He fondly talks of rural life of the time and he is particularly fond of underage girls which as a father of a daughter was difficult to read, however he didn't seem to act on this and indeed tried to marry once or twice. Robert Francis Kilvert (3 December 1840 – 23 September 1879), known as Francis or Frank, was an English clergyman whose diaries reflected rural life in the 1870s, and were published over fifty years after his death. 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.

The former was a screed, the latter a rigmarole, but the rigmarole was more appropriate and more to the purpose than the screed.Kilvert barely knows there are such things as little boys, but he tells us all about the little girls in his parish.

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'.However, poet John Betjeman was among those who have since defended Kilvert, saying, "If there had been anything sinister in his attentions to them, he would hardly have written so candidly in his diary about his feelings".

It's the weird thing where sexual attraction gets mostly sublimated into waxing lyrical about rosy cheeks and angels, which, because there's nothing in it that's specific to the qualities of adult women, gets lavished on little girls too, even though to our eyes it seems so clearly sexual.Once or twice I thought the whole mass of men must have been down together with the coffin atop of them and some one killed or maimed at least. 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.

Kilvert is a keen observer of place (in this case, mostly the Hay valley area of Wales) and a great describer, and often quite amusing. 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. Partly because life appears to me such a curious and wonderful thing that it almost seems a pity that even such a humble and uneventful life as mine should pass altogether away without some such record as this, and partly too because I think the record may amuse and interest some who come after me.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.