by Anne Choma
On the other hand, with her full inheritance of Shibden being within tantalising reach (given the advancing years of her ailing aunt and father), she found herself able to see through Mariana’s renewed desire to one day move in with her. ‘She owned the other day that if William had not died she would not have tried to get me back,’ Anne wrote on 28th June. William Lawton, Mariana’s nephew-in-law, had recently died in a tragic accident, having had his arm ripped off by a piece of machinery when visiting a fulling mill. The death had major implications for Mariana’s future financial stability, seeing as William had stood to inherit her home, Lawton Hall, from husband Charles. Mariana had hoped to benefit from his kindness in the event of her being left a widow, with her husband having as yet made absolutely no provision in his will for her. Anne Lister was shocked to find herself playing second fiddle to poor William. She remarked:
I said not much, but how astounded I had been to find myself second to William Lawton. ’Tis now quite evident how much she wants to bring all on again but, though I am very kind, I always avoid this.
By the time Anne and Mariana had reached London on 3rd July, the cracks in their relationship had opened into a chasm. En route Anne had engaged in reluctant sex with her, which was only marginally satisfying for Anne having only received ‘a tolerable kiss [orgasm]’ (23RD JUNE 1833).
Now, busily reacquainting herself with high society in visits to her titled friends, including Vere – who had just given birth to a baby girl named Anne – Anne Lister effectively ignored Mariana. Mariana, now finding herself waiting at the hotel or in the back of the carriage during Anne’s calls, ‘felt alone and bitterly repented having come’ (5TH JULY 1833). On one occasion, she secretly trailed Anne to see where she was going.
By the time Charles Lawton arrived on 10th July, the situation had deteriorated further. It seemed as if Charles and Mariana were having relationship problems of their own. While Anne had been courting Ann Walker, Mariana had been playing up to the pointed charms of a Cheshire man, a Mr Willoughby Crewe. Anne heard Mariana and Charles arguing. They were ‘shouting and bawling. I was ashamed of them and thought myself lucky to be engaged and out of the way,’ she wrote. She had resolved to leave Mariana in England and travel on to the continent alone.
Anne remained keen to impress her high-ton friends. Trawling the streets of London for a late wedding present for Vere, she made three stops over two days, and agonized over the expense of the resulting coffee pot:
For £33, handsome, second-hand plain coffee pot and tea pot (with lamp, I think, included), and for £39 choice of 2 very handsome modern chased coffee pots and tea pots, but no lamp. A new one would be £8 or £9 more.
9TH JULY 1833
Choosing also the lamp, which makes this second hand concern come to about £40. I could have done better at Rundle Bridges. Vexed at heart but said nothing even to M. May I manage better another time. Mind how I make promises of coffee pots. They have managed well to get [a] teapot into the bargain. Vere told me at Hastings she had no remorse for me. I had money enough, but she will not get much more.
10TH JULY 1833
She displayed more confidence in a visit to a mathematical instrument-maker in Cheapside, buying herself a ‘small compass and a pair of blue spectacles’ as part of a mineralogical tool set she intended to use abroad. There, she also learned that the walking stick barometer she had taken with her and had agreed to get valued on behalf of tenant Charles Howarth’s elderly father, was ‘not worth a farthing’ (9TH JULY 1833).
The round of social engagements continued. A Miss Tate said Anne ‘reminded her of her father, who used to say the world was like a stagecoach, if one was not ready to go with it, one must be left behind.’ She had told Anne, flattering her, ‘How many would be glad of me [Anne] for a companion.’
Anne, still undecided about the final destination of her travels, had been toying with the idea of going as far as Russia: ‘Lady S[tuart] and Miss Tate against my doing more than St. Petersburg and Moscow – (I had talked of an excursion to the Ural mountains) – it would be odd and talked of’ (12TH JULY 1833).
Her plan to travel just to the continent, let alone Russia, was raising eyebrows among Anne’s society acquaintances. She was humbled by Lady Stuart’s honesty and concern:
Said I, ‘I am sure you were right about my oddity of my going alone. Nobody would tell me the truth, not even Vere and I shall never forget my obligation to you.’ She seemed affected and said she had done it because she had a real regard for me. All this was done so kindly, I myself was affected and thought to myself, she is the only friend I have amongst them . . . said I should write all my adventures to Lady S. She should have them all and should tell just what she liked.
17TH JULY 1833
Visiting Vere at Wimpole street during her packed itinerary of farewells, there was no hint of the tense, anxious Anne of Hastings. ‘Laughed and told V, if she liked the coffee pot and I would have the credit of the choice, if not, all the blame should be on Lady S’, Anne wrote in good humour on 16th July.
Elderly Lady Stuart seemed particularly saddened at Anne’s departure. ‘It was a small thing at her time of life to take leave of anyone.’ She kissed Anne, who was once again touched by her kindness. ‘Not everyone has much heart as she. I felt moved and full of gratitude. Thought I would send her thread stockings from Paris and leave her £300 [in her will] and V[ere] at most 1.’
Having now settled upon Copenhagen over Russia, Anne had made arrangements to meet a young woman called Sophie Ferrall in Paris. Sophie, who was the niece of her friend Madame de Bourke, would travel with Anne all the way and be delivered to her sister, Countess Emily Blucher, who lived in the Danish capital.
Boarding the Ferret Steamer, a 140-tonne ‘fine, fast vessel’ bound for Calais, Anne looked back on her time in London and made grand plans for the future. ‘Reflected, did not read, but very fairly happy today,’ she wrote. ‘Castle building about writing, publishing and making my book pay my expenses’ (18TH JULY 1833).
‘This solitary journey may do me good. It will show me how far I may really trust to the resources of my own mind. From the moment they fail me, or threaten to do so, I shall date my return’
Anne was thrilled to be on the road again. Her natural optimism was suited to the pursuit of new adventures:
I always feel a certain indescribable something within that always helps me from without, and if believing all things not unreasonable and hoping all things not impossible be the character of the philosopher, I have some small pretention that way.
29TH JULY 1833
Anne conceded that the addition of Sophie Ferrall to her traveling entourage was a sensible one. Together with her servants, their group would ‘do very well, and very respectably too, into the bargain’ (29TH JULY 1833). That said, she had not actually met Miss Ferrall yet, and her unfavourable first impression of Eugenie had not been helped by what she considered some seriously inappropriate behaviour for a maid as their travels together began:
She certainly does not know how to behave en femme de chambre . . . Walks before me, begins the conversations, and tonight took her place almost in front of me from a gent who offered it, and kept it to the exclusion of a young lady, a friend of the gent’s!!! This was just going too far and so I have just told her. Said I could not do with this sort of thing. If she could not conform to the place she had taken, she had better give it up.
28TH JULY 1833
Eugenie did have her good points. On 1st August, she made a conciliatory rice pudding for Anne, who commented sweetly that if ‘we can possibly keep up going on as well as we do now, I shall think of my servants as treasures’.
By this time, the party had arrived in Paris. Anne took advantage of the superior French fashion scene to purchase stockings, sleeves and black satin shoes, and for both her and for Mariana, a pair of stays (corsets). Anne’s bes
poke corset was more expensive, the maker Madame Calis having to pad out the breast area in order to give a more feminine shape – Anne referred to them as ‘stuffed concerns’ (6TH AUGUST 1833). A letter to her friend Mrs Dalton gave a brilliant critique of the latest styles:
Though London imitates as well as she can, ’tis merely that a substitute shines brightly as a King, until a King be by. Bonnets not much larger than a good sized breakfast cup, skirts of an ampleur, reminding one of the pea-filled rotundity of a Dutch doll, cheveux en hatte. The hair plaited very broad and set upon so as to form something very like a medimmus on the head of Isis. Large rooms and folding doors are nowadays quite necessary, for sleeves are so enormous that each lady’s breadth across the shoulders is doubled. Pelerines very large, much worn with longer or shorter ends confined by the ceinture [belt] in front . . . black lace very much worn. But dress not for nothing – things cheaper in London.
11TH AUGUST 1833
‘My greatest pother is dress, but I find I must have it. My days of one small portmanteau and merely the hat on my head are gone by,’ wrote Anne to Tib the same day. She was aware that in Copenhagen, where she would be mixing with the cream of Danish society, she would need to dress immaculately.
Anne laid out more funds on gifts to the academic friends she had made during her scientific studies in the 1820s. There were medical implements for Étienne Geoffroy St-Hilaire, a ‘four-blade mother-of pearl pen-knife’ to Monsieur Desfontaine – a bold choice for someone now ‘blind from cataract and looking very old and infirm’ (11TH AUGUST 1833) – and ‘5 bistouries and one scalpel’ for Monsieur Julliart, who had instructed her in dissection. Of those, she kept ‘one of each’ back for herself, having ‘hoped to do something again in the study’ on her return from Denmark (12TH AUGUST 1833).
Though Anne was never to formally resume her studies, she retained a lifelong interest in human anatomy and physiology. Having long ‘wished to be, in some sort, a naturalist’, she was also aware that the restrictions of her sex meant this would never be a profession. Dissecting bodies in a secret attic room was one thing, but in the male-only field of early nineteenth-century medicine, she was destined to remain an interested amateur.
On 2nd August, Anne was introduced to Sophie Ferrall for the first time. Her friend, Madame de Bourke, had given Anne the background on her niece a few days previously:
Heard all the story of her refusing a Russian with 2000 sterling a year but 20 years older than herself. The young lady 24. Madame de Bourke determined to get rid of her. I promised never to tell all she had told me and she not to say to the girl herself she had told me. When at last I rather fought off she said it would be a kindness, a charity and I agreed. How extraordinary, thought I. Well, I am at any rate companioned.
30TH JULY 1833
Anne’s first impressions of Sophie were favourable. She judged her to be a ‘pretty looking’, ‘nice, sensible girl’ on the first two occasions of their meeting. On 3rd August at the fashionable Rue de Fauberg, the home of Madame de Bourke, Anne was treated to a fine selection of ‘madeira, champagne, Bordeaux, sherry, Burgundy, and an old Sicilian wine, a liqueur (blue)’. She concluded that she ‘liked Mademoiselle Ferrall very well’.
Before setting off on their journey, Anne pointedly told Sophie that she would not be going direct to Copenhagen, meaning that Sophie would have to fit in with Anne’s protracted journey and resultant adventures through her decidedly more scenic route through Luxembourg, Treves, Koblentz, Kassel, Hanover and Lubeck. Sophie made no comment, most likely not quite understanding just exactly what was meant by Anne deciding to ‘not going direct’.
‘How extraordinarily things happen’
On 8th August, a three-page letter arrived from Elizabeth Sutherland from Udale in Scotland, about Miss Walker:
Mrs S perplexed about her sister. Better in bodily health, at least fatter, but still it seems no better in spirits. ‘I am aware, from what my sister has repeatedly stated, that there is no individual living by whom she would be so much influenced, and my only consolation is that through your kind interference and influence, she may be directed to do that which will promote her happiness.’
8TH AUGUST 1833
Ann Walker had, she said, been waiting anxiously to hear from her. ‘How extraordinarily things happen,’ wrote Anne to herself, considering her elevation from a figure of suspicion to one of trust in the eyes of Ann’s family. Despite the ocean’s distance between them, she maintained a feeling of moral duty towards Miss Walker’s wellbeing. The next day, from her lodgings at the Rue Neuve de Luxembourg, Anne Lister penned her considered reply to Mrs Sutherland, sounding like a physician-in-waiting:
My dear Mrs. Sutherland,
I received your letter yesterday and lose no time in answering it and in expressing my very sincere regret that your sister’s health is not more entirely re-established. I hope your not having written more explicitly is unimportant, as I have so long contemplated the possibility and probable circumstances of the case, that I am perhaps already nearly as well acquainted with it as you can desire.
I was aware, when your sister left home, that something more than a mere visit to you was necessary, and that you must discover this sooner or later. I was aware also that Lidgate was not the place where she ought to be left alone, and she will remember with what earnestness I represented this to her, again and again. I entreat you to show her this letter and say, if my influence is still unshaken, I am sure that, with your approbation and under your direction, she will follow my advice, I shall give it without reserve, as the best means in my power of proving how much I am really interested for her.
It is, in the first place, necessary to ascertain the real state of morbid disturbance under which the mind is labouring. I have not mentioned my own opinion on the subject to anyone but your aunt, Miss Walker, just before my leaving home, and Dr Belcombe, in whose security and honour I have as much confidence as in his experience and skill in this particular branch of medical practice. I strongly recommend your writing to him to take your sister under his care, to provide a proper person to be with her, and a lodging and every comfort and everything cheerful.
You need be under no apprehension, you may safely leave all to him. He is too well accustomed to this sort of thing and will do his upmost for his own sake as well as for mine, as he knows how much I feel interested. You will mention your wish that that thing should not be known. Your sister can take any name she likes for the time, and you can so manage both friends and business for her in the interview, that no one needs know she is not still with you. I have always told her everything plainly, and without the least concealment. I have even, in some sort, suggested this plan to her before. Do give my love and tell her that if she will only consent to do what I so earnestly advise, I am persuaded she will be better and happier by and by.
I leave here on Monday for Copenhagen. Any letter directed there to Madame Lister, aux soins de Messrs Kortwright, Banquiers will be quite safe and will meet me on my arrival, about 3 weeks hence. With kind regards to Captain Sutherland and for your sister’s recovery.
Believe me, my dear Mrs. Sutherland, very truly yours, Anne Lister.
An addendum to the letter demonstrates an impulse to include something more heart-felt:
I can’t close my letter without again begging you to give my love to your sister, with a repetition of the assurance that she may count upon my doing all I can for her, and that, her having too often prevented my doing the best I could, will never deter me from doing whatever may remain in my power. Tell her to consider what I have urged and not reject it too hastily. Removal and skilful medical treatment are, in the first instance absolutely and immediately necessary. Half measures never answer and feeble ones but seldom.
9TH AUGUST 1833
Ann Walker was to stay in Anne’s thoughts throughout her journey. She remained a sexual preo
ccupation too, the coded words ‘incurred a cross thinking of Miss Walker’ appearing at regular intervals in her diary over the coming months.
‘Eugenie heated and very much tired and Thomas tired too. I, not at all’
Anne, Sophie Ferrall, Thomas Beech and Eugenie left Paris on 18th August 1833. The journey, which was not without its mishaps and adventures, saw Anne determined to eke out as much as she could from the sights, sounds and spectacles of the foreign landscapes. She often dished out orders to her two weary and possibly shell-shocked new servants, and occasionally pandered to the needs of an impatient and flirty Sophie Ferrall. But the ramshackle carriage soon veered off down tracks, over narrow bridges into the cobbled streets of the villages of rural France and Germany.
The ‘boulder stone pavement, all in holes’ was a contrast to the smart neighbourhoods she had occupied in the French capital. Occasionally, so soft was the ground that the carriage wheel sunk into the ‘deep rutted sand’, as on 13th September.
At the end of each day, the weary group would settle at whatever auberge or inn they could find, regularly judged by Anne to be over-priced and under-par. As protection against the filthy sheets, she often found herself sleeping in her great coat. Sophie, she noted, was sometimes so exhausted that she slept ‘without nightcap and in her day shift’ (25TH AUGUST 1833).
But Anne’s descriptions of the flora and fauna in the passing villages spoke of a beautiful landscape. The wooded hills and dales of oak, beech and birch trees reminded her of the Shibden valley. Rivers were compared with those in Yorkshire too, though not always favourably. The River Lahn in the Moselle region was ‘not so good at the moment as the Calder at Salterhebble’ (26TH AUGUST 1833).
