by Anne Choma
Money, or the lack of it, was an ongoing issue for Anne in 1832. Though she hated being reliant on her father for the funds and permission she needed to improve her estate, he did at least appear to be obliging. On 2nd August she asked for, and was given, a loan of £200, ‘promising to pay it any time on having a week’s notice’. When she ‘mentioned my wish to have a stove in the library passage – he said nothing against it’.
Alongside her courtship of Ann Walker, Anne found plenty of time and energy to cultivate Shibden’s land. Merat’s Botany and Paxton and Harrison’s gardening magazine were particularly useful:
‘Annual pruning – take out not less than 3 or more than 5 of the most vigorous branches beginning at the top – never injure the tap root of timber – sow where the plant is to remain . . . cypress wood the most durable known.’
6TH AUGUST 1832
Keeping trespassers off her newly cultivated land remained a preoccupation for Anne. She was determined that her more lenient father and sister shouldn’t prevent her from dealing with the culprits in the official way she hoped to. Telling James Greenwood that she was, ‘Going to speak to Mr Parker about trespassers and desired all might be taken to him’, she specifically asked James not to ‘say a word to my father or sister as I would have no one excused in future’. It was better that they didn’t know, in case they tried to stop her.
The men on her estate colluded with Anne’s demands when they were asked to. She liked to think of them as her eyes and ears, recognising that a flow of information from her workers could be of benefit to her. It helped that she wasn’t afraid of mucking in with their physical outdoor work.
As the summer progressed, things began to take shape to her satisfaction. Anne’s thatched chaumière was under construction. George and Robert Pickles were levelling and widening an elegant walk in the Lower Brook Ing Wood, partly at the suggestion of Mariana Lawton. Sister Marian took the opportunity to give her opinion that Anne would soon ‘not have income to keep these things up’ (12TH AUGUST 1832).
On 13th August, Anne received Mr and Mrs Edwards of nearby Pye Nest. Following Miss Walker’s words about his lack of gentlemanly conduct as trustee of her estate, Anne harboured a mistrust of Mr Edwards, but seems to have entertained him civilly on this occasion. He and his wife approached the hall from the steep, new Northowram Road, which lay to the east of the house and offered (as it does today) a stunning view of Shibden’s grounds. They told Anne that they had been admiring the ‘beauties’ of the estate. Anne joked that in order to get the full impact of the place they needed to see all the other ‘beauties’ too, including the crumbling barn. She gave them the full tour, telling Marian after they had gone that her self-deprecating manner surely meant that they could not think she had any ‘affectation about the place’.
Anne was keen to press on with the renovation, despite her limited funds and her sister’s scepticism. Her next innovation was a ‘long chair’, a rustic red seat built by her father-and-son tenants Charles and James Howarth, and set at the bottom of Calf Croft, towards the lower end of the estate. She wrote to her friend, Isabella (Tib) Norcliffe, of the ‘jobbing of all sorts in hand’ that was keeping her busy. She could not give serious thought to any travel until at least after Christmas.
The ‘all sorts’ of Anne’s letter to Tib might have included the sporadic misbehaviour of her tenants. The evening of 16th August was marred by the arrival of a drunk workman at the door: ‘About 7 Pickles called at the door to speak to me – saw he was quite drunk – told him to come tomorrow and bade Rachel to shut the door in his face.’
George Pickles was not Anne’s favourite employee. He wanted ‘looking after . . . trust the man as little as possible . . . he will take advantage if he can’, she wrote to herself. The next day Anne gave him some very clear instructions: ‘To do his job and stick to it and not come drunk to speak to me’.
This directness was typical of Anne’s approach to her workers. It was better that they knew from the off, she felt, that ‘this sort of thing would not do with me’ (17TH AUGUST 1832). It was important to her that they submit as fully to her authority as mistress of the estate as they would to a master.
If Pickles gave Anne the most trouble of her tenants, John Booth gave her the least. ‘Of all the workmen I like Booth the best,’ she wrote on 30th August 1832. In December of that year, Anne would go so far as to seek out for his 14-year-old daughter, Charlotte, a placement as a dressmaker in Halifax – but not before checking her ability to read:
Heard her read tolerably and made her read the four lines one of Plutarch’s lives (easy, again and again, 5 or 6 times till she could tell me what it was about). Set her to write her name and put a few words together. But she could not well do this on account of spelling. Knows nothing of accounts but seems a niceish little girl – well enough. Talked very gently and kindly to her and on her promising to do the very best she could at learning, said I would speak to her father about her going for half a year to a reading, writing and accounts school, and then perhaps she might learn dressmaking.
23RD DECEMBER 1832
Martha Booth aged fourteen, and John’s other daughter, was also being considered for employment as part of Mariana Lawton’s household. After an exchange of letters between her and Anne she wrote back to Anne saying that she thought an ‘under housemaid’s place must be the upmost height she is fit to aspire to’ (6TH JANUARY 1833).
The majority of Anne’s tenants were industrious, hard-working people. In addition, many of them had ambitions for their children outside the farming, mining and quarrying industries that dominated the Shibden valley. Two of Anne Lister’s notable tenants – Samuel Sowden of Sutcliffe Wood Farm, and John Mallinson of the Stag’s Head Inn – had sons who went to Cambridge University. Sutcliffe Sowden, who became vicar of St James Church in Hebden Bridge, officiated at the marriage of Charlotte Brontë and Arthur Bell Nicholls on 29th June 1854 in Haworth.
Between visits to Lidgate and dealing with inebriated workmen, Anne found time to read. On Sunday 19th August 1832, she recorded eight hours spent on scientific, classical and travel volumes. Anne read with purpose as well as for pleasure, wishing to draw improving connections between books, their authors, and her own lived experience.
The neatly catalogued literary indexes Anne kept are testament to the staggering range of literature she consumed. Books were her obsession. She thought frequently about her home library when she was absent from it, writing to remind Cordingley to open the windows to air the books on the shelves. The construction of a passage next to her bedroom, now underway, would give her even more space for, and easier access to, her archive.
The purpose-built gothic library tower adjoining the west wing of Shibden Hall was not to come until years later. For this, Anne would need not only vision, which she had in abundance, but significant finance, which she did not.
‘She thought ladies had never any business with politics. I said entirely, but there were exceptions’
The months of Anne’s life following her return from Hastings were all about reinvention. The renovation of Shibden Hall represented much more than a practical desire to smarten up an old building: it was a symbol of Anne’s personal healing. Her immersion in the land was cathartic and it excited her, because to Anne change meant progress.
The estate was particularly important to Anne at this moment in her life because it was a realm over which she had dominion. The deterioration of her relationship with Vere had been a painful reminder that she could not always be in control of her romantic life. Shibden, on the other hand, was her domain. The gradual transformation of the landscape around her was a daily reminder to Anne that she was creating a legacy, writing her own narrative.
Time was healing her emotional wounds, too. Vere Cameron, as she now was, would become a lifelong friend of Anne’s. And though their courtship was at a tentative stage, Anne’s visits to Miss Walke
r filled her with optimism. They heralded, she rightly hoped, the beginning of a new chapter.
Mariana Lawton’s role in Anne’s life remained consistent. She continued to provide epistolary dispatches of her unhappy marriage to Charles: ‘All would be well if Mr L would be a little more consistent, a little more sociable, a little more forbearing, a little more pleased to see others happy, and a little better tempered’ (20TH AUGUST 1832).
Anne suspected this was never going to happen. Over the years, Charles Lawton had proven himself a gambler and philanderer, and had fathered a child with a servant. The marriage seemed so hopeless that Mariana’s complaints simply annoyed Anne. ‘Well,’ she wrote on 20th August 1832, ‘I trust I have done with her. I rarely think of her without irritation.’
As August progressed, Anne remained deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the estate. She was a hard taskmaster:
Pickles and his men and William Greenwood and Robert Pickles the sick boy there . . . Found them cutting through the old pit hill bottom of Calf Croft all wrong – made them do it again . . . loitered about while the men dined at 12¼ – all at their work again under the hour.
21ST AUGUST 1832
Her assessment of her workmen’s competence was even bleaker the following day: ‘Found I could not safely leave them – they would have cut through the roots.’
On the plus side, she had finally decided on the location of her chaumière – ‘Near Lily bank or rather at the entrance of Lower Brook Ing wood’. She envisaged that nine small oaks would be needed to build the moss hut, which would be complete with thatched roof, and dressed prettily with ‘3 or 4 little hollies opposite’. She hoped that it would be finished by the end of September. Its secluded location and cosy interior were designed with intent: the chaumière was an intimate site that was to become crucial in Anne’s seduction of Ann Walker.
Though the routine she detailed in her diary suggests a person with boundless energy, Anne had in fact been suffering from exhaustion. The most personally distressing of her symptoms was that she found she could not stay awake to read or write. Dismissing the idea that her physically challenging, sixteen-hour days were the root of the problem, she sought help for another long-standing medical issue, constipation. Writing to the York-based practice of Dr Stephen (Steph) Belcombe – whom she trusted more than the ‘local quacks’ that were found around Shibden – she asked for advice on her ‘intestinal obstinacy’.
Dr Belcombe was Mariana Lawton’s brother. He and Anne had been friends for many years and she was not prepared to spare him any detail that she thought could aid an effectual diagnosis:
Long letter to Dr B – re ‘I have never since had any sufficient or proper alvine evacuations . . . found that I had parted with, to all appearance, a large garden worm, but rather thinner or flatter and paler – I eat and sleep well and am out all the day . . . have a sensation of fullness in my head and ringing in my ears . . . If you can make anything of all this do pray tell me what I had best do.
26TH AUGUST 1832
Anne was clearly frustrated. Her bowels were a lifelong preoccupation and analysis of their imperfect function appears frequently in her journal. The many books she had read on the subject had not helped much. After a period of eating only vegetables, she had recently returned to an omnivorous diet. Now, Steph prescribed senna for her ‘intestinal torpor’.
The quest for a cure continued for years to come. In 1835, Anne was testing various approaches. She wrote about castor oil and ‘bathing the bottom of the back with salt and water or vinegar and water’ and ‘digestive pills of aloe and myrrh before dinner (it would produce one solid stool)’. Her continuing obsession with her bowels suggests that an effective cure remained elusive.
Anne did not seem to mind that Dr Belcombe did not address the other ailments she had described in her letter: backache, a compression against the lower vertebrae and an unquenchable thirst. He remained her trusted practitioner. And soon she would be consulting him about another patient, whose symptoms it would prove far more difficult to diagnose and treat.
Anne’s month ended in a typically busy fashion. On 30th August a local coal merchant, James Hinscliffe, called at Shibden to offer her £150 per acre for her coal-rich land. He was in direct competition with the Rawsons. Though Christopher and Jeremiah had maintained a silence since Jeremiah’s meeting with Anne, she remained cool and non-committal with Hinscliffe:
I was not anxious about selling – the coals would pay for keeping. I might one of these days get them myself . . . after a great deal of talk irrelevant of the business in hand (these people will always have their talk) on politics, it ended with H seemed inclined to give my price.
If Hinscliffe guessed that Anne was in negotiation with the Rawsons, she neither confirmed nor denied it. She maintained, enigmatically, that she was engaged in several conversations over her valuable commodity, but had committed herself to nobody. Anne may have been dismissive of Hinscliffe on this occasion, but as a pawn in her negotiation with the Rawsons he was to become pivotal in her quest to establish herself as a leading coal player in Halifax over the coming months and years.
Outside the bounds of the Shibden estate, there were political stirrings. Charles Howarth kept Anne up to date with the instances of radical agitation that were becoming increasingly frequent in Halifax. Men, he told her, had joined up to unions in unprecedented numbers as the march towards reform had accelerated.
Anne was critical of the unstoppable force of industrial and political change. A landowner with deeply held conservative views, she disagreed with the idea of extending the franchise to unpropertied men of an inferior class. Part of it was pure snobbishness. ‘So much for the spirit of reform’, was her response to the news that a friend’s carriage had been set upon by thugs (5TH NOVEMBER 1831).
On 31st August 1832, she gave Jonathan Mallinson strict orders not to allow local masons’ and delvers’ meetings to take place at the Stag’s Head. Her inn would not be the home of left-wing agitation; if Mallinson did not comply she would revoke his license.
Anne described herself as someone with little interest in politics, but she certainly knew how to use the power she held as a landowner. Before the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872, it was commonplace for landowners to tell their tenants how to vote. Anne’s influence was felt among the frequent elections of the turbulent 1830s. Her opinion on the role of women in politics, demonstrated in a letter to her friend Harriet de Hageman, is brilliantly, and conveniently, specific:
She thought ladies had never any business with politics. I said entirely, but there were exceptions, for example ladies, unmarried who had landed property had influence arising out of that property and might perhaps use it moderately.
6TH JUNE 1830
Lady de Hageman was Vere Hobart’s half-sister. Anne’s letter, sent from Paris in 1830, was written at the time Anne had been out to impress the aristocratic Hobart and Stuart de Rothesay families. In this instance, she wondered if she had overstepped the mark with her opinions, which she conceded may have been ‘too energetic’ for the ‘milk and watery’ Lady de Hageman: ‘I always forget to be restrained till it is too late,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I am too much a man at heart.’
CHAPTER 4
The Demands of Propriety, Progression with Miss Walker, ‘Lady’ Vere Cameron, a New French Lady’s Maid, Money and Coal
‘I am more and more astonished when I think how marvellously things work together in my favour . . . I am thankful enough for all the blessings I enjoy’
In the first days of September 1832, Ann Walker was preparing for a holiday in the Lake District. The trip, which she would make with her relative, Catherine Rawson, would take her away from Halifax for over three weeks. By now, Anne Lister felt confident enough to ask Miss Walker if she would be thinking of her while she was away. Though Ann’s response to this rather romantic question
was encouraging – ‘yes, she would not forget’ – Anne Lister remained circumspect. The scrape with Vere and the historic disappointment of Mariana tempered her excitement about this new relationship. ‘Who knows how it may end’ she wrote, ‘I shall be wary this time’ (31ST AUGUST 1832).
The two women arranged to spend an afternoon together in Halifax before Miss Walker’s departure. Their first public outing would be meticulously planned. Theirs was a courtship destined to take place within the bounds of propriety; nothing could have appeared more respectable than the ‘sundry shopping’ and social calls of two landed women.
Anne spent the evening beforehand planning her outfit. She personalised a new pelisse, ‘sewing [on a] watch pocket’ and ‘putting strings to petticoat and getting all ready to put on tomorrow’. It was a measure of the seriousness with which she viewed this first show of togetherness in Halifax society. Anne wanted to make a good impression, not only on Ann Walker, but on the wider family who she hoped would, one day, become her in-laws.
Ann Walker arrived at Shibden Hall on the morning of 3rd September. She was early, and made conversation with Aunt Anne until Anne was ready to leave. At 11.50am, the two women set off for Halifax in Miss Walker’s carriage, which had been selected as the smarter vehicle. An ambitious itinerary of social calls had been planned: after a visit to the recent widow of local banker Rawdon Briggs, came a trip to Willowfield to see Mrs Dyson, who was dutifully thanked for her recent call at Shibden, but warned by Anne not to expect regular visits in return. Stopping next at Throps, the garden merchant, for shrubs and flowers, the women called finally at the home of the Saltmarshes. Disappointingly, the Saltmarshes were not in, but Anne and Ann left calling cards, expressing ‘particular inquiries after Mrs Saltmarshe’.