THE FAILURE OF FRANCIS KILVERT 13
133
just a little misleading when we read the entry of 7th August,
1874, on a child called Fanny Strange:
She has during the last few weeks been repeatedly stripped and
has had her bottom flogged naked with great severity. At one time
she seemed absolutely incorrigible. The severest whippings her
mother could inflict upon her bare flesh seemed to have no effect
upon her. She was whipped every day, and often twice or three
times in the day and then when her father came home at night he
got a stout switch, stripped the girl naked, laid her on her face
cross his knees and whipped her bare bottom and thighs again till
they were covered with weals and the blood came. I asked her
mother if it would shame the girl and have a good effect if I were to
whip her myself or if she were to flog her in my presence. 'No,' she
said, 'she is so hardened that she wouldn't care if I made her strip
herself bare and then flogged her on her naked bottom before you.'
The first comment to be made on this is that only three days
later Kilvert attends a wedding near Worthing and falls 'in love at
first sight with sweet Kathleen Mavourneen'. The girl he calls
'Kathleen Mavourneen' is tall and handsome 'with very dark hair,
eyebrows and eyelashes, and beautiful bright grey eyes, a thin
high aristocratic nose, a sweet firm rosy mouth, beautiful white
teeth, a well developed chin, a clear complexion and fresh colour.'
On October 1 st he tells us that she shares with him a love of In
Memoriam. Sixteen days later he writes of her 'sweet pure
thoughts'I, so much 'holier and nobler' than his. 'She has indeed
been, unconsciously, a good and guardian angel to me.'I
It is clear that the diarist has an equal need for the conversation
of 'Kathleen Mavourneen' and the bottom of Fanny Strange. His
feelings for Kathleen are not without sensuality, but she is so
awe-inspiring that it is difficult to believe she will gratify all his
desires. Elsewhere in the Diary we have this same duality: the
mature, marriageable, cultured, Christian girl and the voluptuous
child. It was a problem he never solved and it is a problem
countless others have never solved,, so we may quote once more
without cynicism from that biographical -note to his poems:
He possessed a happy faculty and felt an unceasing delight in
teaching young children. There was something in his manner of
speaking to them which had an attraction almost magnetic. It was
so wherever he went.
