Anne Lister lived in tumultuous times. Born during the less sanguinary phase of the French Revolution, she grew up in an England riven by political dissent and embroiled in relentless war with France. When she was sixteen, Britain abolished the slave trade under the leadership of Yorkshire MP William Wilberforce. She came of age during the Regency and saw the accession of the controversial Prince of Wales, of the ‘Sailor King’ William and of the unlikely Victoria. She learned within a day about the infamous Peterloo Massacre on 16 August 1819, in not-so-distant Manchester. She saw Irish rebellion, annexation and mass immigration. Her mature years encompassed the removal of disabilities against Roman Catholics in 1829, the dramatic expansion of the franchise through the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the government-subsidised emancipation of enslaved Africans in 1833. She read her way through the literary transformations wrought by two generations of Romantic poets. She crossed the English Channel in one of the earliest steamships, rode a train from Manchester to Liverpool in the first year of its operation and explored innovations in agriculture, shipping and coal manufacture. She was in Europe, though not in Paris, when a new Revolution broke out in July 1830. By 1834 her Halifax had become a hotbed of Whig politics and soon thereafter of Chartist activity. And her life coincided with the emergence of an empire on which the sun proverbially never set.
How did Anne Lister respond to this national and global tumult while negotiating her own tumultuous love life, her complicated social relationships, her ambitious travels and her relentless pursuit of an improved estate? Which issues preoccupied her and which did she ignore? Did her views change over time? What did it mean to her to be English? In raising such questions, I also confront the partiality – in both senses – of my research. I rely gratefully for this project on the letters, diaries and diary excerpts that have already been transcribed. I draw too on the superb scholarship that already grapples with Lister’s politics, most fully the work of Jill Liddington and Catherine Euler. But I have not braved the facsimiles. And, of course, even textual resources as voluminous as Lister’s diaries and letters cannot capture the conversations and actions that often provide the most reliable key to political practice. My opening litany is thus somewhat proleptic: Lister’s perspectives on some or even most of the events I have outlined are unknown and may be unknowable.
In one crucial sense, of course, the phrase ‘Anne Lister’s politics’ leaves little doubt: Lister was a lifelong Tory who campaigned for Tory members of Parliament and vocally supported Tory values, which emphasised the preservation of order and inherited traditions, the rights of country landowners, patriotic loyalty to the Protestant crown and adherence to the Anglican establishment. I had no trouble including Lister in a 2010 essay anchored by the term ‘Tory Lesbians’ or in arguing in 1998 that Lister’s conservatism, like that of the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, may have been a compensatory assertion of class and caste conformity that Lister’s gender, sexuality, her singleness and her singularity could not confer.
In this chapter, however, I want to complicate these claims not only by looking more broadly and more fully at Anne Lister’s politics, but also by asking what the phrase ‘Anne Lister’s politics’ might mean. Which concerns most motivated Lister? How did she position herself when the Tory party was itself riven into more liberal and conservative poles? Are there gaps or contradictions between her public and private professions? Do her exceptional life practices themselves constitute a ‘politics’? And is it possible that Lister’s conservatism was not so much compensatory as constitutive, parcel to her self-fashioning in ways that merit a deeper exploration than the ameliorative notion of ‘compensation’ affords?
I organise my exploration of these questions around three conceptions of ‘politics’: first, and most obviously, of politics as ‘activities or policies associated with government’, a definition I draw from the Oxford English Dictionary; second, as ‘actions concerned with the acquisition or exercise of power, status, or authority’ (also taken from the OED); and third, politics as a disturbance in the field of authorised bodies that inserts a new part or party of humanity, a concept I take from the philosopher Jacques Rancière. As I address Anne Lister’s politics through these definitions, I will propose that her responses to national concerns (definition 1) underwrote her quest for status (definition 2), which in turn sustained a self-insertion into public life on innovative terms (definition 3). Methodologically, I take up this inquiry through a reading of the letters and diaries that focuses especially on words and phrases that Lister repeats across entries and for topics about which she writes at length. I find particularly illuminating the occasions when she repeats, for the sake of her journal, what she has said or written to someone else, narrating herself back to herself in a form that resembles free indirect discourse. Occasions when the letters and diaries conflict overtly or even subtly also seem to me to offer important insights.
Throughout her adult life, Anne Lister was passionately Protestant and passionately English, identities that were effectively co-constitutive: as Linda Colley reminds us, in the late eighteenth century ‘Protestantism lay at the core of British national identity.’1 To be patriotic in Lister’s lifetime was to define oneself against continental and colonial others, and especially against Catholicism, the entrenched signifier of the enemy without and within. For Lister as for most Britons, ‘Protestant’ meant Church of England, and if her religious investments were more formal than deeply spiritual, that is also typical for her generation and her class.
Patriotism was especially intense during Lister’s formative years, when Britain and France were at war almost non-stop and when French threats of invasion and conquest were far from idle. Lister’s reading list for the late 1810s and early 1820s shows a copious interest in the Napoleonic wars and in Napoleon himself. In 1810 she records attending a performance of ‘Rule Britannia’ and notes that ‘the company consisted of about 60 of our most respectable people’.2 In 1816 she gloats that Britain has ‘humbled La Grande Nation, and some of them will owe us a grudge for it, for some time to come’.3 It is perhaps her eagerness to celebrate the restoration of the Bourbon throne that leads her to misread Helen Maria Williams, one of the firmest English adherents of the French Revolution, as ‘a staunch friend to Louis 18’;4 in fact, Williams hated Napoleon (who hated her) and only hoped that the restored king would respect the ‘rights of man’ as the French emperor had not. There are also intimations that, during this period at least, Lister was fascinated by Napoleon,5 a quality that she would have shared with quite a few Britons, including her stealthily admired Lord Byron, a locus of interesting contradictions in Lister’s politics to which I will return.
We might rightly ask what it means politically that Lister, for all her professed love of England, chose to spend so much of her time outside it. It is touching to see a fifteen-year-old Anne writing in her journal that a trip to the small town of Bacup in August 1806 was ‘the first time I ever Was out of Yorkshire’,6 and then to absorb the voluminous list of her adult travels: Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Prussia, Italy, Finland and Russia, with Paris a familiar point of return. In the early years, Lister’s writings are filled with encomiums to England, which becomes the ground of comparison next to which every elsewhere falls short: writing to the Duffins, she extols ‘this favoured island, the admiration of every enlightened and impartial mind’ is ‘where the wise man sees abundant reason to be satisfied and happy’.7 On her first trip to Paris in 1819, she finds the French capital a ‘shabby’ disappointment at first compared wth London.8 But she thinks Dieppe ‘might almost pass for English’.9 Rouen reminds her of Manchester, and in 1822, she identifies London’s Regent’s Crescent as ‘now, surely, the finest street’ in all of Europe, though this would be a Europe she has at that point hardly seen.10
As Lister becomes a habitual traveller, England does cease to be the measure of all things beautiful, but it remains the measure of all things right. In the 1820s and perhaps beyond, Lister seems to show a certain guilty pleasure in loving the continent. She writes on 31 March 1825, in one of her self-reflexive passages,
I leave Paris, said I to myself, with sentiments how different from those with which I arrived. My eye was accustomed to all it saw – it was no longer a stranger nor found fault as before with all that differed from what it left at home. Imperfectly as I speak the language, I felt almost at home in Paris & seemed to feel so in France.11
As soon as she is home, however, she seems to need to prove her patriotism: just two weeks later, she writes a letter affirming that ‘French manners & habits of thinking [are] very different from ours’, and then, even more dismissively in another recounting of her own words, ‘My being in Paris was a mere nothing. Scarce deserved the name of being abroad. Like a dream which I had already forgotten’; indeed, she ‘told them all I was more than ever English at heart’.12 On another occasion, after thinking wistfully about France, she writes, ‘But don’t mistake me. Ours is the land of righteous law & liberty; & I would not change my birthplace for all the loveliest spots that smile upon the god of day. But we may migrate now & then, & yet be patriot still.’13 In a society where the Grand Tour is not only a commonplace for upper-class men, but in some circles even an expectation for men and a possibility for women, this level of protest is interestingly intense.
I have not found the same defensiveness regarding Lister’s later travels, perhaps because they enabled her to meet continental royalty while also advancing her relationships with the English elite. She does still enjoy marking English – and Yorkshire – superiority; in summer 1831, returning from travels in Holland, Belgium and several English cathedral towns, she pronounces that ‘up to this moment, no ecclesiastical building I have ever seen equals York cathedral’, while more equivocally attributing to Norwich ‘the best bread and butter I have ever tasted, save in Lombardy’.14 And by the time she reaches Moscow in 1840, she can call the city’s beauty ‘indescribable’ and the Kremlin ‘unrivalled’, aesthetically leaving England behind. Yet even then her justification is English, and poignantly so when we remember that she never returned to England: evoking Samuel Johnson, she extols the ‘enlarging’ benefits of travel and her hopes ‘to be richer in these by and by; and then it will be more flattering to this fair city [Moscow] to repeat, that I still think it the most beautiful town I have ever seen’.15
Given her prolific patriotic protestations, it is significant but not surprising that Lister’s travels were not necessarily ‘enlarging’ of her views at home. A common gesture in the diaries is to recognise and record the opinions, problems and sometimes the sufferings of local people, but then to affirm viewpoints that I propose to call kingly – and this at a time when challenges to absolutism pervaded the European continent. We see often in Lister’s writings support for kings whom others of her class and political leanings are unwilling to defend. For example, although she acknowledged the legitimacy of French frustrations with the ultra-right French king Charles X, whom Isabella Norcliffe’s mother, Ann, was more typical in naming a ‘despot’,16 Lister takes the trouble to praise Charles’s philanthropy toward his servants. Ann Norcliffe also professes herself glad when the time comes in England that ‘William 4th reigns instead of George 4th!’,17 while Lister seems to have been among a distinct minority of women to support the wildly unpopular George. The Prince Regent’s behaviour towards his estranged wife, Caroline, so outraged English women that (despite Caroline’s own clear transgressions) tens of thousands of them, including some 3,700 ‘ladies’ from Halifax, signed petitions supporting the queen when some members of Parliament wanted to try Caroline for adultery rather than allow her to take part in George IV’s coronation.18 But Lister used a trip to Italy in 1827 to visit Caroline’s villa and affirm that ‘unfortunately, we heard quite enough to persuade us, our King was quite right not to suffer such a queen to be the crowned queen of England’.19
No surprise either, then, that it was with the crown that Lister had also sided on the occasion of the Peterloo Massacre of 16 August 1819, when some sixty thousand peacefully assembled petitioners, a majority of them women and children, were charged by cavalry, killing dozens of unarmed demonstrators and slashing and trampling another three to five hundred. In her diary two days later, Lister records the ‘sad work at Manchester – a crowded meeting of these radical reformers’, misrepresenting the crowd as a ‘mob armed with pistols’ while making no mention of royal sabres; for her, the ‘reports are so vague and monstrous’ that she ‘scarce knows what to believe’.20 Lister’s scepticism is understandable, for ‘monstrous’ indeed became the judgement of history; the poet Percy Shelley spoke for the majority of Britons when he memorialised this senseless rampage of ‘Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know’.21 But Lister was explicit in her worry over the ‘grievous … unsettled state of peoples and governments’ and in declaring ‘liberty and equality’ to be both an ‘absurdity’ and an ‘impracticability’.22
This belief in the impossibility – and, for all we know, the undesirability – of ‘liberty and equality’ probably also extends to Lister’s views about enslavement and abolition. The public record gives no evidence of any holdings that implicate Shibden during Anne Lister’s lifetime or the lifetimes of her uncle and aunt. Profits from enslavement do appear in the Lister family record: as Liddington notes, two of Anne’s great-uncles, Thomas and William, ‘emigrated to Virginia in the 1730s, pinning their hopes on the tobacco trade’ and enslaving some fifteen Africans.23 The greatest beneficiary of slavery in Lister’s family, however, was the Lister who inherited Shibden after Ann Walker’s death: Thomas’s grandson John, whose wife, Louisa Grant, owned a sizeable St Vincent plantation. In the 1830s England imperilled its fiscal stability to award 20 million pounds to British enslavers – and nothing to the enslaved; Louisa Grant Lister received a whopping £12,765 13s. 8d. for the mandatory emancipation of 485 enslaved persons.24 The website of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery shows several other Listers receiving more modest compensation for one or more emancipated persons. Ann Walker’s brother-in-law George Sutherland also held persons in bondage in St Vincent and received a significant sum.
Slavery and abolition were hot topics in Yorkshire during Lister’s life. On the one hand, the region’s economy and many of its landowners were implicated beneficiaries of what S. D. Smith calls ‘gentry capitalism’: the efforts of ‘landed and respectable’ gentry ‘to increase their wealth and influence through colonial trade’.25 On the other hand, Yorkshire was also a site of intense abolitionist activity, not least among women and not least because William Wilberforce, Parliament’s prime mover for abolition, was a long-time Yorkshire MP, and ultimately it was anti-slavery sentiment that won county support. At this juncture we do not know Anne Lister’s views on this critical issue of her times, and she would certainly have lacked the means to become a ‘gentry capitalist’. When Lister (slightly mis)quotes from William Cowper’s The Task in 1825 to say that ‘we all agree with Cowper, “England! My country! With all thy faults I love thee still”’, she may or may not have recognised that for Cowper slavery was first among those faults.26
As far as I have read, slavery comes up only once in the transcribed diaries, but that entry, at more than 1,200 words, comprises one of Lister’s longest records of a single conversation. The entry reports the experiences of a John Robinson, who visited Shibden on 22 January 1818 to contract for repairs. Robinson had spent two years on a Liverpool slave ship and ‘gave us an amusing account of what he had seen’. He describes the brutal capture and transport of some six hundred Africans, ‘chained by tens together’, four of whom jumped overboard in their shared chains rather than accept captivity. Without critical comment, Lister recounts the treatment and the suffering of these Africans and dwells on the details of their sale in Jamaica: ‘men bought at about £13 a piece – women £2 less, tho if pregnant only £1 less, and, if with a fine child at the breast, the same price as the men’.27 The entry also records Robinson’s account of African customs, an account that dehumanises the captives and implies that they mistreat their own children such that many of them die. If Lister supported abolition or even amelioration, one would expect a report like this one, written a decade after the slave trade was banned, to have included at least a word of critical comment. But we have only her silence here, and it is challenging to imagine that this silence does not speak complicity.
Lister was not silent about Catholicism, however, and eventually her views took an ultra-conservative and minoritarian stance. As I have noted, in Lister’s day anti-Catholicism was parcel to Englishness: triumph over the Gunpowder Plot engineered in 1605 by the Catholic Guy Fawkes engendered a decreed national holiday and a prescribed liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer that officially lasted until 1859; the 1701 Act of Settlement set forth an order of appointment to the English throne that would guarantee perpetual Protestant accession; and the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots that terrorised London in 1780 remained a recent reminder of English hysteria over Parliament’s efforts to remove minor restrictions against Roman Catholics put in place by the Anti-Popery Act of 1698. Nonetheless, new efforts for fair treatment began percolating in Parliament by 1805 in the wake of Great Britain’s 1801 Act of Union with Ireland. These efforts culminated in the passage of the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, which allowed Catholics to hold parliamentary office though not yet to enter the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
The Tory party and its public were deeply divided over the 1829 bill. If Lister occasionally maintains that she has ‘always been for the Roman Catholics’, as Catherine Euler reports, the diaries had also expressed anti-Catholic views.28 In 1817 Lister comments that ‘the order of Jesuits is the most dangerous and insidious enemy we can possibly suffer to set itself up against the protestant religion’; that diary entry also cites at some length concerns about an increase in Catholics in Lancashire where, she claims, ‘almost all the neighbouring population has been brought over to the popish Faith’.29 While she delights in the majestic cathedrals of the continent, she laments that ‘there are now a thousand Roman Catholic chapels in England’.30 By 1825 she is calling upon ‘all Protestants to stand firm in support of their religion’.31 And echoing longstanding British ideology, she warns that the ‘foreign influence’ of Catholics ‘will not go down with Englishmen’.32
But what almost surely solidified Lister’s opposition to the Catholic Relief Act of 1829 was her new friendship with Lady Louisa Stuart, granddaughter of the Earl of Bute and of the renowned writer and traveller Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. I propose this friendship as a key to understanding Anne Lister’s politics in all three of the respects that I take up here. For most Tories, the Catholic Relief Act was a compromise for the sake of the union; in Lister’s resistance to that compromise, we see not only the conventional insistence on Britain as an exclusively Protestant state, but Lister’s thrall to Lady Stuart, a relationship that, as Jill Liddington has observed, ‘hardened [Lister’s] conservative politics’.33 Importantly, this relationship emerged in Lister’s life at a time when Britain itself was on the cusp of changing in ways that Lister would find disturbing.
Lister was doubtless among the many who were surprised in 1830 by the collapse of a Tory hegemony that had lasted for the better part of seven decades. The Whig takeover also ousted Lady Stuart’s nephew Charles from his position as ambassador to France and coincided with the ‘July Days’ in France that led to the abdication of Charles X, days that Lister marks with the language of ‘horror’ and ‘carnage’. Lady Stuart, ever the arch-conservative, worried in a letter to Lister that ‘the terrible state of this country … seems fast verging to that of France’.34 Britain’s new and more liberal government was solidified by the Reform Bill of 1832, which expanded the male franchise to include many of Lister’s own tenants. An interest in electoral politics turns up in Lister’s journal as early as 1807, when she mentions that ‘Mr R went to York to vote’35 – and one wishes she had said more about what is now called the Great Yorkshire Election that returned William Wilberforce and gave a second seat to the Whig Lord Milton, supporter of electoral reform and workers’ rights, over the Tory enslaver and plantation magnate Henry Lascelles, who, incidentally, as Carol Adlam and San Ní Ríocáin have discovered, turns out to be a distant relation of Eliza Raine.36
Lister brings up electoral politics more fully in 1817 when her diary for four days running is focused almost wholly on the local contest between Scott and Hawksworth, with copious detail and passionate commentary about the poll,37 and in 1823 she is musing about Tory candidates who might be recruited to run for Halifax. But her political investments heat up most intensely after the collapse of the Tory government in 1830, when the question of electoral reform becomes paramount. Lister wrote on 5 March 1831 that she was
not committed on the reform question as yet. I have always lately and to the Stuarts and people here professed myself a friend of the Duke of Wellington. In my heart I scarce know whether to wish for the reform or not. I think I rather incline towards it but I shall wait for circumstances before I declare myself. Not even my aunt as yet know[s] what I wish about it.38
Here we see a private Lister uncertain of her position, unwilling to be open about that uncertainty, perhaps waiting to see what Lady Stuart will do. For as Liddington discusses more deeply in Female Fortune, the friendship with Lady Stuart and the high-level connections that it conferred on Lister seem to have won out when she was undecided. And in the next three parliamentary elections – 1832, 1835 and 1837 – when Lady Stuart’s own nephew James Stuart Wortley was a candidate for West Yorkshire, Lister found herself even more firmly on what Liddington calls ‘the uncompromising diehard wing of the Tories’ where her opposition to the Catholic Relief Act already placed her in 1829.39
The Reform Bill brought politics literally home: even as it explicitly disenfranchised women, who had only rarely dared to vote, it gave Lister the landowner a new influence. As Euler and Liddington have documented more fully, Lister openly strong-armed her eligible tenants to vote (Tory) blue and publicised her vow to ‘not take a new tenant who would not give me a vote’:40 ‘I had made up my mind to take none but blue tenants.’41 She probably did help Wortley squeak into a one-vote victory in 1835 – he had come in at the bottom of four candidates in 1832 – but after that second election, she insists that she will ‘give up talking politics – no hope of gaining people over, such is the spirit abroad for innovation’.42 Indeed, Halifax became a Whig and then radical stronghold in spite of Lister and her fellow landowners, and Wortley’s humiliating defeat in 1837, when (though incumbent) he came in again at the bottom, also showed Lister the limits of her influence. Already with Wortley’s 1832 loss, however, she was expressing dismay and ambivalence about her involvement in politics. ‘I hardly thought myself capable of such strong political excitement and mortification,’ she wrote thereafter. ‘I am completely sick of public events.’43
In moving towards the second conception of ‘Anne Lister’s politics’, I want to dwell on that word ‘mortification’ and on what that sentiment might have meant for Lister as a precarious member of her class. I have agreed with Jill Liddington that Lady Stuart was a catalyst for some of Lister’s more conservative positions. In Lister’s letters to Lady Stuart we can find many a performance of conservative lament; she tells us in a diary entry, for example, that she began one letter to Lady Stuart by saying that ‘The political mind of the people is sadly warped … The registration [of new voters] has not gained us much, if anything.’44 But I would argue that the real catalyst for Anne Lister’s politics lay in the preservation – or enhancement – of her rank. I see Lister’s adulation of Lady Stuart as less about politics as national governance than about politics as ‘actions concerned with the acquisition or exercise of power, status, or authority’.45 I propose, in short, that the quest for status drove Lister’s Tory politics rather than the other way around. For, if we look at the diaries across time, what mattered most to Lister was to secure her identity as a member of the landowning elite. And it seems to me too that it is in the diary entries about status that we find a particular intensity of hyperbolic and redundant prose.
The signs of Lister’s status insecurity are manifold and, given the precarity of her family’s finances especially before she went to live at Shibden, that insecurity is, of course, founded in fact. In her most overblown prose, the twenty-one-year-old Anne exhorts her brother, Sam, as ‘the last remaining hope and stay of an old, but lately drooping family’, to ‘seize it in its fall. Renovate its languid energies; rear it with a tender hand, and let it once more bloom upon the spray. Ah! let the well-ascended blood that trickles in your veins stimulate the generous enthusiasm of your soul, and prove it is not degenerated from the spirit of your ancestors.’46 She is thrilled in 1817 to have the official copy of her family’s pedigree ‘entered in the college’ and will ‘make it a rule to have the pedigree brought down & read aloud the 21st day of every June and December’.47 She admits to her diary in 1825 that ‘I always doubt my own importance & if people are not civil in calling, etc., fancy they mean to cut, or not to know, me. I shall never feel right on this point till I am evidently in good society & rank, with a good establishment.’48 She believes that ‘one can hardly carry oneself too high or keep people at too great a distance’.49 She fears that ‘without some intellectual superiority over the common mass of those I meet with, what am I? Pejus quam nihil [worse than nothing].’50 She acknowledges her awe of Lady Stuart’s elevated rank and contemplates a strategy for recruiting a Tory candidate for Halifax that will bring her renown, even as she recognises her own wine-induced foolishness: ‘Began building castles about the result of my success, the notoriety it would gain me. An introduction to court. Perhaps a Barony, etc … I thought to myself, how slight the partition between sanity & not.’51 Ironically, however, Lister has come of age at a time when the status of status is itself becoming precarious; as Clara Tuite puts it, ‘in the 1820s, in the wake of the French Revolution, Waterloo and Peterloo, and the consolidation of English radical culture into the parliamentary reform movement, the aristocracy’s supposedly natural claims to rule are not self-evident’.52 Lister is chasing the end of a curve.
It is poignant, then, that the political theme that runs most through the diaries is Lister’s insistence on her status, along with an oft-articulated contempt for anyone she deems lower either by birth or by manners. The word ‘vulgar’ appears copiously in the diaries, as she dismisses people as ‘a vulgar set’, ‘a sad vulgar set’. 53 She avows in 1825 that ‘Vulgarity gravifies & sickens me more than ever.’54 She suddenly sees Emma Saltmarshe as ‘sadly vulgar’, and her ‘heart sighed after some better & higher bred companion that it could love’.55 Ann Walker also gets the label ‘vulgar’ at one early moment in their acquaintance.56 Even Lister’s venereal disease must be pronounced high-class, as she assures Mrs Barlow that it did not come ‘from anyone in low life. I never associated with people below myself.’57 And vulgarity, it seems, begins at home, for Lister’s own parents fall under that label: they ‘were both grown 10 times more vulgar than ever’, she writes in her diary in 1817; tellingly, she conceals that admission in code.58
People in trade also, of course, fall within the low-class label, despite or because of the Lister family’s own history; Lister derides Maria Barlow’s beau as ‘a thorough tradesman … clean & neat but thoroughly a tradesman’,59 and resists attending a fair on a Sunday, the ‘vulgar day’ with ‘all the common people there’.60 Closer to home, she opposes her sister Marian’s marriage to a wool stapler and sets Marian a rule that she not invite to Shibden ‘people she knew I did not wish to have anything to do with’.61 English ‘blood’ is also a status marker for Lister. The simple recognition that she is attracted to a French woman unleashes this sermon against intermarriage: if she were a man, she
would only have married an Englishwoman. Would not mix the blood … I was proud of my country. Loved the little spot where my ancestors had lived for centuries. Should inherit from them with pure English blood for five or six centuries and my children should not say I had mixed it. I loved my king & country & compatriots & would not take more fortune away from them. I should be head of my family & it should remain English still.62
When Lister writes to Lady Stuart that ‘The spirit of the times is hard to manage’,63 it is tempting to weigh the word ‘manage’ as a sign of her aspiration to control her world. It is ironic, of course, that her unconventionality – her refusal to marry, her insistence on singular and genderqueer fashion, and the open secret of her love of women – undermined the very status she sought to secure, doubtless also intensifying her elitist discourse.
Yet Lister’s views departed dramatically from those of her more conservative friends on at least one subject (apart from her obvious but secret views about sex between women): her passion for that most controversial – and most high-born – of Romantic poets, Lord Byron, whose writings she cherished along with Rousseau’s Confessions and whose death in 1824 shocked and saddened her. Byron was both a political radical and a scribe of what were deemed obscenities; many of his initial upper-class admirers abandoned him after the publication of Childe Harold, and most of the remaining fans after the publication of Don Juan, to which even Byron’s own publisher, John Murray, would not affix his name. Friedrich Engels probably did not exaggerate much when he wrote in 1843 that ‘Byron and Shelley are read almost exclusively by the lower classes.’64 In terms of both politics and propriety, one could have expected Lister to prefer Wordsworth, but she acknowledges, in reporting a conversation with the Belcombes in July 1821 about ‘the merits of modern poets’, that while Steph preferred ‘Southey, Hope, and Wordsworth to Lord Byron’, ‘not so Mariana and I’.65 The diaries suggest that Lister fancied herself a Rousseauvian individualist and something of a Byronic hero in ways that sit uneasily with her need for social belonging, as does her cathexis to Byron, whose politics could not have been more unlike her own.
No wonder, then, that Lister tended to keep her love of Byron, and especially of the castigated Don Juan, secret. She reports in 1820, for example, that ‘Mrs Waterhouse asked me afterwards if I had read Don Juan. I would not own it.’66 Byron’s poetry does become code in her courting of Miss Brown: ‘do you like Lord Byrons poetry’, Anne asks, to be answered, ‘yes perhaps too well’.67 Lister alludes in her journal to reviews that condemn Don Juan ‘of course’, but is glad that they also ‘do justice to the genius shown in the work’.68 On 19 May 1824, when she records the death of ‘his lordship’, she asks, ‘Who admired him as a man?’ ‘Yet “he is gone & forever!” The greatest poet of the age! And I am sorry.’69 Lister later acknowledges admiring not just the poems but the poet: in 1827 she visits Clarens and ‘sat an hour where Lord Byron would be taken and spent two or three days. A young lady who went the other day, kissed his bed twenty times … Lord B – seems to have been much liked by the people around here – the old woman told us, she had cried like a child when she heard of his death.’70 Tuite has argued that despite their differences, ‘in gender, rank, sexual practice, party-political identification, religion and region’, Lister’s ‘sociable performance is paradigmatically Byronic’;71 certainly Lister’s passion for Byron suggests that his aristocratic entitlement and Romantic self-fashioning outweighed his politics. It seems, however, that she mostly kept this to herself.
Lister’s passion for a poet of high rank but low morals, along with her renowned self-understanding as a Romantic individualist ‘different from any others who exist’ in the Rousseauvian sense,72 suggests a person whose politics were not so simply conservative as I have implied. This leads me to the third and most innovative way of approaching ‘Anne Lister’s politics’: what Majid Yar describes as the attempt ‘to introduce new, heretofore ‘non-political’ issues, into the realm of legitimate political concern’.73 Yar’s concept derives from the philosophical approach of Jacques Rancière, who argues that politics ‘happens’ when a group ‘with no firmly determined place in the hierarchical social edifice’ inserts itself as a part or party of humanity entitled to its full rights and benefits.74 In Slavoj Zižek’s rephrasing, politics happens when the members of a particular constituency ‘not only demand that their voice be heard’ but ‘present themselves as the representatives, the stand-ins, for the Whole of Society’.75 In our own time, both LGBTQ rights and Black Lives Matter have operated in this way: by inserting a new polity and insisting that it stands for humanity itself.
I would suggest that Anne Lister, though usually acting on her own rather than claiming a shared identity, was bent on propelling just such a redistribution. If she was simply following her ‘nature’, as she often claimed, she also made no attempt to conform to the standards of femininity current in her day: at the age of eighteen she reports a second-hand comment of ‘pity that she doesn’t pay more attention to her appearance’, and yet within the week is purchasing ‘gentlemen’s braces’ that would make her even more conspicuously ‘singular’.76 She believed, and may have been right, that marriage could give her ‘rank, fortune and talent, a title and several thousand a year’, yet she ‘refused from principle’ to take that heteronormative path.77 She wilfully inserted herself into all-male social, political and commercial spheres as an unmarried female landowner and entrepreneur, effectively claiming the rights of rank against the disabilities of gender. She was elected to the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society during its first year of operation in 1830–1 and was the only female member during her lifetime. Anira Rowanchild, noting that there were at least two other unmarried female landowners in the area – both of whom had been at school with Lister – observes a ‘relative flexibility of social discourse in relation to class and gender in this rapidly expanding provincial town’;78 I wonder whether Lister helped to make that flexibility possible. Lister also, of course, inserted what could readily be recognised as a same-sex partnership into Halifax society when she brought Ann Walker to live at Shibden, and both women paid with slurs that included a fake marriage announcement for ‘Captain Tom Lister’ and Miss Ann Walker in the Yorkshire press;79 after all, Walker had a perfectly good (or even better) home of her own nearby. Cassandra Ulph makes an astute comment when she evokes the question that Lenore Davidoff and Catherine Hall raise in their iconic Family Fortunes: ‘Men built, men planned, men organized, men acted. Meanwhile, what did women do?’80 To which Ulph wryly answers, ‘Anne Lister would not recognize the question.’81 It is this insistence on taking her unconventional place in the world that I would argue constitutes ‘Anne Lister’s politics’ in a different way.
One dramatic sign of Lister’s investment in this practice of politics as a ‘disturbance in the field’ occurs in an incident involving that icon of Lister’s aristocratic imagination, Lady Stuart. Lister was apparently insistent that her relationship with Ann Walker be accepted in even the highest of her social spheres. In 1836, when Lady Stuart neglected to invite Walker to accompany Lister on a visit to Richmond, Lister wrote insisting that she would not visit without Ann. As Anira Rowanchild tells it, she received a ‘surprisingly ingratiating’ reply from Lady Stuart: ‘My house is now entirely at your service for yourself and Miss Walker … I have had my own Bedroom pulled to piece[s] to have it washed & glazed … [I will sleep] in the Dressing room. Your friend can occupy what was … [my niece] Vere’s room.’82 Here Lister stands up to that same ultra-Tory Lady Stuart, daughter of an earl and granddaughter of the famed Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the woman she has for a decade been effectively fashioning and refashioning herself to please – by insisting on having Ann Walker recognised as her essential companion. This is a fine example of Lister enacting a politics not of reaction but of reform – a word that she herself, of course, might have been loath to use.
What enabled Anne Lister, lesser gentry and relatively impoverished landowner that she was, to press Lady Stuart in this way? Lister was aware that Lady Stuart’s fortunes were declining; a diary entry of 10 June 1834 recognises that ‘there is a sad want of money and she is not in her splendour now – but all kindness to me and I will behave with tact I think I shall get on in high life and carry on with me Miss Walker by and by’.83 But this is also the point at which I would revise my thinking about what I have called Lister’s compensatory conservatism. When I introduced the term in 1998, I argued that in eighteenth-century England, same-sex friendship was coded as a high-status phenomenon and that ‘women whose erotic orientation might be seen as directed toward other women’, or what I called ‘gentry sapphists’ like Elizabeth Carter, Sarah Scott, the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’ Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, and the Dutch couple Aagje Deken and Betje Wolff, could ‘exploit the symbols of class status to sustain an image of sexual innocence. Rather than mere passive beneficiaries of a class-based bifurcation, in other words, these women were sometimes active agents in cultivating their class status as a screen.’84 I took Lister as a prime example, though I noted that her appearance ‘attracted more familiar treatment than a respectable gentrywoman had reason to expect’.85 In my 2010 essay ‘Tory Lesbians’, I argued again that Lister’s ‘self-fashioning threatened her social status’, which she attempted to ‘shore up … through an aggressively conservative class politics’.86
It is possible that both Lister’s conservatism and her assertions of status began as compensation. But the word ‘constitutive’ carries a more positive agency that seems to me appropriate in her case. Conservative politics placed Lister so squarely in the right wing of the landed gentry as to provide some reassurance that she was not a sexual threat. Conservative politics authorised her to do what single women didn’t do – both in the board room and in bed. Rather than seeing her as someone who effectively became conservative by virtue of her difference, I would now say that her conservatism emboldened her to embrace that difference.
Lister’s conscious cultivation of status, which enabled her self-fashioning as visibly and remarkably queer, thus constitutes a claim of privilege as powerful in its way as Byron’s, and one that arguably gave her the best of both worlds. For as Chris Roulston reminds us, ‘Lister simultaneously sought conformity and nonconformity, belonging and difference, community and radical individualism.’87 We see that uneasy mix in a politics that is conformist by dictionary definitions but insistently nonconformist, even anti-conformist, by understandings of politics like Jacques Rancière’s. As Amanda Vickery puts it in The Gentleman’s Daughter, most women of Lister’s class wore propriety like a ‘tight-fitting suit’ in order to achieve freedoms of other kinds.88 But Lister engaged in literal self-fashioning. Certainly Lister’s spirit was also entrepreneurial; she craved knowledge and experience, was fascinated by how things work and took pleasure in new inventions, scientific discoveries and technological improvements. Had her means been more opulent, her status more secure, her patrons differently positioned in national politics, she might well have engaged differently in the politics of both status and governance. But we can say that it was with boldness, brilliance and remarkable self-invention that Anne Lister of Shibden Hall confronted her tumultuous times.
In recent years the explosion of interest in Anne Lister, accelerated in no small measure by Sally Wainwright’s television series Gentleman Jack (2019), has seen her become one of the most famous daughters of the Yorkshire cloth town of Halifax. When I first began researching Lister and her association with the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society in 2012, her story was known by local historians and many scholars of queer literature and history, women’s writing and intellectual history, but in the intervening ten years popular interest in her life has grown exponentially and internationally. The impact of Wainwright’s re-telling of Lister’s story, which builds on years of research by Jill Liddington, Helena Whitbread and others, can be seen in Halifax in material and economic terms, with a boom in ‘Lister Tourism’ to Shibden Hall. In September 2021, a public sculpture in her memory, ‘Contemplation’ by Diane Lawrenson, was unveiled in the town’s Grade I listed Piece Hall, where it is now on permanent display.
Lister’s new cultural prominence seems in keeping with the recent history of the town, and in particular alongside the renovation of the eighteenth-century Piece Hall, which reopened in 2017 following a multi-million-pound renovation and conservation project. As the only remaining Georgian cloth hall (a purpose-built marketplace for the trade of ‘pieces’ of cloth) in Britain, the Piece Hall is central to Halifax’s secular history as a key point on the transpennine route of the cloth trade, and to its development as a civic centre. Lister played a significant role in the economic and civic development of Halifax during her own lifetime, through her management of the Shibden Hall estate and the development of buildings in the town centre, as well as through political campaigning. This chapter connects what is known of Lister’s economic and political participation in Halifax life to her intellectual and social identity, by exploring her involvement in the associational life of the town and, in particular, the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society, of which she was famously the first female member.
Under Existing Rules: Women in the Lit. and Phil.
Lister’s membership of the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society (or the Lit. and Phil.) is relatively well known, but her active participation has tended to be assumed rather than comprehensively proved. The society was inaugurated in 1830 and, within a year, had elected Lister as an ordinary member. The society’s Centenary Handbook in 1930 relates its history, and records simply that ‘at the first Annual Meeting … it being the opinion of the council that Ladies were eligible as members Miss Anne Lister, of Shibden Hall, was duly elected’.1 Similarly, the original minutes of that meeting, held in the Calderdale Archive in Halifax, emphasised that, as far as the committee were concerned, no positive change to the society’s constitution needed to be made. In some senses, the resolution passed on 3 October 1831, ‘that it is the Opinion of the Meeting under the existing Rules Ladies are eligible as Members’, could hardly be called a resolution at all.2 This clarification of the rules – one which was clearly deemed necessary – was prompted by the more concerted voice of the ordinary members at the monthly general meeting in September, at which ‘it was Resolved, that it is the Opinion of the present meeting that the Attendance of Ladies at the monthly meetings is very desirable and that the same be submitted for consideration and adoption at the ensuing annual meeting’.3 Lister was duly elected on 7 October 1831.
Despite the apparent enthusiasm for female members at the monthly meeting, where their attendance was deemed not merely permissible but ‘desirable’, as far as can be established through the society’s own records, Lister remained the only one elected in her lifetime (she died in 1840), and the extent of her active engagement with the society is unclear. Helena Whitbread states that Lister ‘became the first woman to be elected to the Committee of the Halifax Branch of the Literary and Philosophical Society because of her academic contributions to that society’, but there is no evidence that Lister was ever more than an ordinary member, and evidence of her attendance at meetings is elusive.4 During her nine years of membership, Lister was often travelling, abroad and in the UK, so her regular attendance was unlikely.5 What is known is that she contributed significantly to the building of a new museum, a total of £150 in the space of little more than a year. When a subscription for the museum was raised, Lister’s name was first on the list.6 In Lister’s correspondence, the Lit. and Phil. is most frequently mentioned where a financial transaction, such as the payment of membership fees or a contribution to the museum fund, takes place; her involvement (or not) in the associational activities of the society is less well documented.
The Halifax Lit. and Phil.’s establishment, and Lister’s election to it, took place at a relatively late stage of the ‘Lit. and Phil.’ movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Literary and philosophical societies in this period have been seen, generally speaking, to operate within a masculine model of civic sociability. Davidoff and Hall, for example, observe that ‘this public world was consistently organized in gendered ways and had little space for women’.7 Although Peter Clark (in his study of British clubs and societies before 1800) identifies an increase in female participation in associational life in the late eighteenth century, he notes that this is limited to particular areas: ‘during George III’s reign, women began to make more of an impact particularly with the appearance of new subscription associations and philanthropic societies, but the great majority of societies remained exclusively male’.8 There is some evidence to suggest that this exclusion was, in the case of the literary and philosophical societies, by default rather than by design. Just as Halifax Lit. and Phil. would later confirm that women were allowed as members ‘under existing rules’, the Newcastle Lit. and Phil. claimed that it had theoretically allowed female members since its inception in 1793, but it wasn’t until 1798 that the question of female participation was seriously considered, when a query from John Clennell about female membership prompted the proposal of a category of ‘reading members’.9 Reading members would be allowed to attend lectures, but not the monthly meetings that ordinary members attended. This new category would allow for the ‘delicacy’ of female members; by implication, the kind of membership that had previously been available to women in theory would have been considered ‘indelicate’ and therefore unlikely to be adopted in practice.
Similarly, women seem to have been admitted to public lectures of the Manchester Lit. and Phil., but not to its meetings. A letter by a female correspondent to the Leeds Mercury in 1819 claims that ‘at the celebrated societies of Liverpool and Manchester, ladies are admitted’, and proposes the same measure be adopted at the Leeds Phil. and Lit. Another correspondent, a week later, ‘seconds her motion’ by citing the example of Birmingham Philosophical Society, ‘in which is to be seen every Monday night, (in the Winter season,) an assemblage of the most respected Ladies of that town and neighbourhood. And why not?’10 It seemed, then, that by this point women were being admitted to several major societies, but (Birmingham apparently excepted) this was usually a kind of auxiliary membership that did not penetrate the concentric inner circles of ordinary and committee membership. The pattern that emerges here is one of distinction between theory and practice: while the rules did not theoretically exclude women, the practices of such societies remained discursively gendered.
The Late ‘Lit. and Phil.’ Movement and Shifting Modes of Participation
The practices of the Halifax Lit. and Phil. are best understood as consciously modelled on antecedent societies, as demonstrated by the records of committee meetings from 1830 and 1831. These reveal the extent of borrowing from established nearby societies – those of Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and York, in particular – in terms of both organisational and physical structure. For example, the Halifax membership certificate was copied from the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the museum’s cabinet maker (and the plans to which he worked) borrowed from the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, and envoys were dispatched to all corners of the north: ‘Mr Smith and Mr Leyland having undertaken to examine the Museums at Manchester and Liverpool, and Mr E Alexander those at York and Scarborough’.11 The committee’s intention was to replicate the success of neighbouring societies by abiding by an established set of practices. It seems reasonable, then, that in the matter of female participation, Halifax would take its cues from these older, more established societies. However, a gradual shift in focus of literary and philosophical societies towards civic improvement meant that attendance at monthly meetings and public lectures did not necessarily remain the dominant modes of participation.
The Halifax Lit. and Phil. was established, first and foremost, with a view to tangible civic improvement, which would be expressed in the concrete form of a museum. As David Livingstone has argued, ‘the museum voiced the values of its curators and disclosed their mental geographies’.12 The immediacy with which the Halifax society set about establishing an architectural manifestation of those values anticipates the Victorian preoccupation with the spatial and material nature of public culture that Livingstone identifies: ‘While its architecture was intervening in the cultural struggles of late Victorian society, the museum as an institution did much to promote what has been called an ‘object-based’ approach to knowing in the decades around 1900.’13 The material manifestation of knowledge, and the need to house that knowledge, is thus one of the driving principles behind the establishment not only of the museum, but of the society itself. Furthermore, the gendering of scientific space required the founders to consider, in its admission practices, the mediation of such supposedly ‘masculine’ knowledge for an unregulated (possibly female) audience, in accordance with the paternalistic values the museum embodied. The minutes of the inaugural meeting of the Halifax Lit. and Phil., on 30 August 1830, launch immediately into the details of trusteeship of the proposed institution, and its projected status in the Halifax community. The meeting resolved as follows:
[W]ith a view to extend more generally the great Advantages and Information to be derived from the Establishment of the Museum, Individuals, not being Members of the Society, be allowed to become Subscribers to the Museum, on payment of the annual sum of One Pound, and that in Consideration of such payment they, together with the Members of their Families actually resident with them, shall have the Privilege of visiting the museum at all times during the Hours of Attendance to be fixed by the Society’s Rules, and also of introducing personally or by Ticket, Friends and Strangers resident upwards of Five Miles from Halifax, but such subscribers are not to have any Control whatever over or interest in the Museum, nor to be considered in any way Members of the Society.14
This resolution outlines the complex relationship between the society and the museum, which were intricately connected whilst remaining separable. The society was to curate the museum, the trustees of which would ‘consist of Depositors of Collections to the actual value of fifty pounds and upwards, and of Contributors in Money or Specimens to the Amount of Twenty pounds’.15 Trustees, then, did not necessarily have to be members, and it was possible to subscribe to the museum, thus receiving the tickets, without joining the society. As Catherine Euler notes, being a subscriber to the museum meant Lister had tickets such as these in her gift, which she could bestow on her servants. Euler points out that ‘these gifts, which were not gifts, were a display of gentry paternalism which was not really paternalism. It reflected self-interest more than philanthropy.’16 Yet, as Davidoff and Hall have argued, ‘philanthropy came to occupy the status of a profession for some women’, thus Lister’s philanthropy could also be means of cementing her social status along appropriately feminine lines.17
Regardless, philanthropy and self-interest in this case were highly compatible. In contrast to the Machiavellian function of the museum as symbolic of princely power, Tony Bennett has argued that ‘nineteenth-century reformers … typically sought to enlist high cultural practices for a diversity of ends: as an antidote to drunkenness; an alternative to riot; or an instrument for civilizing the morals and manners of the population’.18 Established before the governmentalisation of cultural spaces that gathered pace in the late Victorian period, the Halifax Museum’s system of ticketed access would seem to fulfil all these functions, allowing Lister to reinforce her construction of dynastic status, whilst offering a practical mechanism for the regulation of the behaviour of her dependants.
The complex relationship between the society, the museum and its subscribers underscores the committee’s assumption that visitors to the museum would extend to the friends, neighbours and families of their membership, and subscription would reach beyond the society’s membership, the core of which was Halifax’s wealthy elite. The paternalist dissemination of knowledge embodied in this model of access, filtered through traditional family networks or patronage relationships, does not necessarily extend to inclusion or proprietorship. It is this same paternalism that Euler identifies in Lister’s bestowal of tickets on her servants. From its inception in 1831, then, the society reinforced the existing hierarchy of Halifax’s wealthy and established industrialist families. Arnold Thackray has noted an important generational shift in his study of the Manchester Lit. and Phil., one of the several major societies either side of the Pennines from which the Halifax one borrowed:
By the 1830s and 1840s the descendants of Manchester manufacturers were active in the consolidation of science within the central value system of English life and, in response to the challenges they now faced from a new urban lower class, in finding deeper conservative meanings in the very structure of natural knowledge.19
Just as Thackray here identifies the movement of the descendants of manufacturers into a bourgeois respectability, so the founders of the Halifax society were overwhelmingly drawn from wealthy and powerful families such as the Waterhouses and Rawsons, who had made their money, a generation back, in woollen and worsted manufacturing.20 Many of those listed as ‘founders’ in the society’s 1930 centenary handbook also appear as part of a committee formed for the support of those affected by the Luddite uprisings of 1811–16 (which had particularly targeted wealthy industrialists). The membership of this committee is detailed in a notice in the Leeds Intelligencer, which records:
a numerous and highly respectable Public Meeting of Inhabitants of the Town and Parish of Halifax, called by the Constables of Halifax, to take into Consideration the Services of those Gentleman who so meritoriously exerted themselves during the late Disturbances in the West Riding of the County of York, and held on Wednesday, the 12th of May, 1813, at the White Lion Inn.21
These ‘Gentlemen’ included several founder members including the society’s first two presidents, Christopher Rawson (banker, and later chairman of Halifax and Huddersfield Union Banking Co., 1836–43) and John Waterhouse Jr, son of woollen merchant John Waterhouse Sr.22 The exertions in question had taken the form of financial assistance to William Cartwright, whose factory had been one of the targets of the uprising, and of keeping the ‘public peace’. The interests of the cloth trade that had built Halifax’s merchant elite were protected and the social status quo maintained.
That such prominent local ‘Gentlemen’ were also some of the key proponents in establishing the society at Halifax suggests a change in the nature of the Literary and Philosophical Society as an institution by 1830. Underlining the role that the Manchester Lit. and Phil. had formerly played in ‘the social legitimation of marginal men’, Thackray argues that ‘when political power finally arrived it was members of the “Lit. & Phil.” who, as the local elite, naturally exercised it’.23 The Halifax Lit. and Phil. was established at precisely this crucial political moment; following the death of George IV in June 1830, electoral reform began to look like a serious prospect, with the first Reform Bill being brought before the House of Commons in March 1831 and its final iteration being passed by the House of Lords in June 1832. It is this political moment to which Thackray refers, when the members of the Lit. and Phil. constituted the ‘social elite’, and it is in this context that the Halifax society was inaugurated. The founding membership of the society itself represented the next generation of literary and philosophical societies in a literal sense. Edward Nelson Alexander was probably a descendent of William Alexander MD, Halifax, who is listed as an honorary member at Manchester in 1798 and early subscriber to the Halifax Circulating Library in 1768; the Rev. William Turner, minister of Northgate End Unitarian Chapel, Halifax, was the son of another William Turner, an honorary member of Manchester Lit. and Phil. and founder of the Newcastle Lit. and Phil.24 Many of those early members had also been members of other, smaller societies such as the Halifax Convivial Society (formerly the Conversational Society), at which Lit. and Phil. founder member John Stott, engraver, gave at least two lectures; the society also had strong links with the Mechanics’ Institute (founded in 1825), of which John Waterhouse Jr. was chair, and of which the Rev. William Turner would become president.25 Furthermore, the prominent Halifax families that established the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society echoed the names that appeared on the first committee of the Halifax Circulating Library in 1768: Alexanders, Waterhouses, Rawsons and Briggses dominated, and a Miss Lister (possibly Lister’s aunt Anne) is also amongst the names in the first subscription book.26 All this positioned Halifax Lit. and Phil. as a natural inheritor of the modes and mores of these earlier societies, and the result of an evolution those societies had already undergone.
‘This my Native Town’: Anne Lister’s Investment in Halifax
In some ways, a shift in core membership of the literary and philosophical societies from marginality to centrality, as posited by Thackray, might preclude Anne Lister’s membership of such a society. Her ‘masculinity’ had long been the subject of Halifax gossip, and by 1831 she was living in what she considered a ‘married’ state with her partner, neighbouring heiress Ann Walker. Lister’s homosexuality continues to attract more popular and academic attention than any other aspect of her life, and her relationship with Walker is repeatedly cited as an important early example of same-sex marriage, as other chapters in this volume explore in more detail. In the context of her role in Halifax civic life, what is crucial is that Lister was doubly marginalised, through her sex and her sexuality, and that discourses of gender and sexuality necessarily inflected those of politics, power and social status. While the first literary and philosophical societies may have offered a route to respectability for ‘marginal men’, the Halifax Lit. and Phil. belonged to the later generation of more conservative institutions that Thackray describes, so should have been unlikely to welcome this unconventional woman as a member; the fact that they did admit her is therefore highly significant.
There is an understandable impulse to equate Lister’s unconventional personal life with unconventional politics, but this would be an oversimplification. As a local landowner from an established family, Lister was part of the conservative, Anglican elite of Halifax. Euler observes that Lister was ‘not “ahead of her time” in any obvious way’, calling her a ‘snobbish but untitled member of the lesser gentry, and an enthusiastic Tory’.27 Lister had many tenants, and under the reformed system anyone renting a property for £50 per year or more was eligible to vote in local elections; Jill Liddington describes how in one case Lister increased a tenant’s rent to £50 temporarily during the election year of 1833, but then made them a ‘gift’ equal to the increase (on the understanding, of course, that they voted ‘blue’).28 As outlined by Euler and Liddington, Lister’s election-rigging activities ranged from bribery to intimidation, and she was not above threatening to turn tenants off her property should they support the Whig cause. Lister’s political ambition is manifest in her diary as early in 1823 – prior to inheriting Shibden – following a discussion with the Waterhouses of the prospect of a new MP for Halifax. She imagined writing to the Chancellor of the Exchequer for advice on who this should be, and then ‘began building castles about the result of my success, the notoriety it would gain me. An introduction to court. Perhaps a Barony, etc.’ Although Lister immediately dismisses her fantasy as the result of ‘too much negus’, observing ‘how slight the partition between sanity & not’, this episode exemplifies her desire for an aristocratic model of success, aptly figured as ‘building castles’, that was remote for many men of her class, and nigh-impossible for a woman.29
Aware of the social reality, nevertheless Lister did not let her gender limit her ambition. As Euler outlines, political influence was something Lister actively courted:
Anne Lister knew exactly where the blue political power in the borough lay: with those old gentry families with whom she had been on visiting terms since her youth. She made a point of visiting the men who would consistently play their part for the next decade: James Edward Norris, Christopher Rawson and John Waterhouse.30
Lister was part of a powerful network by birth and rank, and her willingness (and ability) to champion the Tory cause cemented her position within that group of ‘old gentry families’, who sought her support in the political campaigns of the 1830s. The same group who sought to determine the political future of Halifax were arguably more successful in directing its civic development: as noted above, Christopher Rawson and John Waterhouse were the first two presidents of the Literary and Philosophical Society, and between them held the office for thirty-three years.31
The evidence that remains of Lister’s involvement in the Literary and Philosophical Society is mostly limited to her financial contributions. Although by the time of the society’s inception Lister’s financial circumstances were materially improved, her investment of £150 in the building of the museum in 1833–4 is significant at a time when she was often required to draw on her partner, Ann Walker, for money to make improvements to her estate.32 As Lister’s editors have frequently observed, her attention to financial details is minute and shrewd; her accounts and journals take sedulous note of her income and outgoings, and she is reluctant to involve herself in unnecessary expense. Indeed, such prudence was necessary; Liddington notes that by 1832, ‘her aristocratic ambitions already outstripped her modest estate income’.33 However, when Lister did invest, there was a pattern to that investment. Euler’s analysis of the Shibden Hall records demonstrates that Lister was often driven by dynastic motives over and above the financial, noting, for example, that ‘when she planted trees on the estate, she planted oaks and hollies in their thousands, with less regard to profit and loss than in almost any other area of activity’.34 Short of ‘building castles’, long-term plantation was an ‘improvement’ that smacked more of dynastic pride than Lister’s usual shrewd financial calculations. Not content with a metaphorical castle, she ultimately erected a huge property in the centre of Halifax, the Northgate Inn, and her address at the ground-breaking ceremony in 1835 conveys characteristic ambition: ‘I am very anxious that this … should be an accommodation to the public at large, but more especially to this my native town in whose prosperity I ever have felt, and ever shall feel, deeply interested.’35 Lister’s speech here is intended to cement her status as part of the civic elite, constructing an ‘accommodation’ not only for the people of Halifax, but for the increasing traffic of the rapidly industrialising town; it was also a financial speculation, giving her a landlord’s interest in the centre of town. Her subscription to the Lit. and Phil.’s new museum represents a similar speculation, reinforcing the civic status of the ancient family of the Listers alongside the rich industrialists who were expanding the town. Lister Lane, in the centre of modern-day Halifax, seems testament to her success in this regard. Whether her personal standing in the Lit. and Phil. itself reflected her investment is less certain.
Lister’s decision to focus her investments locally is prefigured in 1821, in an episode that also casts light on her associational activity. Lister was an honorary member of the York Female Friendly Society, with which she had been associated through the family of her lover, Mariana Belcombe. According to Jane Rendall, Mariana was active on the committee until around 1815. Lister’s name appears on two lists of Honorary Members of the York Female Friendly Society, one begun in 1796 but updated later, and another begun in 1811. In both cases Mariana Belcombe’s name appears a few entries above Lister’s. Also present are the names of Ann and Charlotte Norcliffe, mother and sister respectively of another of Lister’s lovers, Isabella.36 In 1821, however, Lister gave up her membership:
Letter … from York about the Friendly Society there, of which I have been an honorary member (12s. a year) ever since 1810 or 1811 but, during my last stay at York, I asked Miss Marsh to withdraw my name from their books. Whatever I can give in charity, my uncle & aunt have long said should be given here [i.e. in Halifax], to which Miss Marsh readily agreed.37
Lister remained in contact with the Belcombes and Norcliffes throughout her life, despite Mariana’s marriage to Charles Lawton in 1816 – in fact their affair continued38 – so her withdrawal from the York society in 1821 seems to have been motivated by financial expediency rather than estrangement from that circle.
Lister’s membership of the York Friendly Society is evidence of just one institution with which she had links before the Lit. and Phil., and one of several examples of how selectively she participated in associational activity. Within a week of withdrawing from this society in York, Lister declined an invitation to another: she records being asked by Mr Edward Priestley,
if I would be a subscriber to a book society they wished to establish. About 12 subscribers at one guinea per annum each, the books to be disposed of every year to the highest bidder of the subscribers, but if none wished to purchase, the recommender of the work should take it at half-price. I said should be sorry their plan fell through for want of one subscriber but that such a thing was quite out of my way who went so often to the Halifax library & had there as much reading as I had time for. The thing originated with the young ladies at Crownest, tho Mr Edward Priestly [sic] had long ago thought of it, it was so long before they could get popular new works from the Halifax library, but I have no difficulty of this sort.39
The Halifax library mentioned here is almost certainly the above-mentioned Halifax Circulating Library founded in 1768 which, despite its name, was in fact a subscription library.40 While Priestley complained of the long wait for ‘popular new works’, Lister’s claim that she had ‘no difficulty of this sort’ is explained by a private arrangement with the librarian, detailed in her diary a year earlier: ‘Gave the librarian five shillings as I said, last September, I would do every half-year on condition of his managing to let me have as many books at a time as I wanted. Not, however, that I think of exceeding the regulated allowance by more than two.’41 Lister’s status as a member of the Shibden Hall family, as much as her judicious application of five shillings, probably explains her ability to circumvent the library’s rules in a way that the Priestleys and the Walker family at Crow Nest – wealthier than but socially inferior to the Listers – would not have been able to do.42 It also demonstrates Lister’s rather individualistic approach to the mutual basis of the subscription library, as she has no qualms about exceeding the ‘regulated allowance’ for members, if only by two books.43 What this reveals is Lister’s sense of her own exceptionality within the Halifax community, in both social and intellectual status.
Castles in the Air: Imagining Female Participation
The Halifax Circulating Library was one of several avenues of self-improvement open to residents (including women) before the inauguration of the Lit. and Phil., and not the only one in which Lister participated. According to her diary, for example, Lister attended lectures in the Halifax area by prominent natural philosophers: in August 1817, she records attending at least two lectures by ‘Dalton’, presumably John Dalton of the Manchester Lit. and Phil.; in March 1819 she attends a lecture by the renowned geologist Thomas Webster at the Assembly Rooms; and in 1823 she refers to attending a further lecture by a ‘Mr W’, possibly also Webster. She remarks in particular her surprise on finding ‘his oratory … disfigured by frequent instances of bad grammar’: ‘I have read Mr Webster’s book on chemical & natural philosophy & not remembering or observing in it any heinous sins against grammar, I did not expect that his oral language would be so thickly strewn with the misuse of the person of his verbs.’44
Lister’s attendance at these lectures is part of a wider round of entertainments in which she is a regular participant. In late 1819 and early 1820, she records attending Oratoria in Southowram, an officer’s ball in York and a display of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks in Halifax; in 1824 she attends an exhibition of two ‘Esquimaux Indians’ and a balloon launch.45 For Lister, Webster’s lectures in particular held the promise of social and possibly even sexual contact with other women. Clara Tuite has observed of Lister’s diaries, ‘how different spaces of sociability, such as the circles of Halifax society, work to tolerate and enable different degrees of gender and sexual deviance’.46 Indeed, Lister exploited those tolerant spaces in order to pursue her flirtations. She relates telling her aunt ‘of my fancy for Miss Browne. Told her I had gone to the lectures for no other purpose than to see her.’47 Anne Lister senior seems to have been aware of her niece’s interest in women (although she may have refrained from enquiring too closely into the details), and Lister’s journal records her occasionally ‘testing’ her aunt’s knowledge, so this statement is probably a deliberate exaggeration. After all, Lister’s claim that she had ‘no other purpose’ in attending Webster’s lectures sounds disingenuous given that she has in fact read his work on natural chemistry. Neither her interest in chemistry, nor her romantic interest in Miss Browne, conforms to contemporary ideals of genteel femininity, which she seems to take pleasure in confounding.
Lister’s use of intellectual sociability as a means of meeting or pursuing potential sexual partners is well established. As Stephen Colclough observes, Lister used the ‘shared act of reading, the shared intimacy of the page’ to enact ‘the transition from “friendship” to “romance”’. She gave gifts of particular texts as a coded sexual overture, and used shared literary tastes as a barometer of sexual affinity; in Miss Browne’s case, Lister interpreted her taste for Byron as evidence of her attraction.48 Similarly, I would argue, she reinforced homosexual and homosocial relationships with more structured networks and social encounters such as her membership, along with Mariana, of the York Female Friendly Society, or her attendance of lectures with Miss Browne and later Miss Pickford, who Lister describes, rather disparagingly, as a ‘bas bleu’.49 Lister’s attitude to intellectual community with her female networks was rather contradictory, however. Of Miss Pickford, she remarks that ‘she is better informed than some ladies & a godsend of a companion in my present scarcity, but I am not an admirer of learned ladies. They are not the sweet, interesting creatures I should love.’50 On the one hand, she suggests that Miss Pickford’s company is a poor substitute for the preferred ‘sweet, interesting creature’ who is by implication ‘not learned’. On the other, she expresses her frustration with one of her lovers, Isabella Norcliffe, for retarding her ‘improvement’: ‘I am never much good at study when she is with me, and I am wary of this long stoppage I have had to all improvement.’ While Lister had entertained hopes that Isabella might prove the long-term companion she wanted, she gradually became convinced of both her intellectual and social inadequacy to the task, concluding that ‘she [would] by no means relish the sort of elegant society I covet to acquire’.51 Lister’s idea of ‘improvement’ was doubly intellectual and material, particularly prior to inheriting the Shibden Hall estate: ‘I must … study only to improve myself in the hope of the possibility of making something by writing.’52 The ‘improvement’ Lister seeks, to enable her to ‘make something’, prefigures the political ‘castles’ she builds. Her determination to ‘make something’ is realised in her development of the Northgate Inn and her significant investment in the Halifax Museum.
Lister’s acceptance in Halifax society depended, in many ways, on her exceptionality. There was no public language with which to talk about lesbian sexuality; in a landed culture dominated by primogeniture, female landowners were the exception rather than the rule. Her admission to the Literary and Philosophical Society, according to the rules, was not an exception, yet in practice this did not open the floodgates to female membership, and Lister herself seems to have attended rarely. Women, particularly the wives and daughters of members, participated in other ways, particularly through the disseminated access to the museum through families, and contributions made to the collections.53 The museum was an interface between the scientific community and the public, and women’s bodily presence as a constituent part of that audience was therefore mediated in a variety of ways. As David Livingstone notes, ‘for all the rhetorical claims to the disembodied character of scientific knowing, there was a long-standing “understanding” that female corporeality rendered women unsuitable for intellectual pursuits in general and for science in particular. Scientific space, by and large, was masculine space.’54
Livingstone’s observations in relation to spaces of science, from the laboratory to the museum, are applicable by extension to the Literary and Philosophical Society as an institution, which had bodily presence of its ordinary members at the heart of its associational model. (Corresponding members, of course, complicated, but were not an adequate substitute for, this physical presence.) Indeed, Lister could have elided some of this troubling corporeality by becoming a subscriber to the museum without joining the society, and for less money. However, the Halifax Lit. and Phil. presented another opportunity to make her mark on the local community, just as she hoped to do in politics and in ‘making something’. In a partially coded diary entry of 27 February 1831, excerpted (and deciphered) by Liddington, she writes:
Thinking as I dressed of the Literary & philosophical society just established at Halifax. I have thought of it repeatedly since hearing of it – building castles in the air about the part I myself may take in furthering it – about its becoming celebrated – etc etc. Think of rules that might be for the good of the Society – ladies should be admitted as fellows … To prevent overflow of useless members let everyone be elected on the doing some benefit to the society by mind or money.55
Once more, we find Lister building ‘castles’, with her thoughts turning to the society being ‘celebrated’, just as she had fantasised in 1823 about political ‘notoriety’. Again, Lister has identified a pre-existing structure to which she might contribute, establishing her local importance ‘through mind or money’, but with the emphasis on the money. It is revealing, I think, that ‘the ‘castles in the air’ she builds ‘about the part I myself may take’ are recorded in code, concealed from prying eyes or (she may have supposed) her future editors. In concealing her ambition of making a public contribution to civic life, using a cipher more frequently employed to record her emotional and sexual encounters with other women, Lister tacitly discloses the potential impropriety of that ambition as equivalent to sexual transgression. The diary entry of 27 February 1831 as quoted by Liddington is incomplete, however. The complete entry in the original diary includes the following passage, and reveals Lister’s concern with the more prosaic problems that the female body, in the case of ‘ladies admitted as fellows’, would present in a civic space:
It strikes me it would be well in such a case to have a sort of sumptuary law so that there could be no tendency to any inconvenience about dress, & what more incommodious than a large bonnet over which nobody can see & which too often prevents the unfortunate wearer from either seeing or hearing clearly – let there be a costume – black, with a small brimmed hat that could incommode nobody.56
Lister recapitulates the problem of conspicuousness for women participating in public life, as a matter both originating in, and solvable through, sartorial choices. The potential of fashion, such as that for ‘large bonnets’, to ‘incommode’ both its wearer and other audience members can be overcome by ‘costume’, which can similarly prevent ‘inconvenience about dress’. The ‘inconvenience’ Lister identifies might be one of cost, but it seems likely that she has in mind the problem of knowing what to wear as much as being able to afford it. On 2 September 1817 she recorded that ‘I have entered upon my plan of always wearing black,’ and Whitbread notes her ‘secretive attitude towards discussing or writing about her clothes. She obviously felt reticent about her dress and appearance and was constantly the subject of criticism for her shabby and unfashionable wardrobe.’57 In imagining a place for women in public institutions, she also imagines a place in which her own singular appearance is rendered unremarkable, or even becomes the sartorial model for female intellectualism.
In many ways, Anne Lister’s motivations in joining the Literary and Philosophical Society – civic improvement, the reputation of the town and of her family, and political consolidation – were the same reasons motivating its founders. Lister’s financial contribution suggests a strong reason for them to welcome her as a member, but evidence that she regularly attended the associational forum that was the monthly meetings is not forthcoming in the minutes. In fact, Liddington suggests that Lister, despite being a member of the society, may have been excluded from events, such as members’ dinners, because of her sex.58 However, it was Lister’s desire to construct an edifice, ‘to build something’, that, at least imaginatively, united her with the men of the Halifax Lit. and Phil. In this, both were partially successful. Although its collections were absorbed into the new Bankfield Museum in 1897, the society’s lecture theatre and museum in Harrison Road, Halifax, still stands, albeit in private hands.59 The Northgate Hotel, the foundations of which Lister laid in 1835, became the Theatre De Luxe, which finally closed in 1938 and was demolished after the Second World War to make way for a shopping plaza, but her mark remains on the town through the buildings and streets that bear her name. Ultimately, though, while Lister harnessed the conventional channels of wealth and landed status to ‘make something’, it is her unconventional life, and the remarkable writing she left behind, that have brought her the notoriety she dreamt of, and proved her greatest legacy to her native town.
Introduction
The story of Anne Lister (1791–1840) is now interpreted primarily through three main sources. First, through her five-million-word diaries, currently being transcribed and available online. Second, through Sally Wainwright’s television character, ‘Gentleman Jack’, embodied by actor Suranne Jones. And third, through her home, Shibden Hall, in Halifax, West Yorkshire. It is the relationship between Anne Lister and her home that I shall explore in this chapter.
Shibden Hall used to be a ‘hidden gem’ of a council-funded historic estate with around twenty thousand visitors per year. It is now internationally known as ‘the Home of Anne Lister’, the lesbian icon and prolific diarist, traveller, mountaineer and businesswoman, and is a place of pilgrimage for the LGBTQ+ community. Since the Gentleman Jack television series aired in May 2019, my role as Collections Manager for Calderdale Museum Service has changed from giving talks and tours, which started by having to explain who Anne Lister was, to welcoming international visitors, researchers and ‘Lister Sister’ fans, with far more knowledge than previous visitors and often more than me! Shibden Hall is also now seen as a ‘literary house’, esteemed alongside the Brontë Parsonage in nearby Haworth, a status I could barely have imagined when I arrived to work there in 2014.
The Calderdale Museum Service is part of Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council, which manages both Shibden Hall and Bankfield Museum in Halifax, and the Smith Art Gallery in the nearby town of Brighouse, as well as two large collections stores. My responsibilities are for the preservation of the museum’s objects and sharing their stories through displays, exhibitions and events across our three sites, and online through our website and social media. Our collections number around seventy thousand objects, from fine art, costumes and textiles to everyday objects and toys. Our Museum Service team (half the size it was ten years ago) also includes a Museums Manager, a Front of House Manager, two curators, an education officer, a museums assistant, several Front of House staff and volunteers.
On arriving at Shibden Hall in 2014, despite my Masters in Gender Studies and prior work in the heritage sector sharing women’s stories, I had not heard of Anne Lister. I wondered, and worried, given the small staff and low budget, about how to share her fascinating story with the world. The most recent guidebook, from 2014, contained limited information about Lister and her legacy.1 By 2015 we had incorporated new information in the Hall thanks to an Arts Council grant; this included more about Anne Lister, and an audio-visual unit with pages of Lister’s diaries and information by biographer Helena Whitbread. In 2015 Shibden Hall was selected by Historic England as one of the nation’s historic sites for their ‘Pride of Place’ Project,2 showcasing sites with LGBTQ+ heritage links. In 2016, I produced a longer interview with Helena Whitbread, ‘The Anne Lister Story’,3 to be played at the Hall and shared online (now viewed more than 400,000 times online) and a marketing film, ‘Shibden Hall: 500 Years of History’4 (with more than 90,000 views to date).
The year 2018 saw television presenter Mary Portas meeting Whitbread at Shibden Hall to share Anne Lister’s story for the Channel 4 documentary Britain’s Great Gay Buildings,5 hosted by Stephen Fry, bringing Lister’s story and the site of Shibden Hall to yet more new audiences. Growing interest in Lister, and lack of a clear overview of her legacy in the form of the Hall and museum collections, spurred me to produce a new book, Anne Lister of Shibden Hall, in 2018 (reprinted in 2019, with an updated version of the Hall’s’ guidebook).6 Thanks primarily to the exposure provided by Sally Wainwright’s Gentleman Jack television series (April–July 2019), Shibden Hall entered 2020 as the busiest and most internationally known it had ever been. That year I also organised a conference at Bankfield Museum, in conjunction with the nearby Brontë Parsonage Museum, entitled ‘Interpreting Anne Lister and the Brontës’, discussing museum, television and film adaptations of their stories and the Brontë novel adaptations. During the Covid-19 closures of 2020–1, the few remaining staff focused on sharing content about Anne Lister and our museums on our website and across our main online channels, Twitter and Facebook, and used the time to create a new 3D virtual tour of the Hall,7 several ‘behind the scenes’ films,8 and a new 600-year timeline of the Hall’s history,9 created with researchers from the group ‘Packed with Potential’.10
I will examine how Shibden Hall and its landscape defined and was shaped by Anne Lister’s remarkable character and life, and how it can still be experienced today. I show that the physical Hall and landscape can bring people even closer to the ‘real’ Anne Lister than her extensive diaries and now-iconic, top-hatted ‘Gentleman Jack’ character. I will also explain the challenges faced by a small museum service in meeting expectations, the physical difficulties in representing historic stories within a museum setting, and the complexities of constructing interpretations of history and people.
Shibden Hall’s History
Shibden Hall has been a public museum since 1934. The estate is a historic landmark within a public park attracting thousands of visitors a year and is also a place for weddings, talks and tours, craft fairs, school education, family trails and arts activities. The earliest reference to the Hall is in a document in the West Yorkshire Archives dated 1420–1 and it was a residence until 1933, inhabited by various families including the Otes, Saviles, Waterhouses and Listers.
Figure 5 Shibden Hall.
Shibden Hall first came into the Lister family in the seventeenth century, and they would own the Hall for more than three hundred years, during which time the family’s fortunes varied. It is from the Lister period that most records of the estate survive, including the first inventory of contents of the house from 1677 and the first complete plan of the estate from 1791. The accounts of information on the Hall and estate’s history are now rather dated and subsequent work has largely been based on these earlier accounts. John Lister (who first shared Lister’s diaries in the 1880s) was a historian and keen to document his family heritage. He published several accounts in the Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society in the early 1900s,11 and T. W. Hanson’s book and article on Shibden are also from this period.12
Anne Lister’s uncle, James Lister (1748–1826), inherited Shibden after his father’s death in 1788, living there with his sister Anne (1765–1836) and various servants and house guests. Their brother Joseph (1750–1817) lived at Northgate House in the centre of Halifax, later demolished in 1961. Their younger brother, Jeremy (1752–1836), Anne Lister’s father, was commissioned into the 10th Regiment of Foot (the Lincolnshire Regiment) on Christmas Day, 1770, and saw active service in the American War of Independence. He was injured at the Battle of Concord in 1775 and on his return to England was appointed recruiting officer at Gainsborough. Jeremy married Rebecca Battle of Welton Hall in 1788 and they settled on her estate at Market Weighton in the East Riding of Yorkshire. The couple had six children, four sons and two daughters. Two sons died in infancy, a third died aged fourteen and the fourth, Samuel, died in 1813, at the age of twenty, whilst serving with the army in Ireland. Rebecca died in 1817, the same month as Joseph Lister of Northgate.
Anne Lister’s Inheritance
Anne Lister moved in with her Uncle James and Aunt Anne in 1815, and in 1826, when her uncle died, she inherited a third of the estate, her aunt and father also receiving a third each, and she seems to have taken over the running of Shibden Hall. Her father, Jeremy, and younger sister, Marian (1798–1882), had also moved into Shibden by 1832. In 1836 her father and aunt both died, leaving Lister to fully inherit the whole estate. Her sister, Marian, returned to live in Market Weighton. Marian long survived her family members and died in 1882, aged eighty-four. It is not thought she ever returned to Shibden to live, but interestingly there is a photograph recorded as being of her, seated outside Shibden, possibly on a visit to the Hall at a later date. There are currently no known photographs of Anne Lister.
Anne Lister’s full ownership and control of Shibden Hall and estate was for just four years from 1836 until her death in 1840. However, having lived there from 1815, and taking majority control of the estate in 1826, this extends her involvement to twenty-five years. This is still a short time in the three hundred years of Lister ownership, which adds to how remarkable her changes and physical legacy at Shibden are.
Under the terms of Lister’s will, her partner, Ann Walker (1803–54), inherited Shibden Hall on her death in 1840. There are few records of this time, but it is known that Ann Walker was removed from Shibden Hall in 1843. She was taken to York Asylum and her brother-in-law, Captain George MacKay Sutherland (1798–1847), later moved into Shibden Hall. Walker never returned to Shibden and died at Cliffe Hill in 1854. Whilst she was still alive, several different families lived at Shibden. Anne Lister had mortgaged the estate in 1837, and to pay off the debt, some of Shibden’s contents, including Lister’s library, were sold in 1846. Some of the estate’s land was then sold in 1847 for the new railway line, opened in 1850. On Walker’s death the property reverted to Lister family ownership as the estate was inherited by Dr John Lister (1802–67), the great-grandson of Anne Lister’s grandfather’s brother, Thomas Lister (1708–40) of Virginia, a doctor by profession with a practice in Sandown on the Isle of Wight, and his wife, Louisa Grant (1815–1892).
Anne Lister’s Alterations to Shibden Hall
By 1836 the Lister family had been in residence for two hundred years. All around them, stone houses were being built by the wealthy yeoman clothiers, but the family seemed relatively happy with their home. Their principal architectural achievement before 1836 was building the barn on the north side of the house in the mid-seventeenth century, and the south front of the house had been rendered and sash windows installed. The Shibden estate produced income from agriculture, coal mining, stone quarrying and brick making. The Listers also had some income from canal shares, turnpike road trusts and pew rents. It was the stable income of rents from the farms and cottages on the estate that gave Anne Lister a firm base from which she could branch out into riskier investments.
From first moving in with her aunt and uncle in 1815, Lister had ambitions for Shibden Hall and estate and proved herself a capable manager of it. Muriel Green neatly summarises her skill and interest:
Anne helped with the management of her uncle’s estate. The early Tudor house and grounds were very dear to her, and she encouraged her uncle to buy old farms and property in the neighbourhood which had formerly belonged to Shibden Hall estate. She was an astute businesswoman, capable of drawing up legal documents, negotiating purchases and sales. She superintended repairs to the farm and cottages, the planting and pruning of trees, the making of paths and roads on the estate, and the working of the coalmines which, in the nineteenth century, were at the height of their prosperity.13
Since her uncle remained the owner, Lister also faced issues persuading him to agree to her point of view. She notes in January 1824 that her uncle ‘Listens more patiently than ever to my little plans about a few improvements at home & appears to have confidence in my being able to manage things.’14
By 1825 Lister was starting to take control, and her uncle had clearly started to concede to her judgement: ‘Paid for the trees we had had – 2500 oaks at 30 shillings a thousand & 300 beeches at 35 shillings a thousand. Then ordered & paid for 300 more beeches myself without saying a word to my uncle who likes not so much expense’;15 ‘Talked about planting, walling, alterations & improvements. My uncle took it more patiently.’16
On his death in 1826, her uncle left Anne in charge of the Hall and estate, with income shared with her father and aunt. ‘I have much to think of, and to do. My uncle’s confidence and affection have placed me in a very responsible and by no means unoccupying [sic] situation. The executorship is left solely to me.’17 From 1826, Anne and her aunt spent eighteen months based in France. Lister continued to travel widely through Europe between 1828 and 1839, with just a three-year gap around 1836 when she was particularly focused on Shibden Hall alterations, coal mines, local elections and her relationship with neighbouring landowner Ann Walker. Lister’s business endeavours and management of Shibden Hall are closely examined by Catherine Euler, who explains that ‘by 1837 [Anne] was involved in very complex and interrelated works regarding coal pits, strata, the angles of inclines, drainage, ventilation, water pressure, the construction of a water-wheel, and calculations about the part a steam engine would play in all of this. She was practically obsessed with questions of water drainage and the use the drained or pumped water could be put to.’18
In 1836, after the deaths of her aunt and father, Lister had sole ownership of the Hall and estate, and commissioned John Harper (1809–42), an architect from York. She initially asked him for plans for Northgate House, another Lister property in the centre of Halifax, which she wanted to convert into a hotel and casino. She was impressed with his work and turned her attention to Shibden Hall. Lister wanted a far grander and more imposing property. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was a trend for medieval and Jacobean styles; Walter Scott’s novels and Byron’s poetry were bestsellers. Anne Lister travelled through England finding inspiration for her alterations in cathedrals, castles and ruined abbeys.
The initial plans by Harper were costly and together he and Lister reworked them.19 Rendering was stripped off the south front, half-timbering restored and new timber bay windows installed. They settled on a new three-storey gothic tower with a library and modern water closets on the west side, and an east wing with new kitchen, servants’ quarters and dressing rooms. Lister made changes to improve the look and size of the Hall and to increase the grandeur of the estate, but clearly questioned how far she should go with her plans, as reflected in her comment in 1836: ‘only afraid of making the house too large-looking and important’.20 Anira Rowanchild has explored Lister’s alterations to the Hall and writes that ‘at a time when it was rare for women to control their physical environment’, Anne Lister needed to show tradition and convention: ‘Shibden Hall embodied the delicate balance of [Anne Lister’s] self-production.’ 21
The front parlour is now known as the Savile room after Robert Savile, who made alterations to the room in 1525 when he added bosses to the new ceiling, with an owl, an initial ‘I’ for his wife and Tudor roses. The room was repanelled by Anne Lister in about 1834 and she reduced the size of the large fireplace and installed bigger windows. On 12 May 1836, she cleared out the upper rooms prior to taking out the floor and opening the housebody (the central large room downstairs) to the rafters. A new fireplace was copied from the one at The Grange, a house near Shibden, and part of the buttery built during the residency of the Waterhouse family in the 1500s was removed to accommodate the staircase and gallery above. According to archives, the work on the new staircase by John Wolstenholme of York included forty-two double twist balusters costing twenty-nine pounds and eight shillings, fifty-three plainer ones costing six pounds, twelve shillings and six pence, four figures in Norwegian oak, including the Lister lion set upright holding the family coat of arms, costing a further eighteen pounds, and the Lister family motto, Justus Propositi Tenax (‘Just and True of Purpose’),22 costing two pounds and six shillings. The expense totalled about fifty-five-pounds, which would be about £50,000 in today’s money. Lister also added her initials on either side.
To keep servants out of sight, Lister commissioned the digging of cellars beneath the Hall to link the buttery, kitchen and her new tower. By 1839 the initial alterations were complete, and indentations can be seen today on the tower’s exterior where there would have been more additions to the building work if Lister had lived to return from her travels in 1840. Shibden Hall would have ended up as a castle-like building, alluding to Lister’s love of Norman and early medieval architecture. Architect John Harper then died in 1842 from malaria in Italy, aged just thirty-three, and no further plans were completed.
Subsequent residents made some changes to Shibden Hall too, but none on the scale of Anne Lister’s. This may well have been because coal mining gave Lister her main income, but once that was exhausted, later residents only had farm and cottage rents, and over time the farms were sold off one by one. Nearly all Anne Lister’s alterations to the Hall can still be seen today.
Anne Lister’s Landscape
Surrounding Shibden, the landscape also reveals Lister’s grand plans and ambitions for the Hall and estate, which continue to bear her mark, this time in a grand gatehouse (sometimes known as The Lodge), high walls, trees, ponds, walkways and the lake at the bottom of the valley. Standing outside the Hall, it is possible to walk in Lister’s footsteps and see her vision of Shibden, just ignoring the newer houses now peering from the horizon into the previously private Shibden grounds. Originally, the Listers had 400 acres of farmland stretching from Shibden Mill beyond Salterlee, down the valley, and Cunnery Wood above the Hall on the hill. By the time of Anne Lister’s ownership, the size was much reduced, and she sought to reclaim the land surrounding the Hall from farmland into a landscaped park – in a way, pushing other people further away and out of sight, much like the servants’ tunnels inside the Hall.
Never one to do things by halves or delegate, as Liddington describes it:
[Lister] was soon filling her diary pages with dense agricultural details, as she commanded a small army of men to heave and dig, plant and cart soil for her, as she began to shape nature to her desire by disciplining one of Red Beck’s boggier curves, and by rooting up the ancient agricultural hedges spoiling the leisured view from Shibden.23
The terrace was raised using John Harper’s designs to provide Shibden with an elevated platform, and at the east end tunnels were created for gardeners to use so that they would not be seen from the garden. When recently renovated, it seems there may have been future plans for another tunnel leading to the house. To the west of the Hall is a series of terraces created as an orchard. Lister added fishponds and large rockwork to create a cascade between them, in addition to a walled garden and a garden cottage. The ‘wilderness garden’ that Lister created, with its cascade and pools, leads to the tunnel under Shibden Hall Road and on through to Cunnery Wood, where there was a kitchen garden and ponds providing water for domestic supply.
Lister maximised the potential for coal mining on her land. Halfway between the lake and the Hall, there is a small group of trees, underplanted with daffodils, which marks the entrance to one of the old mines. Halifax had notoriously shallow coal seams that were very difficult to work. Lister’s work managing the coal mines is explored further by Liddington, John Lister, Catherine Euler and W. B. Trigg.24
Landscape gardener Mr Gray suggested Anne Lister widen Red Beck, named after the polluting red oxides from the coal mines. In February 1836, work began creating the Meer, a lake at the bottom of the valley using Red Beck. The lake is dammed with an ornamental balustrade of sandstone, again designed by John Harper, and had an added attraction for Lister in that she could harness its waterpower. As Euler explains:
These operations took up by far the majority of her time and the majority of the journal space for 1835 and 1837 is primarily devoted to her estate concerns, especially those having to do with coal … Based on the information they provided she used her own mathematical knowledge to calculate that 1,512½ cubic feet of water would be needed to work the wheel for one hour. She designed the meer, or lake, which still lies below Shibden Hall, with this calculation in mind.25
From the lake it is difficult to see the Hall on its terrace, screened by trees and a high wall. Lister also created a small private place away from her family and servants on the lower slopes of Shibden. Her initial plans grew to become a ‘chaumière’, a small, thatched cottage, later referred to as the moss-house.26 The fate and exact location of the moss-house are currently unknown.
Lister also had the ‘Lister’s Lane’ carriage drive built to join the Hall to the main road to Halifax and Leeds, now the A58, with the addition of a grand gatehouse. It is a copy of the one at Kirkham Priory, North Yorkshire, supporting a gothic arch, once again designed by John Harper. She first used the drive on 27 June 1837, when she visited Halifax to hear Victoria proclaimed queen. A few days later, when the gatehouse was finished, she celebrated by buying the masons a drink at the Stump Cross Inn. The Shibden Park that the public can walk around and enjoy for free today is largely thanks to Anne Lister, who may never have anticipated public access to her land and private spaces.
Anne Lister’s Collections
Very few of Anne Lister’s personal possessions survive today and the few remaining items are always displayed for visitors to see. As her vast library was sold at auction in 1846, just a handful of books remain at Shibden with her signature in them, and none has her book plate. A list of Anne Lister’s reading and books is being compiled from her diaries and it is hoped some of her collection may one day be discovered now the name Anne Lister is more recognised.27 Two large bound volumes of music remain at Shibden, both believed to be hers, one with ‘Miss Lister’ embossed on red leather on the front and both are signed inside ‘A. Lister’. A wooden travel case, with a writing slope inside and a gold plate reading ‘Miss Lister, Shibden Hall’, was purchased by Calderdale Museums from France and returned to Shibden Hall. The date and style of it make it most likely to be our Anne Lister’s. A Halifax slip-ware planter is also inscribed ‘Anne Lister, Shibden Hall’, but this most likely belonged to the last Anne Lister of Shibden (1852–1929).
Another object relating to our Anne Lister is her painted funeral hatchment, which would have cost about five pounds at the time and was probably purchased by Ann Walker. The custom was to hang it outside the house for a year after a person’s death, before removing it to their church, in this case, Halifax Parish Church, now Halifax Minster. The last resident of Shibden, John Lister, rescued three Lister hatchments from the church and returned them to Shibden. The other two are likely to be those of Lister’s father and aunt, but they were already in disrepair, so they are kept in store as they cannot be displayed.
There are three portraits reputedly of Anne Lister, all displayed at the Hall. The oil painting attributed to Joshua Horner (1811–81) was completed posthumously and hangs in the main housebody at Shibden between those of her aunt (painted in 1833 by Thomas Binns) and uncle (also painted posthumously by Joshua Horner). There is reference in Lister’s diaries to both her and Ann Walker being sketched by Horner, and Ann Walker may have commissioned the portrait on her return to Shibden after Lister’s death. We await further discoveries from the diaries of another mention of the final oil painting being completed in her lifetime, hopefully with a note of what she thought of it! The other two portraits, one watercolour on paper and the other a small oil painting in an elaborate frame, have similarities, but their provenance is uncertain. None of the portraits has any signature or note on them, and it is interesting that the watercolour on paper has two copies, one held by the Museum Service and one in the Archives; they are slightly different from each other but feature clothes similar to those in the final portrait by Joshua Horner.
The Archives also hold more personal items than just the diaries and travel notes, including Lister’s passport to Russia from 1839 and a map of the Pyrenees. In addition, there are approximately 1,800 letters between Lister and her family, friends and business contacts, including her Aunt Anne, Eliza Raine, Mariana Lawton, Maria Barlow, Lady Stuart de Rothsay, Lady Gordon, Sibbella Maclean, Ann Walker and members of the Norcliffe family, all written between 1800 and 1840. There are also notebooks comprising approximately 500 draft business letters to people including Robert Parker, her Halifax solicitor, David Booth, her last steward, John Harper, her architect, and Grays, her solicitors. In addition, there are thirty-two volumes of account and day books covering household, estate and travelling expenses, eleven volumes of schoolbooks and notebooks, eleven volumes of extracts of books read by Lister, lecture notes and miscellaneous notes. These are not yet digitised or online and require in-person viewing.
We know some of the furniture at Shibden Hall would have been present in Anne Lister’s time, including the large table in the housebody, made in Yorkshire around 1595 and assembled inside Shibden. Built of oak and made with hand tools, the table extends on draw-leaves to about sixteen feet/five metres in length. The bench alongside the table may have always been at Shibden too, while the settle (a wooden bench with a back) dated 1690 and the carved wooden court cupboard, used to store and display crockery, have certainly been on site since before 1845. The richly carved bed in the Red Room made in about 1630 is also likely to have always been at Shibden.
Nearly all the oil paintings in the Hall have also been in situ since before Anne Lister’s time, although they may, of course, have been in different positions. H. Brothers has shared references from Lister’s diaries about getting three portraits of her ancestors – James Lister (1705–67), Samuel Lister (1706–66) and Reverend John Lister (1703–59) – restored by local artist John Horner (1784–1867), reframed in 1833 and ordered from Millbourne and Sons, London.28 Lister commissioned the portrait of her Aunt Anne by Thomas Binns, and, as her sister Marian did not want a portrait, Lister commissioned a painting for her of Shibden Valley by John Horner, known as Marian’s View.
Another surviving object from Lister’s time is the Lister Chaise. Built around 1725, it is one of the oldest surviving carriages in the world. It was used by the Lister family for many years and has the Lister coat of arms painted on each door. The current green and gold colours appear to be the original ones, although at some point it was painted grey, before being restored and returned to its original colours in the 1950s. It is a travelling carriage with broad windows, drawn by two horses driven by a rider, called a ‘postilion’, who sat on one of the horses. The carriage remains on display in the aisled barn where it has been housed for nearly three hundred years. The barn itself was first recorded in 1677 and would have been used by Lister and her staff.
Interpreting Anne Lister at Shibden
Shibden’s role when it opened in the 1930s was as a museum. There was no focus on Anne Lister and the curators aimed to present the Hall itself as a point of interest, with a wide range of historical collections on display. To explain to visitors all the changes made by the numerous residents and owners of Shibden Hall over six hundred years is not an easy task. Whilst guidebooks allow space to include finer details, they are not purchased by the majority of visitors. Within the Hall itself there are restrictions on space to display information, with requirements for text to be of a legible size as well as being interesting and accessible to all ages. This often results in a room’s entire six-hundred-year history being condensed into two hundred words. There is also no ideal space for individual object labels and no museum cases to securely display vulnerable or valuable objects within the room spaces. Care is taken to display objects off limits, but they are still on open display, therefore vulnerable to children swinging under ropes, enthusiastic selfie fans, dust, dirt, insects, and an occasional bat or bird.29
There are also physical issues about which parts of the Hall can be accessed by visitors. There is often now a demand to see Anne Lister’s library at the top of the tower. This is up a narrow, low-ceilinged, spiral staircase, with just one entrance, and so is restricted to only a handful of visitors at a time, and when staff are not too busy to facilitate this. Similarly, the servants’ tunnel running under the buttery to the dining room is down a steep staircase with low-hanging pipes and, again, has only one entrance. Other rooms that unfortunately remain off limits are the servants’ quarters, up a staircase again and currently containing a staff room, toilet, office and shop store, which are needed until a separate visitor centre is created to house them. Even if these spaces did become accessible, there would be the challenge of how to re-dress the rooms with no records of what they looked like, nor with any of the original furniture. We are unable to re-dress the whole Hall as it would have been in Anne Lister’s time as there is not enough pre-1840 furniture in our collections. Most of the smaller collection items at Shibden have no provenance and John Lister, the last resident, was an avid and eclectic collector of items, even including a small stuffed crocodile. During Anne Lister’s twenty-five years there, the Hall would have no doubt seen regular changes in decoration, furnishings and paintings. Trying to capture a specific time-period, which has been further explored by Alison Oram, would also mean the removal of many other furniture items and collections and, in turn, ignoring any subsequent residents.30
An example of the difficulty in choosing a time-period or theme for a room is the upstairs guest bedroom. Previously dressed as a nursery, this then gave the confusing idea of a family home with young children, when it was really being used as a space for education workshops on old toys, rather than representing a connection to the Hall’s history. The tradition in presenting historic houses to the public was often to create the idea of a ‘family home’, and, in turn, a heterosexual space.31 Whilst the Listers were certainly all part of the same family, there were very few young children ever living at Shibden. Since 2018, the room has been a mixed-period space, displaying oil paintings, a piano, a table, chairs, a large dresser and, randomly, a narwhal horn with no provenance.32 During Anne Lister’s occupation, the room was decorated with yards of fabric hung like a tent and it was known as the ‘tented room’. To display it as such – drawing from a few diary references – especially when we consider the cost of acquiring period furnishings while not knowing exactly what it looked like, does not seem viable. Instead, we say it was referred to by Lister as the ‘tented room’ and allow visitors to imagine it for themselves.
In trying to focus on Anne Lister, we are restricted by the lack of collections directly related to Lister herself, as outlined above. Her personal possessions are few, which makes representing her and her story within the Hall even harder. Whilst we can see her changes to the physical building and accept that some of the furniture was there in her time, how do we really get close to her without personal effects, clothing, or being able to display on site her diaries and letters? The physical changes to Shibden made by Anne Lister are a representation of herself to others, her public face, in stark contrast to the diaries, especially the coded sections, which were never meant to be seen by anyone. I wonder what Lister would think of us walking in her home, let alone reading the coded sections of her diaries. I think she might like the narwhal horn, though.
The interpretation of the Hall as Anne Lister’s home is further complicated by Gentleman Jack and the wonderful filming sets created within Shibden, designed without the limits we have of keeping them clean and far enough away from visitors not to be touched. The production designer and team had lorry-loads of furniture and props at their disposal, which we were rather envious of, but everything was taken down and removed after use. Some visitors have expected to see the film sets still in situ or have assumed Shibden was filmed exactly as-is. Anne Lister’s bedroom was later used by Dr John Lister’s family and became the bedroom of John Lister, the last resident. None of the original furniture remains from Anne Lister’s time in this room, the fireplace is blocked off and the ceiling and walls long since redecorated. Only the floorboards are original. The small Porch Chamber room next door, where Lister probably wrote her diaries, is off limits to visitors behind a glass door, as the original flooring beams are uneven and the ceiling is very low.
The bedroom and Porch Chamber were too small for the film crew to enter, so these rooms were re-created in a studio in Leeds, with both rooms noticeably larger in the television series than at Shibden. On visiting the set, we realised there would be expectations for the rooms to look similar at Shibden and found ourselves in the strange position of re-creating a historic room based on a television series. We decided the bedroom was the most personal space in the house for Anne Lister, the place where visitors would possibly feel closest to her. We purchased a replica bed of the period style, as they did for the bedroom set in Gentleman Jack. We had new bedding made and copied the television series’ style and colour. We kept the room open for access by visitors as there were no historic collections in there, which led to some interesting reactions. Many visitors believed the room and bed to be ‘real’, belonging to and used by Anne Lister, even with our interpretation in place explaining it was based on the film set and what we thought was obviously a replica bed and new bedding. For a photo opportunity we placed a modern replica top hat on the bed, innocently thinking it would make a fun shot, only to find people distraught that we had allowed the public to try on Anne Lister’s top hat!33
We found our staff dealing with a new type of visitor following the television series, ones often more interested in the film sets and taking a selfie with the Gentleman Jack poster that we displayed in the entranceway, showcasing Suranne Jones, than with the portrait of the real Anne Lister. There were more incidents of people breaching the traditional rope barriers, taking selfies, touching off-limits collections and even daring each other on social media to do things in the Hall.
To summarise, the advantages of Shibden Hall featuring so prominently in Gentleman Jack have included the enormous benefit of new audiences, income from filming, increased visitors and ticket sales, and increased awareness of both Anne Lister and the Hall. All of which is priceless in sustaining the Hall’s future. The disadvantages and complexities include loss of income and access for the public when closed for filming, exposure of the house and collections to potential damage from filming and increased visitor numbers, increased wear and tear, higher costs for extra staffing and cleaning, and increased expectations to deliver events and magically make the house larger to fit more people.
Conclusion
The Museum Service’s focus has always been to ensure the long-term survival of our historic sites and collections, along with sharing the stories they contain. The 2019 television series, and the international exposure it afforded Anne Lister and her legacy of Shibden Hall, have certainly improved the future security of the Hall compared with just ten years ago, when it had little income and recognition outside West Yorkshire. However, we still face struggles to ride the wave of Anne Lister interest and to preserve some income for a site which is expensive to maintain. With potentially more series of Gentleman Jack and other new fictional interpretations in novels, poetry, art and theatre, amongst other media, along with new studies and hopefully more biographies, Anne Lister’s story is no longer tied just to her diaries and to Shibden Hall.34 But I believe it remains important to be able to walk in her footsteps in order to truly connect: to see, smell, hear, touch and experience first-hand the world of Shibden which Anne Lister created around her.
Open access