Gentleman Jack

by Katy Derbyshire

  Less than eight hours later, Ann Walker arrived in Gavarnie on horseback and the two women repeated Anne’s 1830 excursion to Spain. I saw my old friends again at Torla, and the prison I was to have been sent to at Jaca – it was less gloomy-looking outside, than I expected; and the town seemed good and prosperous. They rode back via Panticosa, the place Anne had originally wanted to reach on foot from Mount Vignemale. The hotel was so full, we slept on the dinnertables in the salle à manger and the guides in the stable. The cooking was French and excellent, the wines Spanish and delicious.13 After five days they arrived back in St Sauveur. While Ann Walker’s journey seems to have agreed with her marvellously, after her extra trip up Mount Vignemale Anne Lister felt strangely out of sorts, perpetual vertigo and sickness very often, particularly on horseback, all but vomiting – my head heavy, myself dull, oppressed. At night she slept badly, dreaming myself among unclimbable mountains.

  Yet things were to get worse still. Henri Cazaux sold the first ascent of Mount Vignemale a second time. He had deceived the Prince de la Moscowa – had told him that I had not gone to the top, was sick on the glacier. This offended Anne and she vowed she would not pay Cazaux till this was cleared.14 After a vain attempt by Charles to convince the prince of the truth, Anne consulted a lawyer in Lourdes, a Monsieur Latapis, about 50, rather rotund au milieu, & of agreeable lawyer-like manners. Told him I should be glad of his assistance, that the grievance was not serious, but that I felt myself un peu blessee and I hoped he could tell me how to set all right.15 The lawyer wrote a declaration for Cazaux to sign, stating that Anne had climbed to the top of the mountain on 7 August 1838. If Cazaux refused, Latapis would represent Anne in court. They drove back in the midst of heavy rainstorms.

  The next day, Anne invited Henri Cazaux to the hostel at Gèdre to talk. Anne ordered wine, bread and cheese and Cazaux made not the least objection to sign it, declared fully and openly that all I and Charles had said was true, and that I had got to the very top, and got up very well too. She then paid his fee and gave him a decent tip to ensure that nobody either destroyed the bottle or raised a higher column than mine. The following day a triumphant Anne sent Charles to the Prince de la Moscowa with the declaration signed by Cazaux. The prince uttered a word against Cazaux which he (Charles) could not repeat to me.16

  Despite all this, Anne read an article in Galignani’s Messenger – an English newspaper published in France – on 21 August 1838, stating: The Prince of Moscowa and his brother, M. Edgar Ney, accompanied by five guides, made a successful ascent on the 11th instant, to the summit of the Vignemale, the second loftiest mountain of the Pyrenees, being only a few feet lower than Mont Perdu, and which has hitherto been thought inaccessible. The thirty-five-year-old Napoléon Ney, Prince de la Moscowa, was not willing to cede the first ascent to a forty-seven-year-old spinster. Yet his rival refused to back down in this round either, and asked the editors of Galignani’s Messenger to insert the following paragraph in the next edition: ‘We noticed, some days ago, the ascent of the Prince de la Moscowa and his brother, M. Edgar Ney, with five guides, to the summit of the Vignemale, hitherto thought inaccessible. We find that an English lady had, 4 days before, ascended with 3 guides to the same summit, which though inaccessible from the French side, is not more difficult of ascent from the Spanish side, towards the east, than high mountains in general. St Sauveur. Mon. evening 26 August 1838.’17

  Anne Lister’s note was indeed published, but as an honourable woman would not want to see her own name in print, her rival was considered the first climber until 1968, and even today the route Anne Lister took to the peak of the Vignemale on Tuesday, 7 August 1838 is called ‘Prince de la Moscowa’. In the meantime, at least, an anticline on Mount Vignemale has been named ‘Col Lady Lister’. In her diary, Anne pretended not to care. I thought not of certificate, nor cared more for mounting Vignemale than Mount Perdu, the ascent of which last mountain nobody believes. What matters it to me? I have made each ascent for my pleasure, not for éclat. What is éclat to me?18

  From the mountains, Anne and Ann continued their travels in the autumn to Nîmes, Montpellier and along the Rhône Valley to Lyon. They were not getting along well. According to Phyllis Ramsden, one bad row was only reconciled two days later. Ann complains that AL makes all arrangements without consulting her. Anne suspected that much of the trouble with AW has its roots in her attitude to money, her great fear of overspending, running short. Had Anne read her own journals, she would have found the exact same concern there; at times she was reduced to thinking of really cheap places to go & live ‘insruectively’ [sic] until her income increases.19

  THE BRONTËS

  Almost seven months after their departure, Anne Lister and Ann Walker arrived at Shibden Hall on 27 November 1838, late at night, during a snowstorm. That whole winter was to be snowy and bitterly cold in Yorkshire. Despite twelve open fireplaces lit around the house, the temperature in Anne’s study on 19 December was -0.8 °C. Another snowstorm raged on 7 January. Appalling windy night. I rocked in my bed. At 5:40 got up. It blew a hurricane. Soon after I got up Ann came. She had had a note from S. Washington to say that many panes were blown out at Cliffe Hill. At noon, Anne and Ann struggled over to Lightcliffe to check on Ann Walker’s aunt and the damage to her house. Large trees had toppled to the ground. It took us an hour of hard work to push back again against the wind.1

  A young Emily Brontë was also struggling through this unusually hard winter. Having grown up in Haworth, only twelve miles away from Halifax, she had been working as a teacher at Law Hill School since the September of 1838. The school was located in the village of Southowram, close to Shibden Hall. It was during that winter that Emily Brontë’s ideas for Wuthering Heights (1847) matured. Jill Liddington (2001) puts forward a convincing theory that the snow-covered heights of the title have far more in common with the countryside around Halifax than they resemble the Yorkshire Dales. The novel’s famous main conflict might even have been inspired by Anne Lister and Ann Walker.

  Emily Brontë was certainly aware of them. The school’s headmistress, Elizabeth Patchett, knew Anne Lister personally and most likely hinted at the local gossip about the two neighbours. Through Law Hill School, Emily met numerous relatives of Ann Walker’s. A walk she often took led her close to Shibden Hall. Perhaps she could have encountered the passionate pedestrian Anne Lister along the way. Ann Walker may have overtaken her on her daily ride to visit her aunt at Cliffe Hill. Emily Brontë no doubt came to her own conclusions about the two women who lived together and sat together in their church pew: they were united by a forbidden love like that between Heathcliff and Cathy.

  Aside from that, the writer must have got wind of the longstanding conflicts over inheritance in the Walker family, which are reflected in the second narrative strand of Wuthering Heights. During that winter, the large family was plagued by a particularly hostile atmosphere as the Priestleys openly distanced themselves from Anne Lister and Ann Walker. Like every great novel, Wuthering Heights does not indulge in interpretations and is not based on a single source of inspiration. Yet Emily Brontë’s impressions of Anne and Ann are clearly written into it. What sex is Heathcliff anyway? Scholars have asked. Even to raise the possibility of a homoerotic Wuthering Heights helps.2 While some interpret Heathcliff as reminiscent of Anne Lister, Emily Brontë may also have been thinking of Ann Walker and her house Cliffe Hill in Lightcliffe.

  Emily must have told her sister Charlotte Brontë about Halifax, because her work too includes motifs from Anne Lister’s life. Charlotte also knew the Clifton Asylum well, the institution run by Stephen Belcombe, in which Eliza Raine was held.3 After one of her visits, Anne noted that her first lover spits perpetually and is so dirty and obstreperous4 that her gowns are now made, as to the sleeves, like a strait waistcoat, so that she can do no mischief, otherwise she would have struck me.5 While Emily Brontë was working on Wuthering Heights, Charlotte was portraying Eliza Raine in Jane Eyre (1847) as the locked-up, mentall
y disturbed Bertha Mason, a Creole woman from Jamaica, a ‘half-caste’ like Eliza Raine. In her second novel, Shirley (1849), Charlotte Brontë took Anne Lister as a model for her titular heroine. The rich landowning woman is not interested in marriage candidates but in good business, uses a male first name – which only changed gender as a result of the publication of the novel itself – and ends up in a pragmatic marriage. Shirley and her real love, her best friend Caroline, marry brothers.

  It was not only the hard winter that made life at Shibden Hall uncomfortable. During Anne and Ann’s absence, only my little study was finished, the rest of the house seemed nearly as we had left it. Workers and building materials had to be obtained to continue the interior, the Norman tower and the new servants’ quarters. It was high time to be at home again.6 Construction on the Listerwick Colliery had also come to a halt. To run the colliery, a three-storey building was needed to store ropes, tools and material, with an office and rooms for the supervisors. All that cost money which Anne did not have. AL overcome with anxiety & remorse, Phyllis Ramsden notes only a week after her return; and then, the next day: AL upset & hysterical abt her debts.7 Since becoming mistress of Shibden Hall, she had invested more than £20,000 in her various undertakings but had not generated any significant income.8

  Once again, Ann Walker came to her aid with a generous cash injection. A– had sent to the bank for three hundred pounds – she had put up ½ in a little parcel & brought it me with a look of pleasure that affected me – I took the parcel with a mere ‘thank you’, adding, ‘I shall not say much.’ That same evening, Anne suggested a new regime for the costs of running Shibden Hall to Ann. To my surprise she said she could not do that and do for her estate, which was in worse order than mine. [...] She cried and said it was very hard – she had no comforts herself. This upset me. [...] I left her about eleven, declining her invitation to sleep with her. My mind was made up to leave her. I longed for a nutshell to live quietly in and yet the thought of her and the parting distressed me.9

  But Anne still could not afford to leave Ann; paying bills. Depressed abt them.10 In February 1839, Ann Walker helped her out with £50, and in May with £100. As Anne did not want to be dependent on these voluntary gifts, she made several attempts to gain unrestricted access to Ann’s assets. She thought Ann’s reason is very weak11 and asked Ann’s lawyer to arrange for AW to make over management of estate to AL. However, Anne not only underestimated her own wife, but also Mr Gray. He informed Anne such a measure was not legal 12 and that the agreement between Mr and Mrs Sutherland was a very different case. I fancy he doubts me a little in this matter. Very well, it was to be let alone.13

  Anne Lister did not blame her lack of business success on her inferior entrepreneurial skills but on political conflicts. The whole of our social system has been strangely altered of late years. The operative classes spent more time at radical meetings and beer-shops14 than at work. Exploited by the new capitalism, workers were beginning to organise and demand rights. A fearful number of people have turned out for increase of wages and formed trade unions, about which Anne Lister spread implausible claims: a member must bind himself by a solemn and dreadful oath to obey their ‘officers’ in everything, even in murdering a bad master.15 She made life difficult for a tenant of one of her inns after union members met there several times. I had told him as plain as I could speak, I would not have them at the Mytholm [Inn], & if he did not understand now, I should take some other means of making him understand – he must make up his mind to give up these meetings or leave the house.16 Anne was happy to persuade her tenants of all sorts of things; indeed, she did not disapprove of child labour. There were three hundred children employed in her wire-drawing mill in Mytholm alone, and children also worked below ground in her mines.

  On 7 May 1839, more than a million signatures were submitted to the House of Commons in support of the People’s Charter, calling for a restriction of the working day to ten hours, the right to a secret ballot for all men over the age of twenty-one, and other demands. That same day, Halifax town council requested troops against its own Chartists. Anne Lister provided accommodation for the third Dragoon Guard at her Northgate Hotel. I should be happy to do anything I could for the town.17 She wrote to Lady Vere Cameron: Heaven defend from Mobocracy! Democracy is not the word – the demos of antiquity was respectable; and the Democrats of old Athens would have spurned their namesakes of this present day.18 Strictly speaking, she was not wrong: The democrats of Athens held slaves, oppressed women and shared their power among only a few free citizens. The Chartists wanted more equality than that. On Whit Monday of 1839, they passed Shibden Hall along Godley Lane on their way to a major demonstration. A brass band played loudly to make sure Anne heard them. There is a deep-rooted feeling of hostility against the dignities of the olden time that is very difficult to deal with. [...] What used to be sacred is no longer so.19 By ‘sacred’ she meant her own privileges.

  By 1839, Anne Lister had made considerable dents in her inheritance and rendered her own home inhospitable with all the building work. Neither politics nor business life, neither her studies nor love had brought her success, happiness or satisfaction. To evade the realisation that she had failed at everything she set her hand to, she took flight one last time: My love of travel is as great as ever.20 Only six months after returning from the Pyrenees, Anne wanted to set out on her long-postponed trip to Russia. Unlike the previous year, Ann Walker made no objections. Anne’s problems had become her problems, and the tensions in her family meant she too was unhappy in Halifax. She and Anne had argued a great deal on their last trip to France but things may well have been even worse at home. Anne advertised for servants prepared to travel through Scandinavia to Russia with them and found Mr and Mrs Gross, a German and his English wife. From Moscow, Anne hoped to visit the Orient. We do not know how much of this plan she revealed to Ann Walker, who imagined Moscow to be their final destination.

  FROM HALIFAX TO MOSCOW

  For their long journey, they packed several trunks full of clothes, shoes and hats for hot and cold weather, for vigorous hikes and for society occasions; they packed wooden crates full of books, a small camping stove and saucepan, cutlery and crockery, a stable travel desk with a built-in inkwell, papers, a letter opener, a ruler and two thermometers. Being a seasoned traveller, Anne gave instructions on how to pack their carriage. It weighed about 17 hundredweight (800 kg), with another 15 hundredweight (700 kg) of luggage on top.

  They set off on 20 June 1839, making a last few purchases in London. Anne bought a compass, a telescope and an extra watch. At her bank, Hammersley, Anne collected her passport, which was issued to her and my niece, Mademoiselle Ann Walker1 and her servants. Bills of credit from Hammersley could be exchanged for local currency at banks in large towns. Anne had therefore instructed her bank in Halifax to keep her account at Hammersley regularly stocked up. An emergency fund of £2,000 was set up with Hammersley’s agent in Hamburg, which would be much easier to access from Moscow. Finally, Anne Lister and Ann Walker had their wills legally witnessed and deposited them with Hammersley.

  Anne and Ann planned to have their carriage lifted onto a steamship in the London docklands at midnight of 2 July 1839 and to go straight from there to Hamburg. But both of them were overcome by unassailable hydrophobia.2 They promptly cancelled the longer ship’s passage and decided on the shortest maritime route, from Dover to Calais, which meant a far longer journey by land. To save at least a little time, they travelled non-stop from Calais to Copenhagen. As in 1833, Anne was shocked by the poor streets of the Kingdom of Hanover; a mere track over the sandy plain, we could not get out of foot’s pace. Peaty, heathery, sandy, marshy moor or common – must be bleak and dreary in winter. Sand, sand, everywhere, in which the coach’s wheels sank. To cross rivers, the horses had to be unharnessed and the carriage had to be loaded onto ferries. They reached Kiel via Oldenburg, Bremen and Hamburg. The captain of their ship to Copenhagen said he had never before seen
such a heavy carriage.3

  They landed in Denmark on 14 July and retired to the Royal Hotel. To Anne’s disappointment, the only 1833 acquaintance of hers in the city was Monsieur de Hagemann, her friend Harriet’s husband. He showed them around the royal palace and the Academy of Fine Arts, where the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen had just taken up residence after forty years in Rome. Anne described him as to Copenhagen what Praxitales was to Athens. Our great regret was that he happened to be from home. An old friend of mine took us to his atelier – to his apartment – into his very study. It was interesting to see the books and papers of such a man lying up and down just as he had left them. After four days they continued their journey as far as Roskilde, where Anne showed Ann the cathedral and introduced her to Harriet de Hagemann.

  Up to that point, Anne Lister had been familiar with all the places they passed through. On 19 July 1839, she, too, entered new territory. The couple visited the old castle in Helsingør, Frederiksborg with its coronation chapel for Danish kings, and spent a long Nordic summer evening clambering around the Kronborg stronghold, where Hamlet is set, though according to Anne there is more fancy than reality.4 The next morning they rented a ship that had space for their travelling carriage and sailed to Helsingborg. They raced along the coast to Gothenburg in thirty hours. Anne found the white beaches of Halland – now a hive of Swedish tourism – dull, but everything Swedish new to us and therefore interesting. How odd to me to find myself with and without tongue! Not one word could we understand or make understood save in broken German.5 Their German servant spoke the language fluently, of course, but Anne was disappointed in him. He served them well in their mobile home, but when it came to dealing with postmasters, customs officers or innkeepers he seemed uncertain and unassertive. His wife, Grotza, however, proved to be a capable maid and also made friends with the staff at all the inns they stayed at, garnering important information – particularly when Anne and Ann stayed at an English-speaking hotel, Mrs Todd’s in Gothenburg.