The Secret Diaries Of Miss Anne Lister Read online

  Helena Whitbread was born in 1931 in Halifax, West Yorkshire, into an Irish-Catholic family. Due to ill-health, her grammar-school education was cut short at the age of fourteen. After a series of unskilled jobs, she married and had four children. Always conscious of her unfinished education, in her thirties she began a programme of self-education via the local College of Further Education, which qualified her to enter the Civil Service. In 1975 she enrolled in the Open University and in 1976 went to Bradford University to study full-time. After gaining a Joint Honours degree in Politics, Literature and the History of Ideas, she went on to study for a Postgraduate Certificate of Education. Once qualified, she was employed as a teacher by Calderdale Education Department and also began to work on the Anne Lister journals. The two books of edited extracts which resulted from her work are published in Britain and America. Now retired, Helena is working on a biography of Anne Lister.

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-0-748-12571-5

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Helena Whitbread 1988, 2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  ‘I know my own heart & I know men. I am not made like any other I have seen. I dare believe myself to be different from any others who exist.’

  Rousseau, Confessions, Volume I

  ‘I might exclaim with Virgil, In tenui labor, but I am resolved not to let my life pass without some private memorial that I may hereafter read, perhaps with a smile, when Time has frozen up the channel of those sentiments which flow so freshly now.’

  Anne Lister, Friday, 19 February 1819

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1816

  1817

  1818

  1819

  1820

  1821

  1822

  1823

  1824

  Notes

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  It is to Dr Betteridge and his excellent team of archivists that my first debt of gratitude must be paid. They have given unstintingly of their time, expertise, good humour and friendly advice throughout the period I was engaged in actively researching this book. My grateful thanks to them and also to the staff of the Reference Library, next to the archive department, whose help was as willingly forthcoming when the archives were closed.

  To my many friends and colleagues in secondary education in Calderdale whom I have met whilst working as a supply teacher, I can only say thank you for your interest in the Anne Lister saga. Support and encouragement has come from many quarters, not least from language teachers when I was struggling with some rather puzzling quotations in French, Latin and Greek which occur in Anne’s scholarly journals. My own deficiencies in those areas have been nicely camouflaged, thanks to their help.

  To Ruthie Petrie and Rosalind Smith I extend my thanks and appreciation. As my editors and advisers at Virago Press they have guided me and helped to shape the book into a manageable publication.

  A special thank you to Caroline Davidson whose own work on The World of Mary Ellen Best brought about our friendship. Her constructive advice, her scholarly interest in my work, and her professional expertise in, and knowledge of, the publishing world have been immensely beneficial to me.

  My immediate family, of course, have been intimately involved in the whole proceedings from the start. To Rachel and her friend, Ruthanne Gregory, I give my thanks and love for their patient research undertaken in York on my behalf. To my son, Philip, for his work in Calderdale archives at times when I was unable to go myself and for his continuing interest and support in my literary activities, many thanks are due and my very best hopes and wishes for his own literary work. To my two other daughters, Claire and Elizabeth, go my thanks for their patience and tolerance. Immersed as they are in busy family and business lives, with all the attendant problems such lives bring, they have nevertheless been a willing and sympathetic audience when I have expounded on my literary problems, of which there have been not a few. Lastly, a very special thank you to my husband, Bob, whose role in the whole undertaking has been of crucial importance in enabling me to work as freely as I have done. Role-reversal situations are no longer a novelty in these times of mass unemployment and the professionalization of women, but degrees of willingness and efficiency must vary. I can only say that the smooth running of the domestic scene has, for the last few years, been entirely due to his efforts and has been the most important factor of all in enabling me to embark, somewhat belatedly, on my writing career, the first fruits of which lie in the present publication.

  My thanks go to my editor at Virago, Donna Coonan, and my agent, Caroline Davidson, for their help and guidance in the preparation of this new edition. It remains for me to say that throughout the whole undertaking, historical and textual accuracy have been an over-riding concern; I have placed it equally in importance with my desire to elucidate the life of a courageous and extraordinary woman.

  To my daughter, Rachel, whose

  love, care and support throughout

  the ‘Anne Lister years’ has been,

  and continues to be, invaluable.

  INTRODUCTION

  In their entirety, the journals of Anne Lister run to four million words. They are contained in two thin blue exercise books and twenty-four small hardback volumes. The journals evolve over a number of years: although they begin in 1806, it isn’t until 1808 that the entries become more detailed and Anne introduces the rudiments of what is eventually to become an elaborate code – her ‘crypthand’ as she called it – the use of which allowed her the freedom to describe her intimate life in great detail.

  The idea of using an esoteric code appears to have had its roots in Anne’s burgeoning knowledge of the Greek language: she mingles Greek letters with other symbols of her own devising. She felt safe in the belief that no one would be able to decipher the coded passages, and as her confidence grew, they became longer and much more explicit when dealing with those aspects of her life which could not be written about in ‘plainhand’.

  The history of the concealment of the journals is a story in itself. Whether or not Anne Lister intended to destroy them before her death is a debatable point. In 1840, her premature death in Russia, at the age of forty-nine, precluded any such decision on her part. Her journals remained intact at Shibden Hall for a period of almost sixty years until, in 1887, John Lister, the last remaining member of the Lister family to occupy Shibden Hall, decided to publish some of the plainhand extracts in the local paper under the title ‘Social and Political Life in Halifax Fifty Years Ago’. The crypthand passages had not yet been deciphered and their content was still unknown.

  However, the secrets buried within Anne’s cryptic code were about to be discovered. John Lister and his friend, Arthur Burrell, a Bradford schoolteacher and antiquarian, decided to set themselves the task of attempting to unravel the code. What they found was, to them, so disturbing that Burrell thought they ought to burn the journals immediately. What was it that so shocked these two educated Victorian gentlemen? Arthur Burrell put it into words some years later when he wrote tha
t: ‘The contents of this cipher… is an intimate account of homosexual practices among Miss Lister and her many “friends”; hardly any one of them escaped her.’

  It was not merely the revelation of his predecessor’s sexual activities with members of her own sex that so dismayed John Lister. He also worried that local scandal about his own sexual orientation would be brought to the notice of the higher authorities. In that era, the late 1890s, homosexual acts between men were punishable by law, as the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 demonstrated.

  Despite Burrell’s advice that the journals be burnt, John Lister was reluctant to destroy such an important historical document. His antiquarian instincts could not allow him to countenance such an act of vandalism and, instead, he replaced the journals behind one of the panels in Shibden Hall, where they remained until after his death in 1933. He never published another word from what he now saw as the infamous document which his predecessor, Anne Lister, had left behind.

  Shibden Hall fell into the possession of Halifax Town Council after John Lister died. He had become bankrupt some years before. A friend and Halifax philanthropist, Mr A. S. McCrea, purchased the estate and gave the grounds to the people of Halifax as a public park, but stipulated that John Lister could remain in the Hall for the remainder of his life, after which it would revert to the Borough of Halifax for the enjoyment of the townspeople.

  Prior to its opening as a museum in June 1934, an inventory of all the Lister documents was made and the journals made the transition from private hands to public property. Inevitably questions were raised about the coded passages. The town clerk of Halifax wrote to Arthur Burrell in an attempt to clear up the mystery, but he received a reluctant reply. The only person who could provide the answer was initially unwilling to reveal the clues to the code: ‘You must excuse my hesitations: I am not in full possession of what old Halifax scandal knows about Miss Lister; and as I say, I do not want to be the means of allowing a very unsavoury document to see even a partial light.’ He did, however, have scruples about withholding the information and went on to say: ‘At the same time I have, as a student, the feeling that someone (and preferably someone in Halifax, and a Librarian) should be, so to speak, armed with a knowledge of what the cipher contains.’ A copy of the key to the code was placed in the possession of Edward Green, Halifax’s chief librarian at the time, who kept it locked in his safe.

  The task of cataloguing and indexing the Shibden Hall muniments fell to his daughter, Muriel, a young woman who was working towards her librarianship qualifications. Her father had given her a copy of the key to the code used by Anne Lister in her journals but for her dissertation Muriel chose to work on the letters of Anne Lister instead. As she said in an interview with Jill Liddington (whose book, Presenting the Past: Anne Lister of Halifax 1791–1840, tells the story of how different historians have written about Anne Lister):

  I don’t think my father knew much about Anne Lister, that she was a lesbian or anything. And I never mentioned it. We didn’t talk about it much in those days. It would have cast a slur on the good name of the Lister family if it were known then, so I didn’t put it into my Letters at all. It doesn’t come into the Letters really.

  A twenty-year period of comparative silence followed until 1958, when Dr Phyllis Ramsden, a historian who lived in Halifax, and her London friend, Vivien Ingham, obtained permission to work jointly on the journals. No major publication resulted from their research, although Phyllis Ramsden did attempt to write a book about Anne’s travels. Vivien Ingham focused on Anne’s adventurous mountain-climbing, ‘Anne Lister in the Pyrenees’, while Phyllis Ramsden wrote a more general paper entitled ‘Anne Lister’s Journal (1817–1840)’.

  But, here again, the secret of Anne’s sexuality, although known to the researchers, was carefully concealed. The authorities in Halifax, worried about scandal, insisted on vetting any material which Ramsden and Ingham might wish to publish. Dr Ramsden herself cooperated in the cover-up by stating that that the coded passages in Anne’s journals were ‘excruciatingly tedious to the modern mind… and of no historical interest whatsoever.’ Ramsden’s dismissal of what has since been recognised as a unique contribution to the history of women’s sexuality in the early nineteenth century was somewhat redeemed by her colleague, Vivien Ingham, who wrote that anyone who wished to undertake serious work on the life of Anne Lister could not afford to ignore the contents of the coded passages in her journals.

  The history of the secret sexual life of Anne Lister remained behind an iron curtain of conspiracy by those ‘in the know’ – a handful of Halifax town officials and one or two scholars. That situation was about to change. The liberalising decade of the 1960s saw the introduction of the Sexual Offences Act (1967), which legalised homosexual activity so long as it was conducted in private and between consenting adults. The following two decades saw an extension of this climate of toleration and, as the homosexual community became more visible and vocal in their demand for equal rights, it became possible to speak, or write, openly about the lives of lesbian or gay people.

  It was in the early 1980s that I first came across the Anne Lister journals, a serendipitous discovery that radically altered the course of my life. I had completed my degree and wanted to carry on studying with a view to publication. Due to work and home commitments I decided to look close to home for a suitable subject – one which I could fit around the other demands in my life.

  Anne Lister of Shibden Hall was vaguely familiar to me as a woman of some importance in Halifax during her lifetime. I also knew that some of her letters had been published from time to time in the local newspaper. Apart from these scanty facts, I knew nothing about her. I thought it would be interesting to know more about her life, so I visited the archive department of my home-town library. The Anne Lister letters were available on microfilm and, given my incompetence with machines of any kind, the young archivist obligingly placed the reel on the reader for me.

  What I saw made me consider the complexities of the work I was about to undertake. On many of the letters Lister had used up every bit of available space by turning the paper around at a ninety-degree angle and writing across the original lines of the page. This technique formed a trellis-like effect which, in addition to the small handwriting, looked rather daunting. As I sat staring dubiously at the difficult material before me, the archivist asked, ‘Did you know she kept a journal?’ It has since amazed me how those seven small words set me on a literary and academic journey which, to date, has lasted almost three decades.

  The microfilm reels were changed over and the next sight to meet my eyes was a coded page of Anne Lister’s journal. If you turn to the example included in this book, you might be able to gauge what my feelings were when confronted with those lines and lines of unintelligible symbols – a sight much more puzzling than the trellised letters. But I was hooked. Curiosity, allied to the thrill of an intellectual challenge, gripped me. What was this woman, living in the early nineteenth century, hiding? I there and then decided that, if at all possible, I would unravel the mysteries concealed in the pages of Anne Lister’s journals. I had found my research project!

  The extant journals, so I believed in the initial stages of my research, began in March 1817 (I was to discover earlier journals some years later). Finding that the key to the code was available, I obtained a copy of it and photocopied the first fifty pages of the 1817 journal to take home with me. From then on, for the next three years, I visited the archives weekly, collected fifty pages each time, and made it my next week’s work to read and decode the material. As I worked through the journal I became very aware that Anne Lister’s life, which was so rich, historically, and complex, was far too valuable to be buried in the archives, hidden in an esoteric code. But there were many textual difficulties to overcome if I wished, as I did, to place Anne Lister’s journals before a reading public.

  When I began the collation of the two types of scripts, I found Anne’s handwriting almost as difficult to
decipher as the code had been. This was particularly the case when she wanted to economise on paper by cramming the pages as fully as possible with very small handwriting, or when she was writing in a hurry or in a state of great emotion. Her usual method, especially whilst travelling, was to jot down memoranda in small note-books, on odd pieces of paper or, occasionally, a slate and then write it up in her journal wherever she happened to be lodged. I endeavoured to place her at the time of writing by putting the location at the head of each entry along with the date.

  Anne’s spelling of some words can be seen, by today’s standards, as idiosyncratic; for example, ‘shewed’ for ‘showed’; ‘sopha’ for ‘sofa’; ‘poney’ for ‘pony’, etc. Where each of these spellings first occurs, I have indicated this by ‘sic’ and thereafter left her spellings as they are. Anne also used to vary the spellings of some of her friends’ names; for instance, Miss Brown/Browne. I have left these unchanged.

  Almost every other word written by Anne in plainhand is abbreviated, a habit which, while economical on paper, makes the reading of the text difficult. There have been other obstacles to surmount in presenting the diaries; for instance, the use of a dash in place of a full stop at the end of a sentence; the lack of paragraphs when Anne passed from one subject to another in the same diary entry; the non-use, on many occasions, of the personal pronoun, and other small difficulties too tedious to enumerate.

  The coded sections posed different problems. A superficial scrutiny of these texts gives no indication whatsoever of any form of punctuation and, to add to the obfuscation which Anne obviously intended, there is no space between individual words. Only when every symbol in each extract had been decoded could a sense of what was written emerge. Even then, it had to be the decision of the decoder to impose a structure on the sequence of words that emerged – to define where words and sentences begin and end. Italics have been used throughout the text to distinguish the ‘crypthand’ passages from the ones written in ‘plainhand’.