Gentleman Jack

by Katy Derbyshire

  Anne realised she had asked too much of Ann. Ignoring the pouring rain, she took the letter and purse straight back to Lidgate. She was nervous when we met – but I looked calm & we soon got on tolerably – we kissed and she was affectionate as usual, as far as I would let her. Anne explained that she could not leave to the decision of chance what ought only to be decided by her [Ann’s] own heart.52 Having been unable to force the decision, Anne was prepared to wait until 2 January, as agreed. Two days later, Ann surprised Anne with a confession of an earlier relationship with Mr Ainsworth: if she married him, it would be from duty – I pressed for explanation & discovered that she felt bound to him by some indiscretion – he had taught her to kiss, but they had never gone so far as she & I had done. Anne thought such loyalty ridiculous. I reasoned her out of all feeling of duty or obligation towards a man who had taken such base advantage. She said there was no other obstacle between us – & she should be happier with me. [...] I asked her if she was sure of this. ‘Yes, quite.’ ‘Well, then,’ said I, ‘consider half-an-hour & decide.’ In half the time she asked if I would take her & gave me her word & ‘Yes’ & hoped I should find her faithful & constant to me. Thus, in a moment that I thought not of, was I accepted & the matter settled. I kissed her.53

  But Anne had got her hopes up too soon. When she wanted to seal their engagement with a ring ordered discreetly in York, Ann sent it back. I cannot take it, my love, till I have fewer torments of conscience than I endure at present.54 Anne had managed to set aside Ann’s scruples over Mr Fraser and Mr Ainsworth, but the new problem was more serious. She had doubted whether it was right to engage herself to me, if this sort of thing was so bad between two men, it must be so. I answered this in my usual way: it was my natural & undeviating feeling etc etc.55 Ann was also much troubled with anonymous letters,56 warning her of Anne Lister – who had been attacked again that autumn. An impertinent fellow with a great stick in his hand [...] made a catch at my queer. ‘God damn you,’ said I & pushed him off.57 Unsettled by such attacks and by reading homophobic Bible passages, Ann Walker could not fully enjoy the sex she so desired with Anne. Talking last night till two – said she should not suffer for me – so declared I would not grubble her – she excited as she lay on me & I pretended great difficulty in keeping my word – I felt her over her chemise & this all but did the job for her. She owned she could not help it & that now she had got into the way of it. [...] Thought she should be getting wrong with somebody when I went away. ‘Oh,’ thought I, ‘this is plain enough.’ Yet still she talked of her sufferings because she thought it wrong to have this connection with me. We argued this point. Anne suspected the problem lay elsewhere: But she is quite man-keen, & the wrong with me is that I am not enough for her.58

  Anne thought, in spite of all her declarations to the contrary, I begin to suspect he [Mr Ainsworth] really has deflowered & enjoyed her. When they made love, Anne always had the feeling she must have some man or other – I can never satisfy her.59 Against her usual way, Anne had not so far used her euphemism kiss when writing about Ann, instead speaking only of gently grubbling. They had not yet been truly uninhibited and passionate with one another. Said to myself as I left her, ‘What a goose she is.’ 60 How can such a girl make me happy? 61

  The cooler Anne became, the more honest she was towards Ann. This proved more successful than all her false declarations of love and attempts at emotional blackmail. Ann was evidently courting me more as I court her less. Initially, that took effect in bed too. Without any persuasion she came to me at once last night – and, forgetting all the wrong, she lay in my arms all the night – and had three good long grubblings, nothing loth. [...] We awoke at seven and talked till eight – now that she sees me inclined to be off, she wants to be on again, said no more about the wrong, but began to think she was throwing away her happiness & said she could not bear to part with me.62 Anne raised the pressure on Ann by insinuating for the first time, that our present intercourse, without any tie between us, must be as wrong as any other transient connection.63 It was not that lesbian sex itself was a sin, in other words, but that all sex before marriage was. This argument did stir something in Ann Walker, but she still could not bring herself to say ‘I do.’ She wants my services & time & friendship & to keep her money to herself.64 A desperate Ann cried a great deal, promising this and that, but Anne Lister attached in reality no importance to all this, well knowing that tomorrow she might be all on the other side of the question. By Christmas of 1832 Anne knew she would not get an answer from Ann. I never saw such a hopeless person in my life – how miserable – said I to myself, ‘thank God my own mind’s not like hers – what could I do with her?’65

  Instead of an intimate betrothal to Ann Walker on 31 December, parted in tears, both of us, I saying I never did or could understand her. Anne spent New Year’s Eve alone. Well! Here is the end of another year! How different this new year’s eve from the last! tho’ in each case, unsuccessful love-making. [...] Vere married & off at Rome, [...] Miss W–, as it were, come & gone, known & forgotten – & myself, what I have never been before since fifteen – absolutely untied to anyone. I never stood so alone – & yet I am far happier than I have been of long – I am used & reconciled to my loneliness. In the same breath, Anne looked forward: some way or other, what adventure will come next? Who will be the next tenant of my heart? 66

  In the new year, Ann Walker sent a letter expressing her fear that she would burn in hell for having sex with Anne. ‘Why,’ said I to myself, ‘this explains all. The poor girl is beside herself.’ 67 Elizabeth Sutherland, up in Scotland, had meanwhile gained the same impression and invited her sister to Inverness. Ann Walker did not know whether she wanted to go or not, but let Anne help her pack. On 16 February 1833, Captain Sutherland and his mother arrived to pick her up. On an earlier occasion, Anne had found Captain Sutherland better in appearance and manners than I expected, very well.68 Now she could not refuse him her respect, he having managed – unlike her – to marry one of the rich Walker heiresses. Some talk with Captain S–; said I thought the complaint chiefly on Miss W–’s mind; but she was perfectly herself on all subjects but that of religious despondency. Worldly-wise Mrs Sutherland asked Anne if any love affair was on her mind. ‘No,’ Anne answered without batting an eyelid. To say goodbye, Anne grubbled a little last night & touched & handled her this morning. Then she accompanied Ann to the carriage and waved adieu. ‘Heaven be praised,’ said I to myself as I walked homewards, ‘that they are off & that I have got rid of her & am once more free.’ 69

  SEPARATION

  Alone again, Anne Lister focused on business matters. A check of her finances revealed that she and her aunt had a joint annual income of only £825 – divided between them, not even half of what Ann Walker had at her disposal. Anne had to borrow several hundred pounds to invest in new business ventures. Like all Northern industrial towns, Halifax was booming. Never in my life did I see a more smoky place than Bradford. The number of high chimneys there had doubled over only a few years; the same may be said of Leeds.1 Anne knew that one day we shall do all by steam, from carrying ourselves to boiling our potatoes. But they must have coal to have steam,2 which was why she wanted to exploit the coal seams underneath her land. She read books on geology and thought about how and where to start a mine and how to transport coal away from it.

  The past year – 1832 – had gone badly for her, not only on the marriage front. Frightened into action by France’s July Revolution in 1830, Earl Grey’s government was attempting to correct the worst excesses of the old peerage system before the population started demanding rights by violent means. Grey and his Whigs represented the industrial middle class; Anne was a Tory, interested in defending the privileges of the land-owning aristocracy. While she outwardly rejected Grey’s electoral reform, she admitted its necessity in her diary. Grey was forced to resign when the House of Lords rejected his Reform Act, prompting rioting. In Halifax, protesters were seen parading a straw figure of the ki
ng with a petticoat over his head (& then burning him).3 The possibility of a revolution became a national threat, so Earl Grey was re-accepted into government and his act was passed after all on 7 June 1832, abolishing several dozen infamously rotten boroughs and re-drawing constituencies to correspond better with the size of the electorate. In former days, the whole of Yorkshire had had only two members of parliament; since the 1820s the number had grown to four. Now Halifax alone, with its population of around 20,000, would be sending two MPs to Westminster. Of course, women didn’t have the vote, and only those men who had rented land for at least £10 a year for at least sixty years (or whose fathers had), or had held land of their own, worth £50 or the corresponding assets for at least twenty years had the privilege. In Halifax, that amounted to about 7.5 per cent of the population; the overwhelming majority still had no voice whatsoever. To exclude land-owning women like Anne Lister from the vote, the ballot was explicitly restricted to male persons; the threat of female emancipation meant a male-only electorate was written into law.

  That did not stop Anne from casting more than one vote, however, when the first post-reform ballot was held in Halifax in December of 1832. The election was neither general nor secret: votes were cast publicly at polling stations. This gave Anne Lister the opportunity to persuade all her tenants now granted a vote to cast it for her favoured Tory candidate, twenty-eight-year-old James Stuart Wortley – a nephew of the dowager Lady Stuart. Had John Bottomley, having sent for him to tell him to vote for Wortley tomorrow – had ¼ hour’s talk – he promised to vote for him. The tenant told her the Whigs had paid them all visits and some of them had all been at him, & some said they would not employ him again if he would not vote their way, but he told them how I wanted him to vote – and seeming to care nothing about it but that he thought he ought to oblige me. It is quite useless to leave such men as he uninfluenced – he knows nothing & cares nothing about it, & is likely best satisfied with the idea of pleasing somebody he knows.4 Yet despite Anne’s untiring political campaigning and inventive methods, at times bordering on blackmail, her candidate came in last. The two seats in the House of Commons went to the Whigs.

  Politically frustrated and without the prospect of a new love affair, Anne Lister could no longer stand to live with her family at Shibden Hall. A good year after her return, she left again for pastures new in her own travelling carriage, accompanied by her new maid Eugénie and her manservant Thomas – George Playforth had been shot dead in a hunting accident. She was heading for Paris and would see where she might go from there. In London, she met Lady Stuart, her daughter-in-law Lady Stuart de Rothesay and Lady Vere Cameron née Hobart, who had just given birth to her first child. After leaving Vere, Anne had kept a stiff upper lip towards her and managed to write letters of affectionate chit-chat to Miss H–.5 For the sake of good relations with the Stuart family, Anne pretended there was nothing she’d rather hear than Vere’s stories about her wonderful months honeymooning in Rome, Naples and Florence.

  After a few summer weeks in Paris, during which she saw Maria Barlow and decided on no nonsense6 with her, Anne accepted an invitation from another friend from her Paris days, Lady Harriet de Hageman, who was now living in Copenhagen with her husband. From there, Anne hoped to continue to Russia, her dream destination ever since Isabella’s well-travelled brother had announced: whoever had not seen St Petersburg, had seen nothing.7 She left Paris in scorching heat on 18 August. To see a little of the German lands on her way, she travelled slowly and never by night. I like Germany exceedingly, Anne wrote to her aunt. In Trier, she was impressed by the Porta Nigra city gate and the Roman baths, recently excavated at the expense of the Prussian King. Via the Mosel valley – magnificent – they reached Coblenz, a fine-looking town. She viewed Limburg and Marburg on the River Lahn. She took great interest in the modernisation of these medieval towns, where the ramparts and fosses are turned into good gravel-walks and handsome pleasure grounds. Eventually she reached Cassel, a very handsome but stupid town. She preferred Göttingen, as a letter of recommendation from the Paris Jardin des Plantes opened the doors to the university collections for her, and also to the anatomist and anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, then at the height of his Europe-wide fame. He showed Anne a mummified corpse, probably one of the ‘Nedlitz mummies’. Anne was sorry to leave the nice little town, and good, reasonable inn. Had she not caught a cold on her journey, she would have liked to travel through the Harz region; as it was, however, she went on via Einbeck to Hanover, the original residency of Britain’s ruling Hanoverians and capital of a kingdom in its own right; a very good town, and they say one of the gayest and pleasantest on the continent in winter. She enjoyed Bremen and its town hall, but liked Hamburg even better. I know nothing finer than the Jungfernstieg (pronounced Youngferstee), and the fine place (square), round the basin of the Alster. Everywhere in the region, she found the inns, however odd-looking, comfortable enough, except for the evil of scanty bed-clothes, scarcely large enough to cover a person. She was shocked by the state of the roads, however. All Hanover seems a bed of sand. All the paved roads they have, have been made since the peace [1814]. What did they do without them? – their wheels must have been perpetually up to the naves in dry sand, or mud. The last stretch of the route presented a particular challenge. The road from Hamburg to Lubeck is the worst I ever saw in my life, a rough granite boulder pavement full of holes. I never thought of getting safe to Lubeck; but we really did arrive without any accident or breakage at all.8 Lübeck was another town Anne was reluctant to leave. On the evening of 17 September, she took a steamer from the neighbouring port of Travemünde, which dropped her off in Copenhagen by one o’clock the next afternoon thanks to its eighty-horsepower engine.

  There, Anne stayed at the Royal Hotel but ate at the Hagemans’ home every evening. Lady Harriet soon took her on a two-day excursion to Roskilde, the former capital, in whose cathedral the Danish kings were buried. She also introduced her to the charming person Countess Blücher, who took Anne along to the theatre – the dancing was fair; but the women had such bad legs9 – and to evening receptions held by the ambassadors of the Netherlands and Sweden. Anne exulted: I have every prospect of getting into all the best society here, and of passing a very pleasant winter.10 She boasted to Mariana Lawton, I am always au courant des affaires. I see the Corps Diplomatique and leading people, and the business of nations has always interested me more than village scandal. Excuse the expressions but my mind seems as if it had room to stir in.11 Anne believed she had made her breakthrough into society when she was received at the Danish court, for which she had a new dress made. One cannot appear in black on a royal birthnight, so, for the first time these 17 years, I was in white satin.12 Yet her arrival in high society was not a complete success: she mistook a maid of honour for the queen. Nonetheless, Anne wrote to her aunt, as I am so well off here, stay the winter. And as she was so pleased with Germany, I think of travelling about there next spring – but not knowing German is terrible; so I have made up my mind to have a master.13 From Germany, she intended to travel on to Russia, if you are well enough to allow of my going in comfort.14

  However, the reverse was the case. Anne received a first unsettling letter from her sister in mid-November. Another letter from Marian arrived on 28 November, prompting Anne to pack her bags and set off for Halifax two days later in the hope of caring for her aunt or at least seeing her one last time. But there were no ships leaving Copenhagen at that time of year. Anne had to take the arduous land route to Hamburg and a ship from there to London. She was lucky that the British embassy found her a travelling companion, Lord Hillborough, a diplomat in his mid-forties on his way from Norway to Paris as a courier. He presented Anne as his wife, with his diplomatic passport granting them easier access to post horses for Anne’s carriage on the islands of Zealand, Funen and Jutland. They travelled day and night to catch a ship from Hamburg to London on 3 December. Yet heavy rain and muddy roads meant they did not reach the
city’s Altona Gate until 5:30 in the morning of 4 December. The next steamer to London did not leave for three days. Anne wrote anguished letters home, knowing they were unlikely to arrive before she did.

  Anne and her two servants set sail on 7 December. The passage to London usually took two days but the weather had got even worse. The Colombine had to moor again in nearby Cuxhaven because the two sixty-horsepower engines were making no progress against the wind and waves. During the night the storm became a hurricane, loosening the moorings; the bowsprit smashed against the pier. They stayed in Cuxhaven for five days until the damage was repaired and the weather had improved somewhat. Anne had been seasick in her bunk at night, even in the protected harbour at Cuxhaven. On the open sea, she could not keep down a sip of tea or a morsel of dry bread; even looking at her watch made her vomit. Thomas and Eugénie were no better off.

  The Colombine docked in London at 2:10 in the morning, three days later. Anne fled to the nearby Ship Tavern, which was a dirty-looking place, no help for it, anything better than on board. It was a Sunday, so the coach could not be unloaded that day, costing Anne even more time on the way to her aunt, with no idea whether she was alive or dead. She did not arrive at Shibden Hall until 19 December, almost three weeks after leaving Copenhagen. Found my aunt a great deal better than it was possible to expect from the alarming accounts I had received. She was delighted to see me & had counted upon my coming, that I shall never repent not having hesitated about it.15