“gentleman jack” and her bootmaker: “i shall employ him no more” A remarkable and intriguing volume that conceals and preserves the first appearance in print of any part of the journals of Anne Lister (“Gentleman Jack”). These have been carefully excised from copies of the Halifax Guardian and pasted into an odd volume of a Georgian dictionary by the son of Lister’s bootmaker, of whom she leaves a brief but pungent picture in her diaries. Library Hub lists issues of the Halifax Guardian for the period of the publication at the British Library and Brotherton Library, Leeds; we are not aware of any similar private collection of the series. James Graydon (1824–1892), whose book label is on the front pastedown, was the son of William Graydon (1801–1857), with whom Lister records a heated encounter in her diary entry for 15 March 1821: “Just before tea, Graydon brought me a pair of shoes he had soled. I said he had made the toes narrower. He would have it he had not. He will always, on these occasions, say black is white & I shall employ him no more. He saw I was not pleased & said he did not wish to make for those he did not satisfy, to which I gave no answer but walked off. I proved I was right & thus said too much to him. Fewer words & more peremptory shall do for such people in future.” James Graydon is recorded in the 1861 census as a “cordwainer” and the 1871 census as a “Master boot maker, employing 4 men”; Kelly’s Directory of the Leather Trades (1880) lists Graydon as having premises at 20 & 32 Southgate, Halifax. Lister “took an active interest in local schools and was the first woman to be elected to the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society. She was keenly interested in all details of estate business which she directed personally even when abroad, not least because lack of money was a constant embarrassment to her. She developed a hotel and sold and leased land for building, coal mines, and stone quarries . . . She was an old-fashioned tory and Anglican, disdaining tradesmen, set against dissent, and using her power over tenants and her limited means unsuccessfully to fight the radicalism sweeping the area. Her lesbianism caused her no mental anguish since she explicitly stated it to be a pure form of love, and she was very largely protected from gossip by her discretion and dominant social position . . . She later became known through her diaries which, in twenty-seven volumes and four million words (about one sixth in cipher), chronicle in minute detail her daily life at Shibden, her travels, and her personal life” ( ODNB ). Nicknamed “Gentleman Jack” for her masculine dress and comportment, Lister was a compulsive diarist, recording her life in rich detail from the age of 15 until her death at the age of 49. Following Walker’s death, Shibden passed to Lister’s relatives. Her cousin John Lister (1845–1933) began publishing extracts from her diaries in the Halifax Guardian in 1887, sometimes contextualizing and introducing them with information from Lister’s correspondence and other papers. Lister discusses local commerce and infrastructure; the conditions of victims of the Atlantic slave trade; the death and funeral of Queen Charlotte; and the works of classical authors. She acknowledges the superiority of French musicians (but not their music), expresses disdain for the refurbishment of the local Subscription Library (“awkward, ugly, inconvenient”),
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97 LEVY, Amy. A London Plane-Tree and other Verse. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889 First edition, the publisher T. Fisher Unwin’s own copy of the limited issue, number 1 of 30 copies on Japanese vellum and signed by himself on the limitation leaf. This was Levy’s final work – “marked by emotional integrity and condensed power” ( ODNB ) – for which she corrected the proofs only a week before her suicide. Levy was “a remarkable poet, melancholy but forceful and individual . . . She is a writer of the urban and the modern, whose work is given extra interest by its sometimes painful engagement with her Jewish identity and with the position of Jews in the world of the English intelligentsia” (Orlando). Unwin’s Cameo series of poetry was a distinctively packaged sequence of books that caught the attention of the public and attracted imitators; several titles constituted meaningful first appearances, with works by Henrik Ibsen, Richard Garnett, W. B. Yeats, Edward Willmore, and Alfred de Kantzow. Unwin always kept the top copy of the limited issue for himself. Octavo. Original Japanese vellum, spine lettered in gilt, series title device to front cover in brown, publisher’s device to rear in brown, edges uncut. Contents unopened. Binding lightly soiled and spotted, firm and intact. An excellent copy. £3,750 [147102] 98 LISTER, Anne. Social and Political Life in Halifax Fifty Years Ago. [Extracts pasted into:] BAILEY, N. The New Universal Etymological English Dictionary . . . Vol. II . . . the fourth Edition. London: T. Waller, 1756. [Halifax: Halifax Guardian, May 1887 – April 1889]
laments the inconvenience of a footpath near the house (necessitating threatening passers-by with a pistol), and records her visit to the Ladies of Llangollen. John Lister was almost certainly unaware of the nature of his cousin’s relationships with women, and Anne’s partners (notably Isabella Norcliffe, Mariana Belcombe, and Ann Walker) appear often; excerpts of her correspondence with her “intimate and valued friend” Belcombe and Belcombe’s sisters (in issue XVII) were very likely interpreted by their editor merely as evidence of romantic friendships. In addition to her commentary on contemporary life, Lister detailed the minutiae of her many lesbian relationships in a “crypt hand”, foreseeing “the almost impossibility of its being deciphered” (West Yorkshire Archives). In 1834, she and her life-partner Anne Walker exchanged rings on Easter Sunday in Holy Trinity Church in York, 180 years before same- sex unions became legal in the UK. It is likely that in 1892 John Lister and Bradford antiquarian Arthur Burrell cracked Lister’s code and succeeded in translating a passage. Burrell later recounted the discovery in a letter to the Halifax Borough librarian: “The part written in cipher – turned out after examination to be entirely unpublishable. Mr Lister was distressed but he refused to take my advice, which was that he should burn all 26 volumes” (12 December 1936). John Lister instead hid the journals behind the panelling of Shibden and discontinued the publication in October 1892 without mentioning his discoveries. When he died in 1933, Halifax Borough became the owners of Shibden and, consequently, Lister’s diary. Burrell was contacted and
supplied a copy of the key: despite this, early 20th-century research on Lister was sanitized and restrained. It was not until Helena Whitbread’s ground-breaking I Know My Own Heart (1988) that the erotic contexts of her diary were brought to public attention. Lister’s life has been the subject of numerous documentaries and a two-series BBC drama starring Suranne Jones in 2019 and 2022. In 2011 her diaries were included on the UNESCO Memory of the World register, alongside Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. In her entry of 22 June 1821, Lister wrote: “I owe a good deal to this journal. By unburdening my mind on paper I feel, as it were, to get rid of it; it seems made over to a friend that hears it patiently, keeps it faithfully, and by never forgetting anything, is always ready to compare the past & present & thus to cheer & edify the future.” Although she may have been pained to know he were “merely” a tradesman, Lister appears to have found such a friend in the compiler of this volume. Together 62 consecutive newspaper articles (of 121) in 320 clippings, pasted onto 230 pp. of Bailey’s English Dictionary ; comprising numbers [2], II, “II”, III–XXII, “XXII”, XXIII–XXXII, XXXIV–LVI, “LVI”, LVII–LIX. Octavo (208 × 126 mm). Contemporary reversed calf, panels roll-tooled in blind, spine reinforced with 19th-century red roan, printed paper spine label (taken from the title of a subsequent column of “Social and Political Life”). Front pastedown inscribed in ink “Late Mrs Turner’s”, printed book label of James Graydon underneath. Binding worn with some stripping to roan, several leaves excised to allow for the clippings, a small section (15 ll.) removed from no. LI. £7,500 [157441]
All items are fully described and photographed at peterharrington.co.uk
LOUDER THAN WORDS
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