by Anne Choma
Very nice kind letter . . . [Vere] recommends Mr Stark’s ‘Directions to Travellers’ as an excellent road book, and very correct as to names and distance with a rarity of names and useful information. I have heard him called vulgar and not remarkably true in his history and chronology, but of that I am no judge. ‘Conder’s Italy I think a very nice little book, three small volumes . . . the Campo Santa will charm you . . . do not on any account miss the Cathedral at Siena . . . the carved pulpits at Belgium are mere toys compared to the marble one there.’
7TH DECEMBER 1832
Nine months on from the ‘tyranny of disappointment’ she had suffered in Hastings, Anne appeared reconciled with Vere’s marriage to Donald, wishing the couple happiness in her reply:
One of these days I hope to know him much better and to see you both felices ter et amplius. God bless you my dearest Vere at this season and at every other. My regard for you is like the law of the Medes and Persians which changeth not, and you will find me always and affectionately very faithfully yours, AL.
7TH DECEMBER 1832
There was more news from Mariana. She had found a potential manservant for Anne:
A man that had lived two years with the Kinnersley’s – a native of Lawton – a remarkably handsome, fine-looking man . . . understands horses and carriages, and as far as words go, promises very fair and I believe would be most glad to do anything in the way of making himself useful.
9TH DECEMBER 1832
This was 24-year-old Thomas Beech. Perceiving from this early account that Beech would suit her well, Anne asked Mariana to kit him out in the appropriate ‘Oxford mixture jacket and waistcoat and plush breeches and plain yellow buttons’. She would reimburse her later (26TH DECEMBER 1832).
On 12th December, Anne received some valuable advice on how to deal with the Rawson brothers. Hinscliffe, who was competing against them for Anne’s land, advised her to bind the Rawsons in a strict lease, stating ‘their heirs, executors, administrators and assigners under a penalty of £500 not to turn any more water on my [Anne’s] coal (both beds)’. James Holt had offered a similar warning. ‘Turning the water’ referred to an underhand tactic by which competitors could flood their rival’s mines. Keen to have the clause agreed, Anne resolved to heap pressure on Jeremiah and Christopher to deliver a final answer on the lease:
Dear Sir, if I do not hear from you respecting the coal before the end of this week, I shall feel myself at liberty to dispose of it. The other party have themselves valued at and offered me for the upper or hard bed, the same price at which I said you should have it. I am Sir, etc. etc. etc., Anne Lister.
18TH DECEMBER 1832
In fact, it was this threat of a £500 penalty that would ultimately sound the death knell for the deal. In February 1833, after months of ‘blustering’, Jeremiah Rawson would tell Mr Parker that ‘he never saw such a coal lease, would never sign it’.
Anne found the whole thing ‘tiresome’. Though there were moments of triumph – such as Jeremiah’s admission on 24th December that ‘he was never beaten by ladies’ but that ‘she had beaten him’ on price (to which Anne replied acidly ‘It is the intellectual part of us that makes the bargain, and that has no sex, or ought to have none’) – she couldn’t help feeling that all her ‘backwards and forwards work’ had been a waste of time. The failed deal left Anne to think more seriously now that she should sink a pit herself and ‘set Holt to manage getting coals for me so as to look after Mr Rawson [i.e. teach him a lesson]’. She later said of him, ‘He thinks he has me beaten, perhaps he will be disappointed’ (25TH FEBRUARY 1833).
In the months after the passing of the Reform Act, the spirit of change flourished across the towns and cities of the industrial north. In Halifax, Anne’s favoured Tory candidate, James Wortley, lost out in the election to his Whig opponent. Anne vented her frustration to Lady Vere, who was a relation of Wortley’s:
So thoroughly unexpected was the disappointment of Mr James Wortley’s losing his election, I have not yet got up my political spirits – I hardly thought myself capable of such strong political excitement and mortification. I am completely sick of public events. The unions are still in full force. Many of the delvers (stone quarriers) have turned into the work again. But they have gained the day, and got the advance of wages.
31ST DECEMBER 1832
As the last days of December played out, Anne reflected on her year in business in a letter to Mariana, and hinted at her desire to be free to travel again:
Everything seems to go well with me, for though I have no gold mine, I feel I shall work my way through my inconveniences and have little cause to regret what I have done . . . In fact, I hope I shall leave all my concerns more satisfactorily than I have ever done before. I have lately been much pleased with some business-like attentions from people upon whom I had no claim. I seem to have established myself a character at least respectable. I see and feel that I have nothing to complain of and all I am now anxious about is to wind up my concerns and be on the wide world again.
26TH DECEMBER 1832
Her love life was judged to have been less of a success. By the end of 1832 she was resigned to the fact that her situation with Miss Walker was now one of complete hopelessness. With Ann’s unwillingness to commit to a life permanently with her, matters had come to a head:
Miss Walker fretted and cried and sighed and said she should not live long. I proposed her returning her notes, and having mine. She said she had burned all that were material, and wished to keep the rest. I begged to see them, and then had no objection to her keeping them. She begged me not to send back her history of Paris in three volumes. It would be of no more use to her, and she wished me to keep it . . . Parted in tears, both of us. I saying, I never did or could understand her.
31ST DECEMBER 1832
After the strain of the last few months, Anne’s regret over the failed relationship was tempered with relief. Taking stock, she looked to the future:
Well! Here is the end of another year! How different this new year’s eve from the last! Though in each case unsuccessful love-making . . . how different my situation now . . . Quite off with Mariana, Vere married and off at Rome . . . Miss Walker, as it were, come and gone, known and forgotten . . . I have never stood so alone and yet am far happier that I was twelve months ago – in fact, happier than I have been of long. I am used and reconciled to my loneliness.
Believing that all really now was at an end with Miss Walker, Anne asked herself: ‘What adventure will come next? Who will be the next tenant of my heart?’
CHAPTER 9
Miss Walker’s Departure, Catherine Rawson and Plans for ‘Getting Off’
‘Magna est veritas, et praevalebit’ ‘Truth is great and will prevail’
1833 began badly. On New Year’s Day, Anne reported that ‘poor, old glandered Ball’, her beloved shaft horse, was to be shot. Pickles put an end to his suffering as Anne looked on:
The poor horse had but a few of those feint convulsive movements and soon died, surely without having been considered in much pain. He was soon covered up where he fell.
1ST JANUARY 1833
Anne remained preoccupied with Miss Walker’s declining mental health. Indeed, there had been a hint in her final diary entry of 1832 that Ann would not be as easily ‘gone and forgotten’ as Anne Lister had claimed: ‘This girl, without really having my esteem or affection, somehow or other, unhinges me whenever I see her’ (31ST DECEMBER 1832).
Now, in the first weeks of 1833, it was becoming clear to those around Ann Walker that an effective form of specialised medical treatment needed to be found. Her anxiety was compounded by periods of insomnia and, when she was able to sleep, night terrors. Anne wrote to Steph Belcombe:
I never exactly understood before what nervousness meant and God grant that I may know no more of it in any ca
se which concerns me much . . . it is dreary to combat sickness without disease, and misery without reason.
6TH JANUARY 1833
Ann was suffering a complete mental breakdown. Symptoms of obsessive compulsion and agoraphobia accompanied her bouts of mania. The successive deaths of her lover and friend, not many years after the loss of her parents and brother, had taken their toll on an already fragile state. Dr Sunderland’s precis of her symptoms – ‘some little excitement of the mind’ – was either euphemistic or a severe understatement (17TH JANUARY 1833).
Miss Walker pointed to a ‘want of confidence in God’ at the root of her own illness. A fixation on her sins and the Lord’s word characterised her melancholy now as in past patches of ill-health. On 8th January, she pleaded with Anne to pray for her immortal soul. ‘It is not only death in this world, but a far worse death that I fear’, she wrote. ‘If ever the prayers of a so true friend may ever avail for another, may yours be heard for me this night, that the gate of Mercy may not be forever closed upon me, for I am wretchedness itself.’
Anne found herself caught between exhaustion at the ‘melodrama’ she witnessed at Lidgate and her instinct to protect the woman whose vulnerability continued to ‘unhinge’ her. Miss Walker talked of ‘bitterly’ repenting having made the earlier promise to Anne – a promise made from a ‘bad motive’ and only ‘from the fear of being left’. Anne’s response to this was sympathetic: ‘Be assured of my saying and doing everything in the world I can to cheer and console you.’
Over the next few weeks, Anne turned to pragmatic measures in an attempt to relieve Ann’s suffering. She was blunt with her at times, telling her that ‘she laboured under mental delusions’ (10TH JANUARY 1833). She instructed Ann to keep a bowl of gruel by her bedside (‘kept hot up, to be taken on awakening in the night’), and advised that the ‘striking weight’ be taken out of the clock to avoid waking her in the early hours of the morning. Ann had told her:
It is these hours of the night I so much dread, and they make me feel afraid of going to bed. Oh, my very dear friend, if I could have more faith, it would enable me to support better other afflictions.
12TH JANUARY 1833
By this time, Anne was sleeping at Lidgate regularly, to be on hand with advice and reassurance throughout the night. She suggested that repeating the Lord’s Prayer might provide an antidote to Ann’s insomnia:
Talked and reasoned calmly, then turned, and pretended to sleep. She refused all affection, and I did not press it. She scarcely, I think, closed her eyes until after 3, when I bade her say the Lord’s prayer incessantly until I think she dropped off into a doze for a little while . . . She, and the room and bed, smelt of Mr Day’s turpentine ointment. I could sleep no better than usual, and longed to be once more creditably free from all this.
11TH JANUARY 1833
Fearing that she was approaching death, Ann begged Anne to read extracts of the bible aloud. Anne selected and ‘paraphrased the 10th of St Matthew’, but it seemed that Ann was unable to be reached by its message of resilience and healing. Instead, she preferred to cast herself as the subject of ‘Genesis Epistle, St James 1.6’, whose lack of absolute faith in the Lord’s ability to heal destined them to be cast adrift, ‘driven and tossed by the wind, like a wave in the sea’.
‘I think her beside herself,’ wrote Anne, who understood the depth of Ann’s mania (8TH JANUARY 1833). Though she never doubted her own position as protector – ‘It is evident I do her more good and have far more influence than anyone’ (14TH JANUARY 1833) – the emotional strain of caring for Ann was evident. ‘Seeing her always unhinges me,’ she wrote on 1st January. ‘I was low and in tears at dinner and could not get her out of my head and why? For if I had her what could I do with her?’ They were questions she could not answer, and on 10th January Anne judged that the time had come to share the burden of Miss Walker’s illness with her family. ‘I must write to her sister, or get rid of all of this in some way,’ she confided to her diary.
Catherine Rawson, who had been drafted in to stay at Lidgate, was alarmed by the deterioration of her cousin’s health. ‘Miss W frightens her,’ commented Anne. She had asked Anne what Miss Walker meant by her reference to ‘other afflictions’ (25TH JANUARY 1833).
The Reverend Ainsworth continued to write, but following a thinly-veiled threat to expose his adultery if he continued to communicate with Ann, it was Anne Lister to whom his long ‘rigmarole’ letters were addressed. His feeble promise – ‘will not intrude on Miss Walker again . . . he said he hoped she would not, further from vanity, expose him, as her own character might suffer’ – confirmed Anne’s conviction that he was a spineless scoundrel. ‘I assure you of the pardon you desire and that whatever confidence has been placed in me will not be abused,’ she replied simply.
A letter she received from Captain George Sutherland on 11th January informed Anne that Miss Walker had written to her brother-in-law in Scotland herself. Sutherland was acutely concerned by the tone of Ann’s latest letter. ‘I am apprehensive she is in a more delicate state of health than we had any idea of, as it is evidently written under a feeling of gloomy despondency,’ he told Anne, asking for more details of Miss Walker’s affliction. ‘It will confer a great obligation on me if you would kindly give me your candid opinion as to its nature.’
Responding immediately, Anne advised Captain Sutherland not to bring his wife – who was in a delicate state of health herself, having just given birth and nursing another child who had measles – with him on the long journey from Inverness to Yorkshire. She also suggested withholding the purpose of his visit until he had returned with Miss Walker. ‘No time should be lost,’ she warned, given the degree to which Miss Walker’s state had deteriorated since their visit to Dr Belcombe the previous October:
No occasion for Mrs Sutherland’s coming. Your coming on the plea of business will be quite enough, as I dare say you will have no difficulty in persuading Miss Walker to return with you, but would you like Mr Belcombe to be written to and consulted in the meantime? Than whom I know of no-one on every account more likely to be of service. He is certainly a great favourite with Miss Walker, and would probably have more influence than any medical man she at present knows. My own confidence in him is great.
11TH JANUARY 1833
With Captain Sutherland’s journey south in hand, Anne found time to return to business at Shibden. Commissioning a local cabinet maker to craft her a new writing box, she became keenly interested in timber:
It is the St. Domingo mahogany, which he calls Spanish, which is most beautiful. And the Honduras looks common but it is this, he says, that pays the best – much less duty paid on it.
14TH JANUARY 1833
She was typically exacting about the piece of furniture, giving Greenwood her ‘patent, rosewood cased ink bottle as a model for the ink stand place in my new writing box’ (31ST JANUARY 1833).
Work on the estate was progressing steadily. On one occasion, Anne’s hands-on approach to the improvements ended with her submerged in the freezing water of the Red Beck:
Cutting and pruning in Lower Brook Ing wood and James Smith’s holme. Cut longish Alder there, it fell across the brook, and in trying to walk over it, slipped off into the water and got wet halfway above my knees to my hips or more.
18TH JANUARY 1833
At the top of the estate, hundreds of tonnes of earth were being moved by hand to accommodate the building of the new road through the Trough of Bolland Wood. As her men continued to dig, excavate and shore up the land, Anne revealed another grand plan to Pickles. She wanted to create a miniature replica of the Simplon Pass, a bridge she had admired during a trip to the Swiss Alps. The bridge that survives today is a testament to Pickles’s team and Anne Lister’s vision:
With Pickles at the deep cutting, 140 yards done, half way down the wood, 80 to do up to the deep dell. Pickles
would fill it up. No! I would have two masonry piers built and throw over a Swiss wooden bridge, such as the one as the bridge over the torrents crossing the Simplon.
2ND FEBRUARY 1833
The ‘Scotch Plan’ agreed with her family, Anne convinced Ann Walker to consent to her stay in Inverness. She was honest with Ann about what the separation would mean for their relationship. Their contact must be limited, and discreet:
Thought she had better not write to me, better not begin a correspondence. I could hear of her from her sister. For being abroad, and uncertain of the fate of letters, must be careful – must begin with My Dear Miss Walker, and end with, Very Truly Yours. She said she would do whatever I liked, but had said before she would rather write to me than anybody.
22ND JANUARY 1833
Ann Walker gave a hopeless plea to travel with Anne Lister in Europe. Anne replied as sensitively as she could:
Told her the time for that was gone by for the moment, but if, in a year’s time, she thought she could not live without me, then she must send for me back again. Thus giving her hope that all is not, or needs not be, quite at an end between us.
22ND JANUARY 1833
In private, Anne’s hopes for Miss Walker’s recovery were weak. ‘Poor soul. Her mental misery must be great, feeling, as she says, it is all over. She has no hope of being saved’ (24TH JANUARY 1833). She was relieved when Ann submitted to the plan which would take her away from the ‘evil spirits’ she was still encountering at Lidgate. Miss Walker became resigned to her fate, understanding that Scotland, at least for the next few months, was going to be home for her.
