The life and times of Anne Lister
The direct address to the audience is a technique I strongly favoured when making drama for the stage, but I dislike its use on screen. In a theatre everyone knows the performers and audience are in the same place and must interact, so if a character speaks directly to the spectators, it does not seem strange. Screen productions spoil the illusion of verisimilitude when an actor looks straight down the lens and addresses a viewer who is certainly not in their world. I didn’t like it in the HBO/BBC drama Gentleman Jack, which was otherwise excellent, though its use faded as the two series evolved and, to be fair, the text was based on one of the most fascinating and courageously frank diaries from former times. There have been few forms of address more direct, even though the bluntest bits were written in code.
Anne Lister was a highly educated, eloquent, assertive, arrogant, astute, snobbish, successful and pioneeringly independent woman of her time. Born in April 1791 she eventually inherited the family estate at Shibden near Halifax in Yorkshire, and extended, modified and improved it. She continuously advanced her personal education by extensive reading, travel, hiring a tutor and implementing phases of private study of Latin and Greek. She was fiercely individual, eventually wearing almost exclusively black (the male fashion), and dressing in a distinctly masculine stye, giving rise to her nickname ‘Gentleman Jack’.
She privately acknowledged her lesbian identity and robustly tolerated the social torture of gossip provoked by that and by her unconventional lifestyle. She fearlessly established her independence amid an almost exclusively male business community. She was the first woman to be elected to the committee of the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society. She conducted several love affairs and eventually ‘married’ Ann Walker on Easter Sunday 1834 at Holy Trinity Church, York in what is now regarded as the first lesbian wedding to be held in Britain.
My wife and I much enjoyed the TV series based on her life and we recently ventured to view her home which is now maintained by Calderdale Council. Whilst exiting via the gift shop, I picked up a copy of The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister supremely edited by Helena Whitbread intending to dip into it now and then. I read it continuously from cover to cover.[1]
Anne had a lengthy love affair with Mariana Lawton (née Belcombe) for the first part of her adult life before settling down with Ann Walker in 1834, but there were other dalliances along the way, her emotional entanglements often overlapping each other, as she wrestled with her desires to ascertain which woman would be the best long-term partner. Her thoughts and deeds were recorded in some detail as Anne negotiated what was clearly a very awkward path through the social minefield of middle-class nineteenth-century Yorkshire. The trials were practical, psychological and medical but Anne possessed a magnificently poised sense of identity amid a puritanically narrow and unenlightened society. Some relatives and friends were privately supportive, but it was not easy. Even Mariana publicly rebuffed her on occasion, something which caused Anne great distress.
Ultimately Anne triumphed. Her resilience, determination and application attained success not only in matters of the heart, but in business and local society.
Helena Whitbread is to be congratulated on untangling Anne’s account, not just because of the inconvenience of the coded sections, much of which are far too mundane to warrant being disguised, but she was also faced with Ann’s literary shorthand and crammed text employed to maximise the use of expensive paper. There was often no punctuation or spacing between words. In addition, there was Anne’s lexicon. In the main it was plain and to the point, but some words carried extra meaning. A ‘kiss’ for example, could mean something altogether more comprehensive than what is meant by that word today.
It was not the salacious content, however, but the minutiae of everyday life that I found the most compelling aspect of Whitbread’s work. (I have only read the first of her two volumes.) Yes, it was intriguing to read of how Anne came to terms with her ‘difference’ and how she pursued her romantic quarry, but even more fascinating was her obsession with the clock, always to the quarter hour, and sometimes down to five minutes, and hence we learn how long it took to walk to this place or that, or to travel between cities by coach even taking account of the non-standardisation of clocks.
Fascinating too, are the daily remedies for aches, pains and tummy troubles, the – brutal – dental treatment she sought, the request she made for leeches to be applied to her back, and the fact that when she solicited expert advice on treating a venereal infection, she was asking for a friend.
From the post-mortem procedures – ‘a corpse keeps better in a confined room than in a ventilated one’ – to the fact that in 1818 in York, ripe strawberries and raspberries were served in December, the revelations were often surprising.
Anne travelled widely and following one trip to Wales, so enjoyed the cuisine that she had Welsh lamb sent back to Halifax – the heart of the Yorkshire wool country – and it arrived in three days. This is over a decade before the great railway boom began. Roads, or canals, were the only methods of goods transport, and the state of the former was infinitely variable, while the speed of the latter was set at a walking pace. Anne ordered half a sheep (‘1/2 a sheep will travel better than a less portion on account of less meat being exposed to the air’) at a cost of 5d. a lb plus 1 ½ d. a lb plus a shilling for a yard of cloth wrapper.[2]
Earlier, in December 1817, she ‘Paid a shilling for an inside place in the True Blue heavy coach that sets off from the Black Swan in Coney Street (York) every day for the Golden Lion, Leeds where it should arrive at, or a little before 6.’ They left on time and actually arrived at 6.30pm. That’s thirty miles in four and a half hours, averaging just under seven miles per hour, which can’t be considered bad for a ‘heavy coach’ horse-drawn on inconsistent roads in winter.
Anne gives a good deal of attention to food, especially when on her travels. The diet contains few surprises with meat, fish and poultry being staples along with beans, potatoes and other veg, plus various mentions of ‘gravy soup’, and fruit tarts. She declares a ‘mostly boiled then fried or crisped’ pike at the heart of a serving of vegetable soup, roasted lamb, potatoes, peas, sweet puddings, a tart and jellies, as being ‘All most excellent. We never enjoyed a meal more.’ This was in Bowness on Windermere as part of her excursion to the Lake District in 1824.
An increase in highway robberies prompted Anne to pay £2 15s for a pistol which she learned to clean, assemble, load and fire. They practised in a field ‘just above the gibbet’ in Halifax which became renowned as a town still retaining the Gibbet Law using a guillotine style apparatus long after it had fallen into disuse elsewhere in England.
A couple of entries struck a particular chord with your scribe. Recent accounts from The Unspoken Garden blog posts have outlined our fostering of hedgehogs. On 17th August 1821 Anne wrote:
‘My aunt had a letter from Marian [Anne’s sister] announcing that they had sent off two hedgehogs which have just arrived safe by the mail coach, packed in straw in a basket.’
Anne says they are to be released in the garden to ‘clear it of snails and other vermin’. That’s well and good but she also describes given them a dish of milk – which is something you should never do. Hedgehogs like milk but it is not good for them, and this entry shows how long that misconception has been held.
She also received a letter from a friend in April 1824 describing a public fancy-ball which was exceptionally well organised and ‘far surpassed Preston Guild!’. It is interesting that my Lancashire home town festival (held now every twenty years) was used as an entertainment yardstick in the heart of Yorkshire two centuries ago.
If you find yourself in the West Riding of Yorkshire sometime, then Shibden is well worth a visit. The house is not extensive, but neither is it expensive, and as with Anne’s diaries the detail you will find within has a staunch historical validity made all the more vivid by the honestly and diligence of Anne’s journals.
You will have guessed that I also commend Helena Whitbread’s unravelling of the threads of Anne’s notes and thoughts. Anne was the truest of writers, not just because of her honesty, but because she wrote for the right reasons. Most of the time she had no thoughts of publication or even of being read. She wrote because she felt compelled, and because the knowledge of having written provided constant solace.
“I owe a great deal to this journal. By unburdening my mind on paper…it seems made over to a friend that hears it patiently.”
22nd June 1821.
References
[1] Whitbread H, The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (vol 1) Virago. ISBN: 987-1-84408-719-8
[2] 5d. = five pre-decimal pence. There were twelve pence in a shilling and twenty shillings in a pound. lb = one pound in weight: approx. 0.45kg.
More independent women – though of a fictional nature – can be found in…
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