by Anne Choma
The wider Walker family contrived to keep a close eye on Ann Walker. Some of them had ideas for where she, and her enormous wealth, might end up. Her brother-in-law’s mother, Mrs Sutherland, hoped to marry her to Sir Alexander Mackenzie, a relative who had recently fallen on hard times. Having been ejected from the army for insubordination, his baronetcy was redundant. He had his mother to keep. It is fair to assume that Mrs Sutherland had a financial motive in wondering if he might be a catch for Ann.
Through the marriage of her cousin Mary Priestley, Ann Walker had become linked to the Rawson family, of which Anne’s soon-to-be business rival, Christopher Rawson, was a member. The extended Walker, Rawson, Edwards and Priestley network dominated Halifax society, with combined political and commercial influence. Ann Walker may have been shy, but the reality was that as an unmarried woman of private means at the heart of such a family, she held considerable power. Anne Lister knew this.
In fact, it was on 13th July 1832, the day of Anne’s visit to Lightcliffe, that she received a note from another Rawson family member, Jeremiah: ‘Mr Jeremiah Rawson called and left his card for me this morning. I conclude he wanted to speak about a few coals at the top of the hill, that Hinscliffe wants.’
Anne was now firmly in business-mode. She wasted no time in working out exactly what the coal on her land might be worth. Following a consultation with her coal steward, James Holt, and based on a series of precise calculations, she found the answer. £226.17.6, per acre. She would be ready for Jeremiah Rawson’s next visit on 19th July.
Anne had a good head for figures. Over many years she had become practised in balancing her own books. It stood her in good stead; her mathematical skills were required on a daily basis in her life as an estate owner, from buying and selling property and everyday goods to bidding for the stone of a tumble-down building at a local auction. Now, if the need arose, she was able to quickly measure the amount of stone required for walling, or evaluate the going rate for ‘hurrying’ and ‘getting’ a corve of coal.
On Thursday 19th July 1832, as planned, Jeremiah Rawson came to Shibden Hall to talk business. With her calculations sorted, Anne was able to spend a leisurely morning awaiting his arrival. Breakfast was at nine, followed by the appraisal of some new surgical instruments – ‘razors, bistouries, etc.’ – that had arrived from Rogers Cutlers in Sheffield. She checked over her stone and coal plans before mending stockings till just after eleven.
The Rawson brothers had known Anne since their shared youth in Halifax. She was friendly with their mother. Why had Christopher Rawson sent his brother to see Anne, rather than visiting her himself? Possibly he knew she would be formidable to negotiate with, so perhaps he thought that Jeremiah would pull off the deal better than him.
As Jeremiah was ushered into the hall, just after 11.30am, there were few pleasantries. He cut to the chase, telling Anne she must set a price for her coal. ‘I have made up my mind,’ said Anne, ‘not to take less than my uncle sold it for – £230 for what came out of Trough of Bolland pit, and £205 for what was pulled at Willy Hill pit.’ The visit lasted no more than twenty-five minutes. The price, wrote Anne, ‘frightened him’.
CHAPTER 3
More of Miss Walker, Vere’s Marriage, Beloved Aunt Anne, Anne’s Constipation and Shibden’s Errant Tenants
‘Here I am at, at forty-one, with a heart to seek. What will be the end of it?’
Anne Lister’s account of her third visit to Lidgate signals a surprising shift in her feelings about Ann Walker. Outwardly, the social call she paid on 10th August 1832 was unremarkable; the polite tea-drinking and exchange of amusing local gossip between two respectable ladies might have been taken from one of Jane Austen’s Regency drawing rooms. But as Ann chatted on with a description of the ‘queer questions’ and ‘odd remarks’ of her medical man Dr Kenny – whom she believed, despite his being married, would like to become ‘intimate with her’ – an insight into Anne Lister’s inner thoughts make the story quite different. Miss Walker’s ‘civil and agreeable’ behaviour meant more to Anne than her neighbour knew. For Anne, there was romantic promise in the fact of their getting on so ‘very well together’. The possibility of courting Miss Walker had entered her mind ‘several times before of late’. ‘Thought I,’ she wrote in her diary that evening, ‘shall I try and make up to her?’
A week later, Anne called on Miss Walker again. On her way, she paid a visit to New House on the Lightcliffe estate, home to Ann’s cousin, William Priestley, and his wife, Eliza. Anne had known the Priestleys for many years. She was friendly with Mrs Priestley in particular, who thought her interesting and kind, and was endeared to her eccentricity. They talked, ‘confidential as usual’, about Anne’s sister, Marian. When Anne excused herself from the company, which now included two other members of Miss Walker’s extended family, Mrs Priestley seemed disappointed that she was leaving ‘so soon’. Anne told her friend that she was ‘as busy as ever’, and headed briskly to Lidgate, where she spent the next three hours with Ann Walker.
This would be the longest amount of time the two women had ever spent together. Ann Walker spoke candidly about her relatives, giving Anne a rather cutting take on William Priestley who, along with Mr Edwards, had been appointed trustee of the Walker estate. Neither, she felt, ‘behaved like a gentleman’. Anne was alarmed to learn from Miss Walker that the Priestleys ‘knew all’ of the Listers’ financial concerns.
While they were talking, Anne managed to break an ivory book knife that had been gifted to Miss Walker by her cousin, Catherine Rawson. Initially ashamed of her clumsiness, Anne turned the situation quickly to her charming advantage. It would, she suggested ‘be a good excuse for my giving her one someday from Paris, which she hoped she would value as much as the one destroyed’. Miss Walker replied, encouragingly, that she would value any gift of Anne’s even more than the thing she had broken.
At a friendly parting, Ann Walker gave Anne the Saturday edition of the Penny Magazine to take away with her. Though no follow-up date was arranged, Anne’s intentions were being formed with increasing clarity. The crypt-hand entry she made in her journal that night is revealing: ‘She has money and this might make up for rank. We get on very well so far and the thought, as I returned, amused and interested me’ (17TH AUGUST 1832).
Until now, the combination of wealth and ancient pedigree had been a prerequisite in Anne’s vision for a life partner. She had been attracted to the idea of sharing her life with a woman of a distinguished lineage. But after the disappointment of Vere and her rejection by society, Anne’s mindset had shifted. A woman without rank, but with Ann Walker’s kind of money, might do very well. The Lister lineage could be enough for them both.
Clearly, Anne’s intentions towards Ann Walker were strategically inclined. She was working within a frame set by her heterosexual peers: for the middle and upper-classes in the nineteenth century a ‘good match’ was a marriage that made financial sense, with love a secondary consideration. This was the context in which Mariana had been married to Charles Lawton, twenty years her senior, in 1816. A grand estate like Lawton Hall in Cheshire would always be more important to Mariana’s family than a romantic connection. Despite her own heartbreak at Mariana’s betrayal, Anne Lister had understood that. She had nothing to offer Mariana in terms of immediate wealth. Nor did her passionate love and intense loyalty mean anything in Georgian society. A private lesbian relationship like theirs had no value.
Sixteen years later, Anne was able to think differently. With her impending inheritance, she had something to bring to a match with Ann Walker. The combination of their incomes would cement her own financial future. And they did get on ‘very well together’. It was time to move the friendship on to something more serious. ‘She little dreams what is in my head,’ wrote Anne to her diary. All that remained was to bring Miss Walker up to speed with the plan.
‘Have patience with Dame Destiny, and she will pay everybody�
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On returning from her lengthy visit to Lidgate on 17th August, Anne spent five hours of the afternoon digging on the land with her men – ‘Banking up the new part of the walk in Tilly Holm’. Returning to the hall almost twelve hours after she had left it, she was greeted with relief by her aunt, who had been uneasy ‘at my being out and nobody knowing where I was’. Only a few days previously, servant Rachel Hemingway had injured herself climbing over a wall on the estate, trying to locate her mistress.
Anne often went out for long periods of time without telling anybody how long she was going to be away for. For someone as attached to her fob watch and obsessed with recording the precise timing of her comings and goings, it was an interesting habit to have.
The following day was quieter. Anne wrote a thank you to Burnett at Langton Hall, the servant with whom she had attended George Playforth’s autopsy:
My very good Burnett. I send you a silk gown which I hope you will think pretty, but which I count upon you wearing for my sake. You may be quite sure I can’t forget all your valuable attentions to poor George, or the many little kind services you have so often done myself. I shall be much obliged to you to let Joseph Booth, the boy at Scott’s, have the parcel directed to him.
18TH AUGUST 1832
Despite her incubating designs on Miss Walker, Anne was unable to put the thought of foreign travel out of her mind. She had been on the hunt for a new lady’s maid and manservant for some time, and was determined that her new servants should be suited to travel. She had offered the role of manservant to a local man called James Greenwood of Conery Wood, but he had declined, confiding in Matty Pollard (Anne’s only female tenant) that he would have been interested had Miss Lister been more ‘settled’. It was the second time in recent months that someone had questioned Anne’s restlessness. Mariana had told her back in April, after she had left Hastings, that she should ‘be more happy settled than wandering about’.
A plain-speaking Yorkshireman, James Greenwood told Anne that he was not disposed to travel. Anne agreed, having her own doubts about his credentials as a potential companion abroad. There was the language barrier to start with. ‘He should not like . . . to go where they could neither understand him nor he them,’ she wrote. He ‘was right and had judged very well’.
Anne had taken advantage of her time on the south coast to cast a wide net for potential servants. From Hastings, she had placed an advertisement in a London newspaper for:
Thoroughly trustworthy, clever, active, enterprising, cheerful, good humoured person, who is not given to making difficulties, and whose constant attention to her mistress’s interests and comforts will best secure her own.
3RD FEBRUARY 1832
Her criteria were exacting. Of seventy-nine replies, she had ‘burnt all but twenty’.
Now, Marian dared to make a suggestion of her own. It was rare for her to offer advice to her sister, with whom her interaction in this period seemed limited largely to domestic arguments:
Marian stood an hour talking & arguing that she did not order the carpets to be shaken once a week when I was here in 1828, and I persisted that they, or a large carpet was shaken so often. Tis odd enough, we never agree and something always turns up for us to get wrong about. I had come in in good spirits and was rallying her a little and thus as usual, it ended. She cannot like my company much better than I like hers.
13TH AUGUST 1832
On this occasion, Marian came up with the goods. Anne found her suggestion of ‘a soldier, or a Highlander for a servant’ very sensible. ‘I will think about it and try what I can do,’ she wrote. ‘Such a man would be orderly and a good traveller, and might suit me best’ (22ND JULY 1832).
Of course, foreign travel might have to be put on hold if Anne was to achieve the desired outcome with Miss Walker. Now, she sought her aunt’s advice about her potential new relationship.
Aunt Anne – the younger sister of Anne’s father, Jeremy – was a hugely significant person in Anne’s life. Even before the death of her mother in 1817, Anne had looked up to her aunt as a maternal figure. She was loving, loyal and a sympathetic listener with a keen understanding of Anne’s emotional needs. When things were falling apart in Hastings with Vere, it was to her aunt that Anne turned:
My dear aunt. I never think of all you have done without far more affectionate gratitude than I have ever been able to express. And so as to the interpretation of all my thoughts, words and actions . . . you are the only kind, reasonable person I have to count upon.
23RD MARCH 1832
Anne was twenty-six when her mother died, but there is scant mention of Rebecca Lister (née Battle) in her diaries. What there is suggests that she suffered from alcoholism. When Anne does write about her ‘poor mother’, there is a protective tone.
In 1829, Anne confided to Lady Stuart that her mother was the subject of an unsettling recurring dream:
Before Lady S went to bed, talking of dreams. Told her my three, of my mother’s last confinement, the snake and black eggs, and the black bull with a golden horn at Paris.
10TH SEPTEMBER 1829
There is evidence, too, of a loving early relationship, in letters that have survived from the summer of 1803 between twelve-year-old Anne, who was staying with her aunt and uncle at Shibden Hall, and her mother. Anne is eager to impart news of her singing lessons with Mr Stopford, who was in charge of the music at Halifax parish church. She wants her mother to know that on Sunday she will be wearing a ‘new bonnet, a new white Tippet, a pair of new Stays, and my new Frock made up’. Rebecca writes back to Aunt Anne proudly of Anne’s ‘charitable act’ in playing the organ at a local event. She comments on Anne’s ability to ‘write large hand exceedingly well’. Tellingly, perhaps, Rebecca also describes her young daughter as ‘a little high flown’ and ‘giddy’.
Anne’s precociousness and physical restlessness were to have an impact on her relationship with her parents as she grew older. In the sporadic remembrances of her childhood that appear in her adult diaries, Anne talks of being too much for her mother and father to handle, resulting in her spending increasing amounts of time with her aunt and uncle at Shibden Hall, before moving there permanently in 1815.
Over the years leading to 1832, Anne had grown reliant on her aunt as a confidante. In a society which struggled to place Anne, Aunt Anne offered her niece unconditional support and held liberal views that were in many ways ahead of her time. She was an emotionally astute woman who exhibited a tacit understanding of her niece’s lesbian sexuality. She appeared to apportion equal importance to Anne’s desire to settle down with a woman as she did to Marian’s pursuit of happiness with a man. She understood that when Shibden Hall came into Anne’s full ownership, she would want to inhabit it with a female life partner.
Aunt Anne would not have batted an eyelid at Anne and Mariana Lawton sharing a bedroom on 31st July 1832, whether she had been aware of her niece’s sexuality or not. Before and after her marriage to Charles Lawton, Mariana was a frequent visitor to Shibden Hall and always stayed with Anne in the ‘blue room’. In fact, it was not unusual in the culture of the time for female friends – who were assumed to be platonic – to sleep in the same bed. At compact Shibden Hall, where spare beds were non-existent, there would have been no other option. Those Shibden staff who were in the know were discreet enough to keep their thoughts to themselves. Elizabeth Cordingley had served for many years as Anne’s lady’s maid and had long-standing knowledge of her mistress’s preference for women.
Curiously, Mariana’s visit fell on the same day as Vere Hobart’s wedding to Donald Cameron of Lochiel. Anne had received the details in a letter on the 24th August. ‘A thousand thanks for all your good wishes and kindnesses to me in times past, and a happy meeting to us all somewhere hereafter,’ wrote Vere. Anne was less gushing: ‘Well, and there is an end to me of V. Hobart.’
Thoug
h Anne decided not to attend the wedding, which was to take place at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London, propriety required her to send her good wishes to Lady Stuart de Rothesay and Vere’s elderly great aunt, Lady Stuart. ‘Congratulations,’ she wrote, ‘Never a match seemed made with fairer prospects of happiness’.
Mariana arrived by stage coach that afternoon at the Stump Cross Inn on Godley Lane, and Anne walked across the fields to meet her. Given the nature of her recent visit to Lawton Hall, Anne’s hopes for this visit were not high, and she was greeted by a woman who had clearly had ‘a bad night’ and who, she said, ‘looked wretchedly’. Typically, Anne expanded on the medical details of Mariana’s wretchedness in her journal: ‘suffering from inflammation of the left ear produced by over syringing for deafness – too much wax taken away – the drum or tympanum laid too bare’ (31ST AUGUST 1832). She was sympathetic, but did not appear to receive much support in return:
Told Mariana Miss Hobart was married today to Mr Cameron younger of Lochiel, but she made no remark . . . Very civil and kind and attentive to M in walking home she had seemed to take rather more interest about things than she did before. Got into bed as soon as I could. Not much conversation. She was in pain from her ear.
Anne found Mariana’s visit tiring, writing that, by the time her guest left the next day, she ‘felt relieved to get rid of her’. For Mariana, the visit appeared to have stirred up old feelings. On 5th August, she wrote to Anne that she regretted having betrayed their relationship by marrying a man: ‘The last of my sins is that of willingly disappointing you.’ Though Anne had chosen not to tell Mariana about her interest in Ann Walker, perhaps Mariana had picked up a hint that Anne’s affections were becoming vested in someone new.