Anne Lister's diary, tour of North Wales 11-27 July 1822

In July 1822, Anne Lister (1791-1840) and her aunt (also Anne Lister, 1765-1836) undertook a short tour of Wales. Lister (fig. 1), then aged thirty-two, was the daughter of Captain Jeremy Lister and Rebecca Battle. Although her family lived near Market Weighton in the East Riding of Yorkshire she spent much of her youth in York, where she was educated at the Manor School, and at her uncle’s Shibden Hall estate near Halifax: after her brother Samuel's death in 1813 Anne became heir to the Shibden estates. Her thirst for knowledge and her role as heir apparent meant she had an unusually broad education for a young woman, including classical literature and languages, mathematics and geometry. A few years after her Welsh tour her uncle’s death made Anne co-owner of the family estate with her aunt. By 1836 she set herself up as an independent female proprietor at Shibden.

Anne Lister’s diaries, which extend to some four million words, are best known to historians of gender for her extraordinarily detailed and frank descriptions of her life as a lesbian. However, these diaries are also a rich and largely untapped source for travel writing. Lister was an enthusiastic traveller both within Britain (visiting for example the English Lakes, Scottish highlands, North Wales, Oxford, Dublin, Bath, Buxton, Scarborough and London) and abroad (France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Russia). Her travels are recorded as part of the daily diary she had kept since 1806, and she also made notes in separate ‘travel notebooks’, and kept travelling accounts.

The Listers left Shibden in their own coach (fig. 2) on 11 July 1822 and travelled via Chester (where Anne met her lover Mariana Lawton) to Llangollen. They left Llangollen on 14 July and toured through the beauty spots of North Wales visiting Corwen, Capel Curig, Betws-y-coed, Conwy, Caernarvon, Beddgelert, Bala and Tan-y-Bwlch, returning to Llangollen on 23 July. Commencing and concluding their tour at Llangollen allowed Anne to make enquiries about visiting the Ladies of Llangollen, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, at their home at Plas Newydd and to make a visit on their return.

In a letter of 24 June 1822 Anne explained to her sister Marian that their aunt ‘wants a little change of air and scene’ and ‘we talk of taking a little tour in Wales for ten days or a fortnight.’ ¹ Lister’s diary reveals she had already initially planned a more extensive Welsh itinerary taking in Aberystwyth, Caernarvon, Bangor, Conwy and St Asaph. Between May and July Anne was gathering information about Wales to inform their tour, reading books from the Halifax Circulating Library, and consulting friends and neighbours. By 5 July she had planned a shorter Welsh tour: ‘Before breakfast, writing out a rather altered & shorter Welsh tour, finding my aunt & I cannot be absent more than 14 or 15 days’. The same day she also studied maps and made notes on ‘things worth seeing’, and presumably came up with a revised itinerary.

Although this tour is unexceptional in its route, which took in a number of picturesque spots, Lister’s recording of it is not typical of manuscript tours of the period. Its author’s distinctive voice comes through in her attention to detail, personal quirks and preoccupations. Of particular note is her visit to the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, her ascent of Snowdon, her obsessively detailed recording of time and movements, and wide-ranging references that reveal a great deal about her use of published tours and guides, revealing the broader social context. A personal document throughout, Lister’s diary also provides insights into intimate details about her private life, both emotional and physical.

Note on the source text:

Anne Lister’s 26 volumes of diaries cover the years 1806 to 1840 (only diaries covering 23 February 1810 to 13 August 1816 are missing) and are held at West Yorkshire Archive Service’s Calderdale office. It has been estimated that only three per cent of her diaries have been published, and this is not surprising given the challenging nature of the text. The diaries are written in very small script and many words are drastically abbreviated: there are also passages in her private code, and her punctuation is minimal (fig. 3). ² Contrary to our usual practice in these digital editions, considerable editorial intervention has been necessary to create a readable text. The following passage transcribed without expansion of abbreviations or addition of punctuation gives a flavour of the original text:

N^t. down to br^fst. till 11 – settl^g. 1 th^g. or oth. – M w^nt. w^th. me to ye stables to see Percy & ye gig & we yⁿ. leav^g. my a^t., w^nt. to inq. ab^t. serv^ts. – walk^d. a lit. on ye walls ^& up & d^wn. ye rows & d^d. nt co. in till 1 – yⁿ., perh. luck^y. for us, all in a bust. & M off at 2 – we were off in h^r. & g^t. here ye King’s head, New hotel, Llangollen, patronis^d. by Lady Eleanor Butler & Miss Ponsonby in 4 \({1\over 2}\) hours ^{abt. 7} includ^g. the h^r. we stopt at ye ch^ch. gate at Wrexh^m. to ^see y^e beaut. ch^ch. w^ch. is kept w^th. ye gr^tst. possib. neatness –

Extracts of Anne Lister’s tour of Wales have previously been published in Helena Whitbread’s The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (1791-1840) (first published in 1988 as I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister, 1791-1840), which covers 1816 to 1824. Whitbread includes diary entries for nine out of thirteen days spent in Wales, but these daily entries are not reproduced in their entirety. Whitbread’s edition is a valuable introduction to Lister and her diaries, but this complete transcription of her time in Wales gives us many further insights into the mind of this extraordinary woman. Pagination in this edition follows Lister’s own page numbers.

Notes

¹ Anne Lister to Marian Lister, 24 June 1822, West Yorkshire Archive Service, Calderdale, SH:7/ML/116.
² For a further image of Lister’s diary, featuring passages written in code, see here.

Further reading:

Elizabeth Baigent, ‘Lister, Anne (1791-1840)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press
Jill Liddington, Presenting the Past: Anne Lister of Halifax (1791-1840) (Hebden Bridge: Pennine Pens, 1994)
Susan Valladares, ‘An introduction to the ‘literary person(s)’ of Anne Lister and the Ladies of Llangollen’, Literature Compass, 10:3 (2013), pp. 353-68
Helena Whitbread (ed.), The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (1791-1840) (s.l.: Virago, 2010)
Shibden Hall website.