Welsh Journals

important contribution to extending the means by which the whole range of students, indeed anyone with an interest in Welsh history, may investigate that history. D. RUSSELL DAVIES Aberystwyth THE DIARY OF FRANCIS KILVERT, JUNE-JULY 1870. Edited by Dafydd Ifans. The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1989. Pp. xxii, 141. £ 15.00. In 1982, the National Library of Wales published in full Kilvert's diary for 26 April-10 June 1870 and, seven years later, Alan Hodges of Penzance brought out the holiday journal kept over the period 19 July-6 August. Now the intermediate volume is made available and the three volumes together present us with a full and corrected text to cover 27 April to 6 August. The editor of the new one sees the Cornish diary as 'somewhat untypical' but believes that the National Library MSS. 'are very much a sample of the full text of Kilvert's diary'. This is obviously prompted by the comparison between the text newly transcribed and Plomer's abridged version. Their different aims are made very clear: 'where William Plomer's text departs from the manuscript in order to ensure continuity or for some other reason, the present text seeks to restore the precise reading of the manuscript'. Sometimes the differences are small, but there are a number of Plomer's readings that give some cause for apprehension. We have to make allowance for the fact, reported by Kilvert's niece, that people found his hand 'exceedingly difficult to read-and a trial to the eyes'. It could be a cramped one: the word 'reason' in the photo-copy of the manuscript entry for 13 July (facing p. 26) is little more than a squiggle. Even Dafydd Ifans himself honestly wonders if the name 'getewys' should really be transcribed as 'Gittoes'. So there is some excuse for Plomer but not enough, perhaps, to cover some of the guesses that appear in his abridgement of this volume. Consider the following: 'bondsman Garvis' should be 'bandsman Games' and 'Jim Rufen', 'Sir Roger'. For 'the tramping of the fast mare', read 'the company of the foot man'. In place of 'steadily stretching', insert 'steadily stealing'. These are all cited by Dafydd Ifans in his list of discrepancies (pp. 127-30), but the oddest of them is surely Plomer's 'the ladies gallantly sprawled'. Mr. Ifans is able to restore Victorian decorum and correctness by changing the last word to 'scrawled', in its secondary meaning of 'shuffled'. The possibility of checking Plomer's readings in his published versions of the other original notebooks was lost for ever when they were destroyed. One consequence of this is that the two diaries edited by members of the staff of the National Library of Wales have grown in stature for, as Dafydd Ifans remarks, they now take the form of 'a complete and representative fragment of a lost treasure'. No doubt there are readers who think that too much stress is laid upon exact transcription, but most people realise that Kilvert is an artist in word-effects and sets them out deliberately. Look at a few of them. The gentry delight in 'a wild unusual