were stage waggons. She remembered the stage waggon that plied between Bath and Bristol and spent a whole day on the journey, stopping for dinner at Keynsham, and returning from Bristol to Bath the next day. This same lady, my great-grandmother, I have heard my Father say, could remember the Royal troops passing through Bath on their way to meet the ‘Young Pretender’ (Bonnie Prince Charlie) when he was ‘out in the ’45’. Brislington House is a fine, palatial-looking building, very beautifully situated on the high ground between Keynsham and Bristol, and the grounds are large and well kept. I was glad to renew my acquaintance with Mrs Hopton, the matron who was once my housekeeper at Sydney College.”
Mrs Elizabeth Hopton (1811-1886) was housekeeper at Sydney College, a boys’ school in Bath (now the Holburne Museum), which operated from 1855 to about 1889. Kilvert’s brother-in-law was a master there from 1860 to 1874. Mrs Hopton later served as Matron of Brislington House from 1867 until 1886 and is buried in St Luke’s churchyard. She also has her own literary association, which will be told another time.
Tall, bearded and good-looking, Kilvert was fond of nude sea bathing and, in September 1872, swam naked three times while staying at Weston-super-Mare.
“There was delicious freedom in stripping in the open air and running, naked, into the sea … the red morning sunshine glowing upon the naked limbs of the bathers.”
In June 1874 Kilvert visited the Clergy Daughters’ School (later St Brandon’s), which operated at 25 Great George Street, Bristol, from 1862 to 1945. He also visited a confectioner’s shop near “The Drawbridge” (near the site of today’s Hippodrome) and bought a bun for a poor barefoot girl.
In October 1874 he visited friends at 1 Carlton Place (now Princess Victoria Street), Clifton, and went to St Mary Redcliffe Church. In December of the same year he stayed at Carlton Place again and walked across the Suspension Bridge and through Leigh Woods. In March 1876 he visited a bookbinder’s near “The Drawbridge” to have the manuscript of his poems bound in leather.
Kilvert is commemorated in Brislington by Kilvert Close and Hardenhuish Road.
Jonathan Rowe, 2026
