by Anne Choma
Each location was appraised in precise detail. In the central German town of Kassel, the street she stayed on ‘seemed the essence of dullness’ (28TH AUGUST 1833). In Luxembourg, there was ‘nothing to be seen in the town’ but ‘several curiosities in the neighbourhood’ (22ND AUGUST 1833). Treves (now Trier, in southwest Germany), was a ‘nice, clean, good town’, with an attractive church and Roman amphitheatre.
Local people were observed from the windows of the carriage. In Germany, the men wore ‘singular cocked hats and white smock frocks to their knees’, and the women wore caps ‘with their hair plaited from before and secured behind with a large silver pin, like a blunt, long knife blade’ (26TH AUGUST 1833). The women of Holstein got a special mention for wearing ‘men’s black beaver hats’ (13TH SEPTEMBER 1833).
There were additional detours to be made to visit interesting people and attractions. At Épernay, Anne, Eugenie and Sophie explored Moët’s Champagne caves. ‘Each of us a candle in our hand,’ Anne wrote, describing their descent into the eerie blackness where the bottles were stored:
Inscription in memory of Napoleon La Grande, having honoured with a visit in 1807 . . . [The wine left] in the wood two years and in the bottle four, before ever sold – there was a great deal of wine of 1828 but the oldest was 1825 – will be very much and very good this year – 40 to 50 workmen employed.
Mr Möet himself was out:
While at dinner, came a very civil message from him, begging my acceptance of a bottle of Sillery, and one of pink champagne. The latter was most excellent, tasted so good we drank the whole bottle, and were admirably unfitted for doing anything but go to bed and sleep.
19TH AUGUST 1833
By 29th August, they had reached Kassel. The famous statue to Hercules was described as a ‘large, rough building surmounted by a gigantic bronze statue that one sees from all directions approaching Kassel’. On closer inspection, Anne was unimpressed:
The famous waterworks commence from the foot of the building but all has been long out of order and the great building itself is propped from behind. The present Elector will do nothing, nor will the town of Kassel and the people are dissatisfied to pay 300,000 thalers of revenue to Prince, who leaves his wife . . . and spent his money anywhere but at home.
29TH AUGUST 1833
Anne did concede that climbing ‘3 or 4 ladders into the very body of the Hercule’ resulted in a magnificent view, ‘the palace almost as it were at our feet’.
At Gottingen, Anne engineered a meeting with Professor Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the scientist, physician and teacher famous for his studies in comparative anatomy:
At 4.05 called and sat 1/4 of an hour with Mr Blumenbach . . . Mr Blumenbach is about 80 to 84 but received me with as much vivacity and pleasure and civility as if he had been 30 or 40 years younger. But it was easy to see nature could not support this exertion for very long. His countenance still fine with an agreeable expression of goodness, his voice thick. I, with difficulty, understood his French. Said I was English and found he spoke English much more intelligently than French, and apparently with much more ease . . . I complimented him on his looking so well. He said he minded not long life – but, to be useful – that was another thing. His wife older than himself and much more infirm, but he stoops a good deal, has a little rheumatism.
Anne returned the next day to see Blumenbach’s famous cabinet of skulls. His theory of classification relied on the idea that human crania could be classified by race:
There at 4.20. Delighted to see me. Showed me the presents he had had from different people. Our late Queen Charlotte had given him part of an elephant’s tooth, which grown over a lead bullet – the bullet (now cut through), remaining quite round, as if it was at the time of lodging in the poor animal’s tusk, which must have been young. Spoke of the large caves and Meiningen.
. . . Blumenbach showed me into his cabinet of skulls, observed the same sort of model as the one at the museum. The original, he said, is at Darmstadt (Hesse-Darmstadt). It was picked up in some church yard and bought by the Duke at a great price. Monsieur Jussieu of Paris has one, and there is a 3rd at Prague. The complaint had no name till Blumenbach himself gave it that of Osteonecrosis.
He has a specimen of a dried man taken from a church in Magdeburg, much finer specimen than the one at the museum. No accounting for this kind of drying, can’t tell why it should be, especially why one should be so dried among so many which perish like the rest.
Blumenbach never could make out the great distinguishing mark of a Jew till breakfasting one morning with Sir Benjamin West. He, West, told him, it was the ridge formed by the suture of the two bones just under the nose, into which the upper teeth are set. On returning home, he found the remark verified, and pointed out to me a Jew’s skull that was a remarkable illustration of the observation.
1ST SEPTEMBER 1833
‘Nothing very particular, several foetus in spirits, snakes etc, etc, some skulls and a few stuffed birds and animals, sea clothes, spears etc, and a dried man (with his feet gone),’ Anne wrote of a visit to Gottingen’s University museum on the same day. In the crypt of the gothic church in Bremen the following week there were
8 dried bodies, dried up like leather . . . a large, old Swedish General, and his young aide de camp, a man who fell from his work on the top of the cathedral and broke open his neck, and a man who died from a large cut in the arm, both these wounds very evident . . . all lying in large, clumsy black coffins, the lids of which are all lifted up to show the cadavers within.
8TH SEPTEMBER 1833
Other coffins held ‘an English major with half the hair on his head’, and a ‘large, old, English countess’ with ‘cottage-knitted gloves and stockings and cap, said to be those she was buried in’.
Anne’s journal gives little indication of what her servants made of their unusual journey. Generally, she seemed to take only Thomas Beech with her into museums, leaving Eugenie and Sophie Ferrall behind at their current lodgings. It is clear that Sophie, who did not share Anne’s fascination with dead bodies, had begun to grow impatient to reach Copenhagen. Sensing resistance to her plans, Anne started to feel hard done by herself:
Miss F so little thinking of my pleasure. I had said this morning, sorry for the delay but really I might have been a month longer but for her anxiety to get to Hamburg . . . If she was to be long delayed, she thinks she may be mad. Perhaps she is half so already . . . shall be heartily glad to be rid of her. Her German has served me little.
7TH SEPTEMBER 1833
There had been moments of flirtation between Anne and her twenty-four-year-old travel companion. ‘Playing with Miss Ferrall. Very good friends now’, she had written just the evening before. ‘She sits on my knee tonight and has kissed me these three nights but I do it all very properly’ (6TH SEPTEMBER 1833). But this diversion seemed no more than a game to Anne. ‘I behave very kindly to her,’ she said, following it with a less than complimentary, ‘Glad enough to see her but should do very well without her, and shall be glad enough in reality without her’ (11TH SEPTEMBER 1833). It seemed that Sophie Ferrall had a touch of the Miss Walker about her – suffering from low self-esteem, hinted at when Anne wrote, ‘She sat on my knee this evening. I tell her she is not ugly and she is well enough inclined to flirt with me but I am very prudent’ (11TH SEPTEMBER 1833).
Over their many hours in the carriage together, Anne had learned more about the Russian count Sophie’s aunt had been keen for her to marry. Feigning ignorance on the topic, Anne listened with interest to Sophie’s conflicting account of the man who had, according to her ‘first said he had 60, then 40 thousand francs a year. A club foot and 47 years older than herself. I gave no hint of knowing anything about it before’ (25TH AUGUST 1833).
In an interesting coda to this story, Sophie Ferrall went on to marry Federico Confalonieri, the Italian revo
lutionary who had led the insurrection against allied forces in favour of an independent Italy in 1814. Much to the delight of Madame du Bourke, their marriage in July 1841 drew attention from all areas of Parisian society. In February 1840, Sophie wrote to her sister: ‘One knows how nobly he behaved during all his sufferings one cannot help loving him. He is about fifty, but looks more in his face . . . We are the greatest of friends in the world.’ Though the marriage would last only five years, Sophie’s match had given her access to a new realm of society. In the years after Confalonieri’s premature death, she was able to count Rossini, Verdi, Liszt, Victor Hugo, Balzac and Alexis de Tocquville among her acquaintances.
Back in the summer and autumn of 1833, Sophie Ferrall was caught between her attraction to Anne Lister’s charismatic personality and her growing impatience at her uncompromising and eccentric itinerary. By the time they boarded the steamer in Travemunde on 17th September, it was a relief for both of them to be in sight of their final destination.
‘Should have been comfortable enough without Miss Ferrall and her snoring, disagreeable little dog’, Anne had written on 13th September. She looked forward to the luxury of being on her own again, of being left to her own devices – ‘I shall not wish for a companion again,’ she said. To this she now added that Sophie was ‘the most disagreeable girl I ever saw’ (17TH SEPTEMBER 1833).
Now, at last, they were bound for Copenhagen. The carriage, which had been loaded onto the deck of an eighty horse-power steamer, would provide a makeshift cabin for Anne during the eighteen-hour journey ahead. ‘Lay across it with my feet upon my travelling bag pretty comfortably’, she wrote, ‘dozing or slumbering, then sick about every 1/4 of an hour till 8 or 9 in the morning.’ She wrote three pages to Vere’s sister Lady Harriet de Hageman to say that their arrival would be imminent, asking her to reserve two rooms (‘comfortable, but not splendid’), at the Hotel Royal. Miss Ferrall would go direct to her sister, Countess Emily Blucher.
Almost twelve weeks to the day after leaving Shibden Hall, Copenhagen was finally in sight.
CHAPTER 11
Copenhagen
‘I have been presented at court to the King and Queen and the rest. Had separate audiences of the Queen and the 5 princesses and was at the Queen’s ball on her birth night’
Anne was delighted by Copenhagen. From the window of her stylish room at the Hotel Royal, she could see the sparkling new Christiansborg, built on the site of the former palace which had been destroyed by fire. She felt welcome in Denmark, noting none of the stares that followed her masculine apparel and gait in the English provinces. In a letter to her aunt, Anne described a routine of ‘7 English miles on the Roskilde road about 3 days a week’ and ‘out almost every evening’ (9TH NOVEMBER 1833). The small city leant itself perfectly to a busy social life. Vere’s half-sister, Lady Harriet de Hageman, lived a short distance away on a street called Amaliagade. Countess Emily Blucher lived close by at Blancogade, all of which made for an instant and ready-made community for Anne to call upon.
A letter from Mariana Lawton attempted to pour cold water on Anne’s new adventure. Mariana wrote that she had heard that Copenhagen was ‘the court of dullness’ and that people had told her that Anne would ‘not like it here’. Anne replied that she had not had any ‘time to find it so’. She told Mariana that she had dined with the de Hagemans ‘yesterday and Thursday’, had ‘refused today’, but ‘should go tomorrow and should go, if I could, to Countess Blucher this evening’ (21ST SEPTEMBER 1833). The de Hagemans were indeed turning out to be genial hosts, almost fawning and wishing to do as much as they could to make Anne feel welcome and comfortable.
Anne took pleasure in filling in Mariana on her schedule of social engagements, and her ‘very pretty’, ‘very agreeable and useful’ travelling companion. The uncharacteristically complimentary account of Sophie Ferrall was an attempt to provoke Mariana. ‘Let Mariana take Willoughby Crewe,’ she wrote a week later. ‘She will not get hold of me again in a hurry’ (8TH OCTOBER 1833).
Amongst the first packet of letters she had received Anne was struck that there had been no word from Scotland about Miss Walker. Anne was puzzled, wondering if Elizabeth Sutherland had taken offence at her detailed advice for Ann’s recovery. ‘Perhaps she did not quite like my last,’ she mused on 19th September. ‘Well, I am easy about it. If I can only make my income do, it is all I want.’
Anne found her new surroundings intellectually stimulating. She took daily German lessons from a Mr Christiani and practiced her newly acquired skills by reading the memoirs of German dramatist August Kotzebue and the Hamburg Reporter. She devoured travel volumes, memoirs and books on astronomy. During her ten weeks in Denmark, she wrote nearly 40,000 words in her journal, observing the people and places around her.
Her own ‘gaucheries’ were unflinchingly recorded. The aristocratic circles in which she found herself moving were thrilling, but they provided frequent opportunities for embarrassment. Introduced to Madame Rosencrantz, a Russian royal and widow of the late Danish Prime Minister, Anne misread her social cue:
She shook hands with difficulty last night. Like a goose I offered my hand this morning, which she positively declined, and on my hoping to see her often this winter she said as little as possible.
11TH OCTOBER 1833
During a night at the theatre, she made another faux pas:
Made a grand mistake in supposing the music of Robert le Diable by Rossini! By Meyerbeer . . . Got over my blunder as well as perhaps such a blunder could be got over. What in the world do I know of operas?
3RD NOVEMBER 1833
She was now mingling with people who had more knowledge than her ‘about the theatres of Paris’, who talked ‘excessively’ about them, leaving her to conclude that she must learn more about these things in order to contribute effectively in ‘company conversation’.
She remained a confident theatre critic in the privacy of her journal. Of Goethe’s Faust she wrote that ‘the dancing was very fair, but the women had such bad legs’ (21ST OCTOBER 1833).
Anne’s social slips did not impede her entry into the highest level of Danish society. Invitations to be presented at court and, subsequently, to attend the Queen’s birthday ball came astonishingly quickly. They were facilitated by the connections she had begun to cultivate through the de Hagemans with important high society people like the Swedish minister Mr Hockschild, the Russian Ambassador Baron Nikolai and Mr Sarmento, the Portuguese Charge d’affairs. Peter Brown, a British chargé d’affaires, proved a particularly useful figure. Overcoming her initial judgment that he was a ‘common Methodist’ with ‘dirty nails’ (7TH OCTOBER 1833), Anne accepted his offer of royal introduction in appropriately courtly language:
Miss Lister regrets very much being in the country when he was so good to call on Friday. Finding that being presented at Court might make her winter here more agreeable, Miss Lister would be glad to have her audiences before the Queen’s birthday.
15TH OCTOBER 1833
The evening of 23rd October did not begin well. Dressed to impress in black satin with her ‘thinnest black silk stockings and silk shoes’, Anne made a royal blunder:
Unluckily took the chief maid for the Queen because of her broad red ribbon and star. Got over it well enough and did not care so much as I might have done.
Having eventually identified the right woman to curtsey to, Anne seemed to recover well:
About 10 minutes audience of the Queen. At about 65, a nice neat little figure, looking very well but sadly too much rouged. Very gracious. Then to Princess Caroline, the King’s daughter, that was burnt. Her throat and lower part of her face still bearing strong traces of the fire. About 5 minutes with her. Not au fait at audiences like the Queen, not much to say for herself but very civil.
23RD OCTOBER 1833
Princess Christian, the wife of the heir to the throne, was Anne’s
favourite. She was deemed ‘very handsome, very dignified but pleasing and agreeable’, and their lively conversation, which ranged from the Notre Dame cathedral to beech trees, prompted Anne to feel, by the end of the night, quite ‘in love with Princess Christian’.
Returning to her ‘great gaucherie’ as she completed the day’s diary entry, Anne was matter-of-fact. ‘I wonder what they all thought of me,’ she wrote. ‘I joked about it to the Bluchers this morning gently. I shall learn in time.’
As her stay in Copenhagen progressed, Anne perceived that her new friends were competing to impress her with their royal connections:
I shall tread my ground cautiously with the Browns. Neither they, nor others, like the de Hs. I see they [the de Hagemans] are vexed at my have gone to court and would gladly have kept me away. What could be their reason? She [Harriet] thought I had been very often at the Bluchers . . . There is jealousy at the bottom. Well, she may make herself unhappy but not me.
26TH OCTOBER 1833
Harriet de Hageman had also refused to introduce Anne to the Spanish minister’s wife over dinner and, though she subsequently apologised, Anne was beginning to tire of the intricacies of etiquette. As someone who exercised a great deal of control over her life at home, she disliked feeling like a pawn in a game of society rivalry. ‘I always think I can do without the world if I can’t have it to my mind,’ she wrote on 27th October 1833.
