by Anne Choma
PENGUIN BOOKS
GENTLEMAN JACK
ANNE CHOMA is a writer and historical researcher, known as one of the foremost experts on the life and diaries of Anne Lister. She lives in Yorkshire.
SALLY WAINWRIGHT is a BAFTA award–winning writer and director. Her shows include Gentleman Jack, Happy Valley, Last Tango in Halifax, To Walk Invisible, Scott & Bailey, and At Home with the Braithwaites.
STELLA MERZ is an editor and script executive whose television credits include the series Gentleman Jack.
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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First published in Penguin Books 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Lookout Point Limited
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
All transcriptions are the author’s own using primary source material from the Lister archive via the West Yorkshire Archive Service, Calderdale Collections, Halifax, United Kingdom: (SH:7/ML/E/1-24), (SH:7/ML/TR), (SH:7/ML/MISC), (SH:3/MS), (SH:7/ML/5), (SH:2/M/1-6), (SH:2/CM), (SH:7/JN).
This book is published to accompany the television series entitled Gentleman Jack first broadcast by HBO in 2019. Gentleman Jack is a Lookout Point and BBC Studios production, coproduced with HBO.
Executive producers: Sally Wainwright, Faith Penhale, Laura Lankester, and Ben Irving
Produced by: Phil Collinson
Directed by: Sally Wainwright
Cover art © 2019 by Home Box Office, Inc. All Rights Reserved. HBO® is a service mark of Home Box Office, Inc.
ISBN 9780143134565 (paperback)
ISBN 9780525506379 (ebook)
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This book is dedicated to the LGBT community, and written in remembrance of Anne Lister and Ann Walker, who had the courage and conviction to follow their hearts.
“Let us not lose ourselves in subtleties and sophistries. There is one straightforward path of right, and it is only in swerving from it to this side or that, we become entangled.”
ANNE LISTER, 13TH APRIL 1834
Contents
About the Authors and Editor
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword by Sally Wainwright
Introduction
1. High Society Ambition and Heartbreak in Hastings
2. Shibden Hall, Trespassers, George Playforth’s Death, Miss Walker of Lightcliffe and Coal Talk with Jeremiah Rawson
3. More of Miss Walker, Vere’s Marriage, Beloved Aunt Anne, Anne’s Constipation and Shibden’s Errant Tenants
4. The Demands of Propriety, Progression with Miss Walker, ‘Lady’ Vere Cameron, a New French Lady’s Maid, Money and Coal
5. Early Warning Signs and Sexual Confidence
6. Miss Walker’s Mumbling Kisses and Nervous Inconsistency, John Booth’s Mistake and Suspicious Eliza Priestley
7. A Trip to York and Bad News for Miss Walker
8. The Reverend Ainsworth, Miss Walker’s Insulting Purse Offer, Attacked by a Thug, and an Uncertain End to the Year
9. Miss Walker’s Departure, Catherine Rawson and Plans for ‘Getting Off’
10. Halifax, London, Paris and Beyond
11. Copenhagen
Gentleman Jack: Finale – Standing Before God
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Anne Lister is unique and fascinating. She is known primarily as a diarist, and as a great lesbian lover who recorded her adventures with other women in a secret code, but there are a myriad other things to know about this extraordinary woman, who never fails to ignite the imagination.
Anne was unusually intelligent and remarkably physically fit. She had an enviable passion for life. What she didn’t cram into her tragically short forty-nine years probably wasn’t worth doing. And not only did she live a remarkable life, she recorded it in obsessive detail, every day, from her late teens to the last month before her death, from getting up, to going to bed. It is the diary of a perfectionist with an eye for detail; of a woman with a brilliant mind who was fascinated by the world and everything in it. In the coded parts it is often the stream of consciousness outpourings of a passionate human being who had more mental and physical energy than she knew what to do with.
Anne read as profusely as she wrote, keeping herself well informed in the latest thinking in a bewildering array of subjects. She was a true polymath; someone who could absorb complex information, process it quickly and use it effectively. She was a player, both in her professional life running her estate, and in her private life as a lover of women. Her mental and physical prowess and her love of life are inspiring, but there is another side to Anne Lister. She was an authoritarian landowner who believed firmly in a hierarchical social order. Her estate was modest in size (she was never well off), but it was rich in coal, and she owned mines in which people were employed to work cruelly long hours, enduring inhumane and humiliating conditions. As Suranne astutely observed when we started rehearsing Gentleman Jack, ‘She’s a bit Marmite, this one’. One of the many contradictions about Anne Lister is that she appears so far ahead of her time in having such an admirably healthy attitude towards her homosexuality, whilst being something of a dinosaur (even in her own time) in regarding those from the deprived classes as insensate commodities.
Anne Lister was a survivor in a world that could easily have had no place for her, a world that would have rendered her invisible if she’d had less about her. She was smart enough and confident enough to construct a self-identity that would allow her to live her life just as boldly, ambitiously and freely as she chose. She refused to be ignored or made invisible simply because she was born with a penchant for members of her own sex. As well as her robust physical health, it’s clear (between the lines of the journal) that she enjoyed robust mental health too, and it was perhaps this psychological strength that allowed her, when it was convenient, to turn a blind eye to the hardship of others. Of course these contradictions and complexities are the things that make Anne Lister a gift to a dramatist. As Eliza Priestley points out in the first episode of Gentleman Jack, whether we like Anne Lister or not, ‘She’s very entertaining’.
Thanks to Arthur McRea’s generous legacy to the people of Halifax after John Lister’s death in 1933, Shibden Hall has been part of my life ever since I can remember. As a child I came here all the time with my dad, Harry Wainwright, a keen amateur historian. He taught me how to row on the lake, and now and again we went up to the hall and the folk museum. I loved Shibden then, and I love it still. Something about it entered my soul. That it was once owned by the remarkable Anne Lister, odd as it seems to me now, is an entire coincidence. In the early seventies no one mentioned Anne Lister. I can’t remember how I became aware of her, but as a teenager I started to pick up on the fact that an extraordinary woman had once owned Shibden, but there was something about her that people didn’t like to discuss. Times have changed and we now live in a world where we can celebrate a woman who – almost two hundred years ago – chose to marry another woman. We should also celebrate Anne’s partner, Ann Walker, a shy woman who had the courage to make a conspicuous commitment to the woman she was so dazzled by.
I met Anne Choma fifteen years
ago (through an initiative to try and transcribe the Anne Lister diaries) and we became friends. When Gentleman Jack was green lit by the BBC and HBO I invited her on board as my adviser and she has been a wonderful collaborator. I would like to take this opportunity to thank her, not just for her work, but for her support too. We’ve climbed our own little Vignemale together, and got down the other side, and there were a couple of times when I didn’t think I’d make it, but she kept me going. The diaries are vast and complicated. To transcribe, absorb, and then dramatise the eighteen months we have covered in season one has been a mammoth task that perhaps only those familiar with the diaries will appreciate. One of the hardest tasks during that process was making choices about what not to include – choices which Anne Choma and I debated at length – choices that were invariably painful because the material is all so fascinating. This book therefore has the happy task of complementing the drama by providing further detail and context about this particularly dramatic period in Anne Lister’s extraordinarily colourful life.
SALLY WAINWRIGHT
THE CAFÉ, SHIBDEN PARK
SUNDAY, 7TH OCTOBER, 2018
INTRODUCTION
‘I have taken my fate into my own hands, believe nothing till I tell it to you myself. I know well enough what all the world will think, but all the world may be wrong’
It is a tantalising prospect to think that if Anne Lister had lived just a year or so beyond her forty-ninth birthday, we might have had a photographic image of her that would have shown us what she really looked like. There are a few portraits of her at her home, Shibden Hall in Halifax. There is one of her as a child with a broad, impish face. At first glance, it is not easy to say whether it is a boy or a girl. The hair falls tightly in short curls on either side of the cheeks, parted in the middle, but there is little else in terms of affectation. The clothes are plain and dull, the only concession to colour being the red scarf tied loosely around her neck. The pursed lips and haughty look in the eyes bear a strong resemblance to that of another portrait, of Anne as an adult, which, like the childhood image, shows the hair parted down the middle, with tightly packed side curls and eyebrows thickly drawn. The clothes are now more distinctive. The frilled collar of a white shirt shows itself fleetingly, peeping above a dark great coat, appearing to force the chin upwards in a lofty manner. The image is alluring, perceptively but stylistically drawn. Anne looks both handsome and feminine at the same time. Again, the steely, sideways glare draws you in. This is the unmistakable, iconic image that Anne Lister, mistress of Shibden Hall and the prolific writer of a five million–word diary, has become synonymous with.
Anne was very specific about how she wanted to look. She dressed according to her wishes and for her comfort. She rejected anything that might have been seen as pretty or feminine. She refused to be moulded into an image of nineteenth-century womanhood that was defined by bows, bonnets, frills and ringlets. Generally, she was very critical of the restrictive nature of women’s attire, referring to it as an ‘inconvenience’ and ‘incommodious.’ She complained about the tyranny of large bonnets at public meetings ‘over which nobody can see, and which too often prevents the unfortunate wearer herself from either seeing or hearing clearly’ (27TH FEBRUARY 1831).
In 1817, she decided to always wear black clothing, only occasionally making a concession to this rule when propriety demanded it. It was a choice that instantly set her apart from her contemporaries. Anne wore a worsted great coat, a plain black dress, and a sturdy pair of black-gaiter, leather boots. When she walked through the narrow streets of Halifax she cut an unusual figure. She was 5 feet, 4½ inches tall and walked at a great pace with an imposing upright stance. She was flat-chested and she weighed a modest 8 stone, 4¼ pounds. Her voice was deep. It was said that physically she presented herself in a ‘gentlemanly’ manner. She was often called names and jeered at by people who she would refer to as ‘vulgar’ or common. The nickname ‘Gentleman Jack’ was attributed to Anne decades after death, passed down through Halifax folklore. To date no evidence has emerged from her journals to suggest that Anne herself was ever aware of it.
Being mis-gendered was a common occurrence for her however. ‘I, in my pelisse attract much attention,’ she said, having once been mistaken for a man three times in one day when travelling through Strasbourg (Travel journal, 22ND JUNE 1827). She was reminded once that a post-boy on the coach from Rochdale to Halifax said that she looked like a ‘man in petticoats’ (28TH JUNE 1833).
Courting unwanted attention, for being herself, was something she had grown used to. She writes in her childhood diary on 27th November 1806, aged 15, of the time she ‘went to Mr Stopford’s 1st concert in a habit shirt and was much stared at and well quizzed as an original – care despised on my part’. On another occasion, the Halifax vicar’s wife, Mrs Musgrave, commented on Anne’s ‘thick pickles – tallowed boots’, forcing Anne to defend herself, saying that she ‘had no petticoats so short to take up, as they, ladies had’, because she was ‘too independent’ (25TH JANUARY 1833). Years later, at Shibden Hall, Anne remarked how ‘evidently astonished’ the visiting brother of her architect Mr Harper had been at the sight of her in her unconventional ‘costume’ (22ND MARCH 1836).
Privately, the hurt cut deep – ‘It is those who have known me least who have done me the most injustice,’ she said (2ND AUGUST 1833). Whilst many people in local society viewed her with suspicion and were not so forgiving of her manner and ways, some of them were kinder. She wrote of people in Halifax having become accustomed to her manner and ‘oddities’. A Halifax acquaintance jokingly said, in front of Anne, how the world could not do with two Anne Listers, and that one moving in such an ‘eccentric orbit’ was quite enough (11TH FEBRUARY 1835).
Anne was born in Halifax in 1791 into a modest, land-owning Yorkshire family. She was an eccentric child, full of energy and mischief. She was so unusual that her mother Rebecca and her father Jeremy struggled to know how to look after her. When she was supposed to be tucked up safely in her bed asleep at night she would escape from her maid through her bedroom window into the nearest town to see ‘bad’ things. However, her academic ability was never in doubt. She was clever, described by a teacher at her first school in Ripon as a ‘singular’ child. She excelled in mathematics and in reading the classics, counting Virgil, Homer and Tacitus amongst some of her favourite writers of antiquity. She was precocious enough aged eleven to call herself a ‘young genius’, as though anticipating that she was destined for something far greater than a life of predictability and conventionality (3RD FEBRUARY 1803).
In 1805, when she was fourteen years old, the decision was made to send her away to Manor House boarding school in York, with the hope that the institutional discipline might be able to do something to harness her out-of-control energy. The plan did not work, as there was another side to Anne that singled her out as being different, and which impacted on her stay and her behaviour at the school. Physically and emotionally she was attracted to other girls. At the Manor House school she embarked upon her first sexual relationship with another girl, called Eliza Raine. Soon she was asked to leave the establishment, not only for her deepening (and distracting) bond with Eliza, but also for her disruptive behaviour towards the other girls.
Over the next few years, Anne began to spend more and more time with her aunt Anne and uncle James at Shibden Hall, a pretty, rural estate on the outskirts of Halifax. She flourished under their love and care. She began a rigorous period of learning and her days became structured and meaningful. She took regular strenuous exercise, making sure that she timed her daily walks. Soon she began to involve herself in the management of the estate, becoming knowledgeable about farming. She read everything she could to improve her knowledge. She became as hands-on as possible by physically working on the land with the workmen. In 1815, aged twenty-four, she moved in permanently, settling into Shibden’s south-facing Blue Room.
Fortune favoured her. In
1826, when Uncle James died, Anne inherited Shibden. Having displayed an entrepreneurial flair for estate management, all of the land and the income derived from it was eventually to become hers. Though full ownership would not materialise until 1836, on the death of her aunt and father, both of whom had been given a life interest to live at the hall and receive income from the estate, it was a milestone decision that was to change the course of her life.
Anne’s inheritance was not an unexpected piece of news, though. The ambition to become heiress had been part of a long and carefully orchestrated plan. In 1822, when her father told her that if he outlived his brother (Anne’s Uncle James), he would build another archway under the road to the house, Anne swiftly executed her first plan of action to protect and rubber-stamp her future inheritance. She took the opportunity to expose her father’s costly, ill-thought-out re-modelling ambitions by explaining the folly of the idea to her uncle, who she immediately asked to ‘sign the Will’ [in her favour], so as to ‘make all safe’ [for her] (8TH JULY 1822).
As Aunt Anne and her father Jeremy still drew income from the estate, it meant that Anne’s access to money was restricted. For many years following the death of her uncle, she remained reliant upon her friends and on her father to keep financially afloat. Frustratingly, she had to defer to him for money whenever she wanted to make improvements to the house. Anne had to count the pennies and pounds, balance her books, and re-hem her old clothes. She recognised, though, that in a society which had very limited roles for women – usually as a wife, a mother, a governess, or an old maid – that it was her fortuitous inheritance that enabled her to avoid what she called the narrow world of domestic life.
Anne’s only surviving sibling was her younger sister Marian. Unable to compete with Anne’s business prowess or her intellect, Marian was very much in her big sister’s shadow. She was jealous of Anne’s inheritance and remained so for many years. Through the early deaths of her three youngest brothers in childhood, and of her eldest brother Sam when he was serving in the army, Anne had escaped the restrictive inheritance laws that favoured the male line. Had Sam lived he would have been the natural heir to Shibden, and under those circumstances Anne might have become reliant upon him for lodgings and money.
