Gentleman Jack Read online

  ANGELA STEIDELE, born in Bruchsal, Germany, in 1968, studies and tells historical love stories. Her publications in German include In Men’s Clothing: The Daring Life of Catharina Linck alias Anastasius Rosenstengel and Love Story: Adele Schopenhauer and Sibylle Mertens. Her 2015 literary debut Rosenstengel earned her the Bavarian Book Prize.

  KATY DERBYSHIRE comes from London and has lived in Berlin for over twenty years. She translates mainly contemporary German fiction, including writers such as Inka Parei, Olga Grjasnowa and Christa Wolf. Katy’s translation of Clemens Meyer’s Bricks and Mortar was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and earned her the prestigious Straelen Translation Award. She also co-hosts a monthly translation lab in Berlin and the bi-monthly live Dead Ladies Show and podcast.

  Gentleman Jack

  A Biography of Anne Lister:

  Regency Landowner, Seducer & Secret Diarist

  ANGELA STEIDELE

  Translated by Katy Derbyshire

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd 3 Holford Yard

  Bevin Way

  London

  WC1X 9HD

  www.serpentstail.com

  First published in Germany in 2017 by Matthes & Seitz Berlin as Anne Lister: Eine erotische Biographie

  Copyright © MSB Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin 2017.

  All rights reserved.

  Translation copyright © Katy Derbyshire 2018

  Designed and typeset by Crow Books

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP record for this book

  can be obtained from the British Library

  ISBN: 9781788160988

  eISBN: 9781788161008

  Contents

  Prologue: Deciphering Anne Lister’s Diaries

  Eliza 1791–1810

  Isabella 1810–1813

  Mariana 1813–1817

  ‘Kallista’ 1818–1819

  Isabella, Mariana and Miss Vallance 1819–1822

  The Ladies of Llangollen 1822

  ‘Frank’ 1823

  Mariana and Isabella 1823–1824

  Maria 1824–1825

  Mariana 1825–1826

  Maria 1826–1827

  Sibella 1828–1829

  Vere 1829–1832 168

  Ann 1832–1840

  Neighbours

  Separation

  Marriage

  Honeymoon

  At Shibden Hall

  France

  The Brontës

  From Halifax to Moscow

  From Moscow to the Caucasus

  The Widow

  John, Muriel, Vivien, Phyllis, Helena, Jill & Angela

  Epilogue: Reading Anne Lister’s Writing

  Acknowledgements

  Timeline

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Illustrations and Maps

  The girls liked me

  & had always liked me.

  I had never been refused by anyone.

  Anne Lister, 13 November 1816

  Prologue: Deciphering Anne Lister’s Diaries

  John Lister was seven years old when his father inherited Shibden Hall. He and his family moved into the old manor house near Halifax in 1854. John grew up amidst whalebones, tiger skins and a stuffed crocodile. Once he had become lord of Shibden Hall, he sifted through the sheaves of old papers, documents and letters left behind by previous generations. He was particularly captivated by the twenty-four ‘Diaries & Journals of Mrs Lister’.1 Their marbled covers were bound in soft calf leather, the thick pages neatly lined with black ink. Nonetheless, the tiny handwriting was hard to read; Anne Lister had used numerous abbreviations, and some parts were even written in a secret code.

  What John could decipher fascinated him. Anne Lister had been involved in politics and society and had been the only woman co-founder of the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society. Her diary was a treasure trove of local history. John Lister published a series of extracts in the Halifax Guardian under the headline ‘Social and Political Life in Halifax Fifty Years Ago’. There were 121 pieces in all between 1887 and 1892.

  What John couldn’t decipher tempted him just as much. What might the secret code made up of Greek letters, numerical and invented symbols conceal? He asked a friend, the antiquarian Arthur Burrell, for help, and he was able to work out the equivalents for ‘h’ and ‘e’ on the basis of their frequency of use and their position in the words: Then halfway down the collection of deeds we found on a scrap of paper these words ‘In God is my ...’. We at once saw that the word must be ‘hope’; and the h and e corresponded with my guess. The word ‘hope’ was in cipher. With these four letters almost certain we began very late at night to find the remaining clues. We finished at 2 am [...]. The part written in cipher – turned out after examination to be entirely unpublishable.2 It was an intimate account of homosexual practices among Miss Lister and her many ‘friends’; hardly any one of them escaped her.3

  Every entry in Anne Lister’s diaries begins with whether and with whom and how often she had sex the previous evening, and whether it was repeated during the night or in the morning. She routinely noted the number and quality of her orgasms and those of her partners. If she woke up alone, she made a note of whether she had masturbated. Burrell found all this very unsavoury4 and advised his friend to burn the diaries immediately. What annoyed him was not only the fact and the sheer number of Anne Lister’s female lovers. It was her self-esteem: she too was God’s creation. No lesbian self-hatred, no desperation, no tears, no noose. Instead, an early form of gay pride. Anne Lister made no attempt to hide her difference; she flirted with it.

  John Lister hesitated to follow his friend’s advice. Though there could be no thought of further publication, he did not want to destroy the unique journals. He hid them in a chamber off Anne Lister’s bedroom, which she had probably used as a study. He had the wall panelling removed and shelves fitted, then carefully placed the diaries on them and replaced the panels. He had the door to the chamber rendered inconspicuous with more wood panelling. By leaving the window as it was, however, he ensured later owners would notice the room’s existence.

  After his death, Shibden Hall passed to the Halifax Corporation, which turned the house into a museum. As John Lister had intended, Anne Lister’s diaries were found in their closet – and the coded passages once again aroused curiosity. The municipal librarian Edward Green tracked down old Arthur Burrell, who handed him the code but warned him of what old Halifax scandal knows about Miss Lister.5

  The code, which was kept in the safe at Halifax library, was given to Edward’s daughter Muriel Green in the 1930s and to Vivien Ingham and Phyllis Ramsden in the 1960s, but they had to offer assurance that unsuitable material should not be publicised.6

  For a century, only a handful of librarians and archivists in Halifax were aware of what Anne Lister had written down in code. It was not until the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s that the ground was laid for Helena Whitbread (1988 and 1992) and Jill Liddington (1994, 1998 and 2003) to publish uncensored editions of her diary. By now five generations of scholars and editors from Halifax and the surrounding area have spent years deciphering Anne Lister’s handwriting and code, viewing an inexhaustible wealth of material. I have made grateful use of the transcriptions and e
ditions of the above-mentioned researchers, particularly Helena Whitbread and Jill Liddington to whom I owe great respect, and without whose work this book would not be possible. Although I viewed Anne Lister’s original papers and diaries in the Calderdale archives, I did not attempt to transcribe any coded passages or new pages myself. My task was quite different to that of the dedicated Lister scholars; I wanted to distil Anne Lister’s incommensurable day-to-day chronicle and tell the story of her insubordinate life and loves in a single volume. I have let the diarist herself do the talking to a great extent, as she was consciously writing down her life: I am resolved not to let my life pass without some private memorial that I may hereafter read, perhaps with a smile, when Time has frozen up the channel of those sentiments which flow so freshly now.7

  Eliza

  1791–1810

  Anne Lister was fourteen or fifteen when she fell in love for the first time. She and Eliza Raine were the same age and in the same class at Manor House School in York. Both were unlike the other girls. Eliza had been born in Madras and had dark skin and black hair. Anne wore threadbare clothing and was subject to a lot of staring and quizzing for being different. Care despised on my part!1 She wanted to learn more than befitted girls, and was called the Solomon of the school.2

  Anne was able to attend this private boarding school thanks to her aunt and godmother, Anne Lister senior, her father Jeremy’s youngest sister. His eldest brother, James Lister, was the sole heir to the family seat, Shibden Hall near Halifax, West Yorkshire. James’ younger siblings – Joseph and Jeremy, Hannah, Phoebe, Martha and Anne senior – had gone almost empty-handed. Without a dowry, none of the sisters could marry; all four stayed at Shibden Hall with their eldest brother, who also never married. Anne’s father, Jeremy, had to take care of his own financial needs. He signed up to the infantry, was sent to Canada and later fought the American rebels in the first battle of the War of Independence in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, in 1775. Promoted to the rank of captain, he returned home with the defeated British in 1783. In 1788, aged thirty-five, he married eighteen-year-old Rebecca Battle, who was set to receive a modest inheritance. While Jeremy was serving in Ireland in 1789, Rebecca gave birth to her first child, a boy who died shortly afterwards. When she fell pregnant a second time, her sisters-in-law invited her to Halifax, where she had a daughter on 3 April 1791. She was named after her twenty-six-year-old aunt, she who [...] took me on her lap the moment I was born, gave me the first food I ever tasted, lifted me within the pale of Christianity.3

  1 Map of northern England, Laura Fronterré.

  Anne was two when Jeremy used Rebecca’s inheritance to buy the modest Skelfler House in Market Weighton, along with the surrounding fields and two leased-out farmyards. Jeremy hoped to live on the income from his property, as his brother James did. Anne spent her early childhood in the rolling landscapes of the Yorkshire Wolds. For the rest of her life, a good ramble in the Fields was to be one of her greatest pleasures.4 She later had three brothers, Samuel, John and Jeremy, who also died in infancy, and a sister. When Marian was born in 1798, seven-year-old Anne benefitted too; my mother had nursed me when my sister was born, Anne recalled. She had too much milk. I liked it exceedingly.5

  There was no other abundance in the Lister household. Jeremy earned little. When he did have money, he did not spend it wisely, and accustomed to rough army manners, he would argue loudly over domestic matters. In the meantime, his oldest child was growing into an unmanageable tomboy.6 ’Scaped my maid & got away among the work-people. [...] When my mother thought I was safe I was running out in an evening. Saw curious scenes, bad women, etc.7 I was a curious genius and had been so from my cradle, she wrote of herself, a very great pickle. Sent to school very early because they could do nothing with me at home. At that time, girls from the gentry and middle-class families learned to read and write at home and were not sent away to school until at least the age of twelve. Anne, however, started at the Ripon Girls’ School run by Mrs Hague and Mrs Chettle in North Yorkshire aged only seven. Whipped every day, except now & then in the holidays, for two years.8 Apart from having whistled very well,9 she claimed to have learned nothing at the school. Was always talking to the girls instead of attending to my book.10 Her teachers regarded her as a singular child, and singularly dressed, but genteel looking, very quick & independent & quite above telling an untruth.11

  Rebecca thought her oldest daughter a little high flown at times.12 She refused to learn to cook or keep house and left her mother alone with the maid on washing day. The only domestic chore Anne could not escape was needlework, as she had to patch and darn her own clothes. To her mother’s chagrin, she would not wear the obligatory girls’ caps and poke bonnets because the protruding brim restricted her vision. Whenever Anne visited Shibden Hall, Rebecca’s letters enquired with concern as to how her daughter was dressed. Her Uncle James and Aunt Anne got on better with their wayward niece. Anne respected James, a quiet bookish man, and her childless godmother treated her niece as the daughter she never had. After a long stay at Shibden Hall at the age of eleven in 1802, she moved in for almost a year at the end of August 1803.

  Shibden Hall was built in the early fifteenth century and came into the Lister family’s possession via marriage in 1619. The manor house, built of brick with half-timbered sections and clad in stone, stands just outside Halifax today, in the midst of the Pennines. The old road leading past Shibden Hall down to Halifax was so steep, so rugged, and sometimes too so slippery, that Daniel Defoe thought it to a town of so much business as this is, [...] exceeding troublesome and dangerous.13

  Halifax had been going through a boom since the eighteenth century, fundamentally changing its landscape and society. Technical developments such as the spinning jenny and the steam-powered loom industrialized textile production, which was largely based in the North and Midlands. Manchester, this mother of the cotton trade, could be spotted from afar by its thick masses of black smoke and long brick chimneys.14 Spreading out from there, entrepreneurs built large mills along the river valleys, in which good English cloth was manufactured. Impoverished villagers flooded into prospering towns like the previously insignificant Halifax to find work, albeit work that paid a pittance. For middle-class factory-owning families, increasing wealth brought with it political influence. As members of the original landed gentry, the Listers held themselves somewhat apart from the new mercantile class, although Anne’s second uncle, Joseph, did trade in woollen fabrics, though not too successfully. Thanks to his first wife he owned the large, elegant Northgate House down in Halifax.

  As industry spread through the valley, up on the hill at Shibden Hall things were still run in the traditional way. The estate’s land, four dozen small fields, none of them larger than five acres, was leased out. A quarry, a small primitive coalmine and a mill brought in additional income, supplemented by dividends from shares in the Turnpike Trust (road tolls) and Calder and Hebble Navigation (canal tolls). Not yet twelve, Anne wrote to her parents about harvesting oats at Shibden Hall and considered the political and socio-historical meaning of my favourite subject of Farming.15 She was taught by the sisters Sarah and Grace Mellin. Aside from that, she took singing lessons twice a week with the organist of the old parish church in Halifax. I like Music better then [sic] Dancing.16

  After a year back with her parents and siblings in Market Weighton, where she learned Latin from the local vicar, in 1805 or 1806 Anne was sent to Manor House School in York, which was considered one of the best girls’ schools in the area. A boarding school, it occupied the north wing of King’s Manor, built as an abbatial palace in the thirteenth century and today housing part of the university. Along with forty other girls, Anne was schooled in reading, writing and arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, geography, history and heraldry. Drawing lessons were given by the artist Joseph Halfpenny, who had published detailed architectural drawings of York Cathedral, only two minutes’ walk from King’s Manor. Anne showed greater talent for music
. She practised the flute and pianoforte every day and also enjoyed beating the drum.17

  2 Manor House School, York, 1822, copperplate by Henry Cave.

  At school, Anne continued her unusual Latin lessons at her own request, for eight hours a week. Although, as a girl, she could not attend a regular grammar school, she still wanted to learn the language of the sciences like her brothers. As to what has been said about myself I am perfectly indifferent, she claimed. To be thought a little crazy will never give me much uneasiness, so long as I myself feel conscious of mens sana & mens recta.18 She did not sleep in the dormitories, but instead shared an attic room with one other girl: Eliza Raine.

  For Anne and the other schoolgirls, Eliza may have been the first person they had ever seen from another part of the world. Eliza’s father William Raine had been head surgeon at a hospital in Madras on the southeast coast of India, now Chennai. He and an Indian woman – her name is not documented – had two daughters, Jane and Eliza. Both girls were christened and considered illegitimate but British. They spoke Tamil with their mother and the servants, English with their father and his friends. The latter included William Raine’s colleague William Duffin. He and his wife did not have children and grew very fond of the Raine girls. In 1797, Duffin made Raine his successor as Chief Medical Officer in Madras and returned home to York. When William Raine died three years later, William Duffin was executor of his will and brought Eliza and Jane to York. The girls both attended Manor School, with Eliza boarding while Jane moved in with the Duffins at 58 Micklegate. Each of the girls had £4,000 in a London bank account. This capital, which generated enough interest to live on, was to go to them on their marriage or upon reaching the age of twenty-one. Some might have considered them good catches financially – but as illegitimate ‘half-castes’, they were not accepted by society.