About Anne Lister's diary 6-9 May 1835

Introduction

January’s ‘window-breaking’ election in Halifax borough had left a bitter after-taste. Then one of the Whig MPs for the sprawling West Riding of Yorkshire constituency, Lord Morpeth, was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland and therefore had to stand for re-election. So there was at last an electoral contest in the Whig-dominated county constituency. John Stuart Wortley, brother of the Halifax MP, stood against Morpeth.

It was at hard-fought election time that anti-Tory lampooning of Anne Lister was strongest. After the surprise ‘outing’ of Anne Lister and Ann Walker with the mock ‘marriage’ announcement, followed by an anonymous letter, Anne now found herself in receipt of an electoral invitation – that seemingly mocked her masculinity.

Selected passage

In this passage we see Anne Lister and Ann Walker, unenfranchised landowners, visiting their enfranchised tenants in the rural parts of their estates. But they found the ‘yellows’ (ie Whigs) had already been active. Tory unity was paramount in such electoral crisis moments. Any bickering about coal trespass or squeamish scruples about unorthodox relationships had to take second place. The diary vividly records Anne Lister’s conversations with tenants, both loyally blue, defiantly yellow, as well as those pulled and pushed both ways.

Once again, the diaries also confirm just how many horses Anne Lister was able to ride at any one time. In these four days, she not only dealt with the election but also with tricky conversational rivalry with her sister Marian, with complex estate business - including buying a gin-horse, and developing Shibden’s mining at her tiny hill-top Walker pit.

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