by Anne Choma
1ST JUNE 1832
Climbing the tree in an attempt to scare the carrion crows out of their nest for the Lawton’s gamekeeper to shoot, George had been shot himself. Anne was determined to get the best treatment for him, asking the doctor, Charles Cobb, ‘to stay here all night if he thought there was the least occasion’ to aid George’s recovery. Later, curiosity prompted her to examine George’s hat: ‘16 or 18 shot had entered it – of the 5 or 6 that had entered his head, none of any consequence but that that had entered the eye’.
George died three days later:
Found the pulse fluttering, perspiration on the skin . . . at 5.50 the rattling (like the gentle boiling of water) came on. At 6.5/11 – the poor fellow expired without a sigh – he seemed to suffer no pain . . . Mr Charles Cobb came about or soon after 7 – the head to be opened.
3RD JUNE 1832
Anne was upset, but not squeamish. Having dissected a human head during her time in Paris, she was comfortable with the sight of blood, and fascinated by the workings of the brain. She stayed to watch George’s autopsy, having insisted to Dr Cobb that, as George’s employer, she should be present over ‘two of the men’ from the estate. She suggested that Burnett, Lawton Hall’s female servant, should attend too. Dr Cobb agreed to her demands, and the detailed post-mortem instigated by her, recorded on 4th June, reads almost as if Anne were holding the scalpel, or bistouri herself:
Mr Cobb had sawn and prized off the upper hemisphere of the cranium, and laid open the brain in ¼ hour. The whole surface including a little bit over the right eye covered with coagulated blood, and the ventricles full of liquid blood. Mr Cobb thought 6oz at least coagulated, and liquid in the ventricles. Could not find the shot. It had made a large opening through the orbit and must be hid deep in the brain – impossible to have saved life in such a case – of this I was quite satisfied. The cap of the skull was then replaced and the skin so neatly sewn over it, that all looked as if nothing had been disturbed.
4TH JUNE 1832
Anne recorded in her diary how, that day, George’s 72-year-old father walked nearly sixteen miles across the Yorkshire Wolds to see his son’s body. Broad-shouldered in times of crisis, she treated him with great sensitivity:
Said everything I could most comforting (no hint at the examination) . . . mentioned that ¾ years wages would be due on the 19th – gave him £5 for the present, and his watch and all that poor George had here . . . did not pay him more now not knowing whether George might have left any debts behind him . . . would have £10 more to receive – would send him an account.
4TH JUNE 1832
Finally, Anne gave the Langton servant, Burnett, a note containing the message for George’s coffin plate: ‘George Playforth died on the 1st June 1832 aged 31.’ It was a rare mistake for someone so obsessed by detail and accuracy. George had died on the 3rd June. It seems as though Anne had taken the date of his death to be the day he was shot and lost consciousness, and not the day he drew his last breath.
Back at Shibden, Anne turned her energies towards the renovation of her hall and estate. For some time she had envisioned building a chaumière – a kind of rustic thatched hut that she had admired during her travels in France – on her land. She liked the idea of a cosy space into which she could retreat when she wanted a break from working outside. It might be nice to take a nap, or read the newspaper. She started to make definite plans and consult with workmen over where the hut might go.
She also began to think seriously about how she could improve the monetary value of her land. By the 1830s, coal mining had become a hugely important and profitable industry in Halifax, and Anne had hopes that the dormant family pit, Listerwick, could be brought back into operation. Knowing she would need expert advice before plotting her next move, she determined to approach her coal steward tenant, James Holt, from Highroyds in Northowram.
Though Anne appeared to be settling back into estate life at Shibden, she frequently reminded those around her that she would only be staying for as long as it took to plan her next foreign adventure.
Anne had proven that she could manage lengthy periods abroad in conjunction with the profitable running of Shibden’s 400 acres. With her elderly father now little more than a sleeping partner, she was able to deal with estate matters in a way that suited her, running things remotely from whichever part of the world she was in. She left orders with her staff via a relentless trail of letters. She even roped in her aunt to make sure the workmen were planting the right hedges and sowing the right seeds.
During a trip to York in 1831, she wrote to Aunt Anne to check up on how her tenant, Jonathan Mallinson, was getting on with the job of renovating Shibden’s back room. Anne’s physical absence did not mean that her presence should not be felt:
I hope Mallinson would quite understand about his job in the back room. There is to be a brick wall of a brick length in breadth built across the room from the pillar. A new window of two lights nineteen inches wide each, to open sash-wise, and a door to communicate with your room, and the back room, or that part of it taken in is to be lowered as much as it can be conveniently – six or eight inches at least, and is to have a boarded floor . . .
Let them begin this part of the job earlyish in the morning, and all may be pulled down and made up again at night.
26TH JUNE 1831
It wasn’t uncommon for Anne to take advantage of the flexibility of her tenants and their skills. Mallinson was also the publican of her inn, the Stag’s Head. On this occasion, however, he appeared to have overstretched himself. Anne wrote to her aunt again on 7th July: ‘Do pray tell Mallinson he must begin the job as soon as he can, and stick to it, that is not leave it on any pretense whatever, till it is done.’
Until now, the Shibden estate had been run using methods of coal mining, stone-quarrying and agriculture that went back centuries. Anne knew that to fully capitalise on her land and its wider tenanted farms in a rapidly changing landscape bursting with industrial competition, she would need to embrace the new methods of her mill-building, pit-sinking rivals. She also knew that to keep up, she would have to seek the advice of professional men who were better versed than she was in the latest business trends.
When her long-standing land steward, James Briggs, died a few months after her return from Hastings, Anne took the opportunity to rethink exactly how her estate would be managed. Dutifully, she had attempted to visit Mr Briggs before he passed away:
Note from Mrs Briggs with my rent book to say Mr Briggs easier but no better otherwise – would like to see me if I chose and Mrs Briggs thought seeing him would not disturb him . . . down the old bank to Mr Briggs – in much pain – in bed – not well enough to see me.
30TH JUNE 1832
Even before Briggs became ill, Anne had her eye on his potential successor. Samuel Washington of Fenny Royd also managed the nearby Walker estate at Lightcliffe. Following a few glasses of wine and a conversation about the possibility of building ‘£15-a-year houses in the Sheep Croft for £200 each’, Anne wrote that she had given Washington ‘good hope of being my steward, should anything happen to Briggs’ (26TH JULY 1832).
The day of her visit to ailing Mr Briggs, who finally died some months later on 17th September, was packed with other errands. Anne’s trips into Halifax always were; they are a testament to both her mental stamina and her physical fitness. She walked everywhere. She broke up the endless meetings with surveyors, solicitors and tenants by calling on friends and catching herself up on political news which, in the summer of 1832, was dominated by the impending Reform Bill. ‘Stocks had been haranguing his party for 2 hours today in the assembly room – a radical firebrand sort of speech against present institutions,’ she reported on the 29th June 1832.
On her return home from the visit to Briggs, she managed to ‘fit in’ a translation of Theocritus, then order surgical implements for future anato
mical studies from Rogers in Sheffield:
Six French bistouries with tortoiseshell folding handles at 3/6 each, and 2 scalpels with ditto at 2/, and 2 best lancets at 2/6, and one Russian leather case containing the four best razors at 21/, two ditto containing 2 best razors at 11/, and a . . . pruning knife. Will you be so good as to let me know if you have made knife and fork and spoon and corkscrew all shutting up in one handle, and at what prices?
29TH JUNE 1832
The pace at which Anne’s brilliant mind worked had its drawbacks. She often felt frustrated by what she judged to be the glacial tempo of the majority of her day-to-day interactions. It was important to her that the professional men she employed had a level of intelligence that could match her own.
Samuel Washington, her soon-to-be land steward, fitted the bill perfectly. Living with his wife, Hannah, and young family less than a mile from Shibden Hall, he was both sharply intelligent and of sound moral fibre, a characteristic that Anne looked for in all her employees. He was a skilled draughtsman, able to produce the accurate and precise estate maps that would be vital to her ambitious remodelling plans. Over the coming years, his services would become indispensable to Anne.
‘Your letter is just like yourself – sensible, agreeable, and to the purpose’
Lady Gordon’s description of Anne Lister fitted her friend perfectly. One of the many reasons people sought Anne’s company was because her brisk sense of purpose was matched by a deep-rooted optimism. Periods of melancholy, though they occurred, were never lengthy. Anne was a believer in the power of positive thinking, long before it became fashionable. She trusted that all would work out for the best in the end and everyone, she felt, had the power to be their own ‘fortune teller and . . . fortune maker’. ‘Providence leaves us free,’ she wrote, ‘tis we enthral ourselves’ (7TH JANUARY 1832).
Anne could also be intimidatingly measured and cool. Arguments in Hastings frequently ended when Vere Hobart stormed out of the room in tears, frustrated by the calm dignity that Anne was able to maintain in the most fraught moments.
Though, of course, as events in Hastings had proven, Anne was not always as in control as she liked to appear. The raw emotion of her tear-stained diary pages gives an insight into what she referred to as her bouts of ‘womanish weakness’. But what Anne was able to do was critically appraise her mistakes – and she used this ability to help herself move on efficiently, be it from a broken heart or an erroneous business decision. She was skilled at disarming those who confronted her in either situation, too.
Writing her journal gave Anne the opportunity to distil and analyse the subtle detail of her own life. Between her straightforward, if heavily abbreviated, English (plain hand) and passages of secret code (crypt-hand) she had the freedom to catalogue every detail of her public and private life. Anne’s diaries were more than an aide-memoire; she used their wealth of data to improve herself.
There was much material for Anne to reflect on after her return from Hastings. She needed time at home to process the ‘tyranny of disappointment’ she had felt over Vere, and recover from the embarrassment of her visits to Lady Gordon and Mariana Lawton.
Though Anne would never allow her pursuit of love to be thwarted by fear of refusal or social constraints, the failure of Hastings was a watershed moment in her life. Vere’s rejection of her represented to Anne a rejection by high society, and it brought about a significant change in her thinking regarding what she wanted for her future.
Anne’s return to Shibden, though to a degree a decision that was forced upon her, offered the new possibility of finding a love interest closer to home. The reinvention of her ancestral seat was part of a bid to establish financial and emotional stability on her own terms and ‘within her compass’ (29TH APRIL 1832).
There would, of course, be challenges to making a match on home turf. It was an audacious plan that required next-level confidence. In Hastings, Anne’s failure to win Vere had taken place behind the door of 15 Pelham Crescent. She had been hundreds of miles from the eyes of Halifax society. At closer range, she knew she would be subject to scrutiny and gossip. If things went wrong it would be not only excruciating but excruciatingly public. Even though Anne had never tried to mask her ‘oddity’, she fully understood that diplomacy and discretion were crucial if she were to live as she wanted to.
Mariana Lawton had been a consistent figure in Anne’s romantic life for nearly twenty years. Now, as the two women approached middle age, they acknowledged the changes to their relationship the years had wrought. Anne put it succinctly when she wrote that ‘nobody felt at forty as at fifteen’. But though things between them had grown less ardent, Mariana maintained her role as chief advice-giver to Anne in 1832. She told Anne that her ‘unsettled life’ was having a bad effect on her temperament and resulting in her ‘odd and particular’ treatment of others. ‘I am as I am,’ Anne responded stoutly. ‘How can I change myself all at once?’ (3RD MAY 1832).
Mariana also believed that Anne would never settle permanently at Shibden. Anne’s response reveals the degree to which her decision rested upon finding love: ‘A great deal will, and must, depend on that someone known or unknown that I still hope for as the comfort on my evening hour.’
In fact, by the time Mariana was dispensing advice, Anne already had her eye on the wealthy heiress of a neighbouring estate.
Anne Lister and Ann Walker had met several times before 1832. References to the Walkers of Lightcliffe – a grand estate near Shibden – are scattered through Anne’s diaries of the 1820s. Her early descriptions of the family, and particularly Ann, are not auspicious. There is certainly nothing to hint at the hugely significant role Miss Walker would go on to play in Anne’s life. ‘A stupid, vulgar girl indeed’, was how Anne described her on 18th June 1822. Later, along with her sister, Elizabeth, she was ‘deadly stupid’ (19TH AUGUST 1822).
Nor did the other Listers seem particularly enamoured of the Walkers. Despite their geographical proximity, the families were not on regular calling terms. It may have been that the ‘old money’ Listers of ancient (if shabby) Shibden believed themselves to be socially above the ‘new money’ Walkers, whose enormous wealth and sparkling new houses derived from recent trade. Anne recollected encountering Miss Walker, her elder sister and their mother in the aftermath of a carriage accident that had occurred on Shibden land in 1820. The Walkers were offered a cup of tea and a lantern to light their way home, but not friendship.
In 1832, the reacquaintance between Anne and Ann began very respectably. On 6th July 1832, eight weeks after Anne’s return from Hastings, Miss Walker accompanied her relatives, Mr and Mrs Atkinson, on a chance social call at Shibden. ‘Received them and was very civil,’ wrote Anne of the unremarkable afternoon. Reading the day’s diary entry more closely, there is to be found a tiny hint of flirtation in a joke she makes with Miss Walker ‘about travelling’ together.
A week later, Anne returned the social call. At Lightcliffe she found Ann in the company of members of her wider family, Anne’s own friends, Mr and Mrs Priestley, as well as the Atkinsons.
Anne was given a tour of the three properties on the enormous Lightcliffe estate. Lidgate, where Ann lived, was cosier and more contained than the ostentatiously grand Cliff Hill, home to Ann’s aunt (who was also named Ann), and the Walkers’ flashiest property, Crownest. Anne did not seem overawed, limiting her comments on the visit to a few journal lines. She preferred to write of her efforts to avoid the heavy shower that came on as she walked home ‘along the fields and by Lower Brea’ and record that for the rest of the afternoon she read the first volume of Voltaire’s letters, in French.
Born in 1803, Ann Walker was twelve years younger than Anne Lister. She does not seem to have had a happy childhood. Her father, William Priestley told Anne in 1822, was a ‘madman’, who had been ‘spoilt all his life’ and who ‘blackguarded [ill-treated] his wife and daughters’ (9TH JULY 1822).
Whether this was the source of the low self-esteem and anxiety which dogged Ann Walker throughout her adult life, we cannot know. It was Mrs Priestley who expanded on the nature of Miss Walker’s mental illness to Anne some years later:
Miss Walker’s illness likely to be insanity – her mind warped on religion. She thinks she cannot live – has led a wicked life, etc. Had something of this sort of thing occasioned by illness at seventeen, but slighter. The illness seems to in fact a gradual tendency to mental derangement.
28TH AUGUST 1828
In fact only a few months after this conversation Mrs Priestley entered into the subject again with Anne about Miss Walker’s mental health, saying that if nothing was done to help the girl that she feared she would ‘end in idiocy’ (6TH NOVEMBER 1828).
By the 1830s, with her sister Elizabeth married to Captain George Mackay Sutherland and living in Scotland, Ann Walker had little to occupy her at Lidgate. She looked forward to occasional visits from relative Catherine Rawson and friend Miss Parkhill, and lessons from her drawing master, Mr Brown. Otherwise, she filled her time as best she could with sewing, knitting and small philanthropic works. The typical pastimes of a woman of her class were just enough to keep her feeling that her life had some value.
Though they had very different personalities, there were similarities between Anne Lister and Ann Walker’s circumstances. Like Anne, Miss Walker was close to her aunt, Ann’s mother and father having died years previously. Like Anne, she had come into an inheritance that wouldn’t have been hers but for the unexpected death of a brother.
The vast estate that Ann and Elizabeth Walker inherited in 1830 came with great responsibility. Their acreage dwarfed Shibden’s. Ann Walker had a private income far beyond anything that Anne Lister could ever dream of. On 2nd February 1833, Anne worked out that her own income was somewhere between £830 and £840 per annum. She made light of her financial straits in her diary: ‘I will make it do, and perhaps I shall be happier than if I had none’ (2ND FEBRUARY 1833). By contrast, Ann Walker had more than double that amount at her disposal.
