The poems Wordsworth composed in the years just prior to and immediately after Peterloo bear the imprint of the poet’s concern for the degraded state of Britain and are marked by his fear of social insurrection. Introduced by a reading of Wordsworth’s Autumn poems, ‘September, 1819’ and ‘Upon the Same Occasion’, this chapter proceeds to trace the recurrence of patterns of violent imagining in The River Duddon sonnets, which discover, through their adaptation of the ostensibly pacific but deeply conflicted poetics of the sacred fount tradition, a fitting analogue for the times. The chapter concludes with an account of how the material contradictions underpinning the fluvial tradition are displayed in the arrangement of the three-volume Poems (1820) and four-volume Miscellaneous Poems (1820) and in the sequencing of the Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822). If the river sequence offers the promise of recuperation, it is a genre that inevitably reveals its origins in bloodshed and ruin. Yet, it is from such ruins, as Ecclesiastical Sketches go on to suggest, that forms of peaceable life may once again be salvaged.

Memorials of a Tour of the Continent, 1820 follows the poet’s course down the Rhine and the Rhône, revisiting scenes that, thirty years earlier, had provided a setting for dreams of radical rebirth. Wordsworth’s battle with the past is intensified by another, more pressing conflict: a spat with Lord Byron, who in Canto 3 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage had forged an impression of post-war Europe heavily indebted to Wordsworth. In many respects the Memorials can be read as an effort to defend a reputation that, in Wordsworth’s eyes, had been traduced by Byron, while attempting at the same time to correct the pro-Napoleonic sentiments that, on account of the popularity of Childe Harold, had been allowed to cast a pall on the legitimacy of the post-war settlement. The Memorials make clear that Wordsworth’s efforts to make peace with his own history, a history informed by the conflicted history of Europe, remained unresolved and that by returning to the restorative channels of youth the poet had, in fact, merely reinitiated the repetitive cycle in which peace is coupled with war.

Chapter 1 begins with the “Ciceropaideia” (301–29), the account of Cicero’s education and training. It begins with the end of the Brutus in order to provide a sense of what the dialogue has been building up to. Cicero’s concluding discussion of himself reveals and brings together several assumptions, problems, and techniques of presentation that are crucial to the earlier parts of the dialogue. In the Ciceropaideia he carefully shapes biographical and historical details into a tandem narrative, intertwining his ascent with the decline of Hortensius. The account suggestively documents Cicero’s development of a moderate “Rhodian” style and implicitly undermines his Atticist detractors.

Chapter 3 examines the Brutus as an intervention in contemporary politics. It begins by revisiting the preface but focuses on its discussion of the contemporary civic crisis and the immediate history of the civil war (1–25). In both the preface and the digression on Julius Caesar (254–57) Cicero presents an alternative civic vision as a response to the crisis. The chapter concludes by considering the portrayal of the younger generation of orators: Curio (filius), Caelius, Publius Crassus, and Marcellus. The last figure merits special attention because Cicero’s oratorical canon includes only two living figures: Marcellus and Caesar. Marcellus is accorded a prominent role as part of Cicero’s attempt to offer a coherent vision of the republic, one based on the restoration of the senatorial elite and the reinstatement of the traditional institutions of government.

Focussing on a reading of the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’, and its accompanying shorter poems, this chapter sets Wordsworth’s post-Waterloo compositions within the context of broader, contemporary debates concerning the relations between war, religion, and sacrifice. While elsewhere in the Thanksgiving volume attempts are made to cleanse the ‘stains’ of a ‘perturbèd earth’, the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ remains dogged in its attention to the human costs of ‘victory sublime’, an attention that, this chapter argues, should be read within the larger context of Wordsworth’s struggle to submit Imagination to the will of God. With memories too of how, in 1802, peace conflated the distinctions between union and disunion, legitimacy and illegitimacy in Wordsworth’s sexual relations, the ‘Thanksgiving Ode’ tacitly acknowledges the recent wedding of the poet’s daughter, Caroline Wordsworth-Vallon. Figured as the bearer of conflict and as a principle of restitution, Caroline hovers on the margins of the ode, a symbol of peace founded in war.

Chapter 5 takes up the work’s beginnings: why did Cicero choose Marcus Cornelius Cethegus as the first Roman orator? Appius Claudius Caecus made much more sense, and Cicero’s reasons for excluding Caecus from his canon tellingly reveal his literary-historical principles. The literary history presented ultimately justifies his own role as a literary historian and confirms his prejudices about the past, present, and future of oratory. His manicuring of the past emerges prominently in the perplexing “double history” of Greek oratory (26–51), which is a methodological template for Roman oratorical history, and in Ennius’ special place as a literary historian (57–9).

It is a commonplace in discussions of Anne Lister to identify her as a self-proclaimed Tory, and eventually a Tory landowner. But the Lister of the diaries also fancied herself a Rousseauvian individualist and something of a Byronic hero, a champion of Romantic individualism that sits somewhat oddly with her sense of social entitlement. I have argued elsewhere that Lister’s conservatism may have been compensatory, a form of normalisation and possibly of protection. In this chapter I complicate those arguments by looking more closely and more broadly at Lister’s politics - and politics with both a capital and a small ’p’. Lister lived during an age of revolution and reaction, of Napoleonic wars, of abolitionist agitation, of the first major Reform Act, of colonial expansion, of early industrialisation and rail travel. What were her attitudes to these major phenomena that do not necessarily line up neatly with a single party? What issues did she care about, and what did being a (non-voting, because female) Tory mean to her? Were there chinks in her conservative political philosophy? Did her views change over time? And is it possible that Lister’s conservatism was not compensatory at all, but rather part and parcel of her self-fashioning as a lesbian?

This chapter considers how Anne Lister negotiated a place and identity for herself in (and beyond) Halifax society through her engagement in associational activity. This chapter positions Lister’s intellectual activity in the wider context of the opportunities for women’s participation in civic and intellectual life in this period, on a local and regional level, by considering her membership of more formal networks such as the York Friendly Society and the Halifax Literary and Philosophical Society, alongside informal ones of prominent local families. Lister’s status in her home town of Halifax was particular and unusual owing to the relatively open secret of her sexual nonconformity, as well as her propertied status as the owner of Shibden Hall. Building on the important work by Jill Liddington in Female Fortune (1998), which establishes Lister’s construction of a landed gentry identity that could compete with her fellow landowners, this chapter examines how far this exceptionality was able to carry her in evading the usual gendered constraints of intellectual life, and the ways in which she deployed traditionally patriarchal forms of power in accessing, promoting and disseminating civic projects such as the new ‘Lit and Phil’.

This Introduction highlights the importance of this collection - the first of its kind - for showcasing the paradigm-shifting quality of the Anne Lister archive. It describes Lister’s growing importance to a range of disciplines that include the history of sexuality, women’s and gender studies, literary studies, life writing and travel writing. It outlines how Lister’s transgression of gender and sexual boundaries not only marked and shaped every aspect of her lived experience, but also has challenged our understanding of the evolution of sexual and gendered narratives up to the present. Decoding Anne Lister includes interviews and essays on Lister’s queer sexuality and gender variance, her role as a diarist, her pushing of gender barriers through her involvement in local politics and in the managing of her Shibden Hall estate, her adventurous and at times gender-defying travels through Britain, Europe and the Russian Caucasus, and on the highly successful adaptation of the Lister diaries into the BBC/HBO series, Gentleman Jack. Each chapter shows how the Lister diaries have helped to reconfigure the more traditional trajectories of nineteenth-century histories of gender and sexuality, and of social and political life.

In July 2018, the York Civic Trust unveiled the first rainbow plaque in the UK, commemorating Anne Lister’s union with Ann Walker. The plaque, at the church in York where the two women celebrated their bond by taking communion together, sparked controversy with its labelling of Lister as ‘gender-nonconforming entrepreneur’. Following a consultation period, a new plaque describing Lister as ‘lesbian and diarist’ was unveiled in February 2019. On 3 April 2019 (Lister’s birthday), a third plaque was presented at Shibden Hall, the house and estate she inherited from her uncle. Avoiding the controversy of the first York plaque, it described Lister as ‘diarist, businesswoman, landowner, traveller and lesbian who recorded much of her personal life in a secret code’. Lister herself repeatedly insists on the naturalness of her desire for women, as well as on her own exceptionalism. Yet her diaries also show her looking for women like her, not as sexual partners but as models (the Ladies of Llangollen) or as kindred spirits (the masculine bluestocking Miss Pickford). This chapter explores the implications and the stakes of attempts to classify and categorise Anne Lister according to past and present rubrics of gender and sexuality.

Travel was key to Anne Lister’s sense of self and has played an important part in shaping her posthumous reputation. Famously, she was the first amateur to climb the Vignemale in the French Pyrenees in 1838 and died on one of her most ambitious journeys to Russia in 1840. Scholarship on her diaries in the mid-twentieth century highlighted these and other more local travels. Changing social attitudes, which made possible the publication of decoded passages of Lister’s diaries in the 1980s, meant that Lister’s diaries were no longer valued primarily for their social history content. To understand Lister’s life fully we need, I suggest, to investigate more closely how Anne Lister’s diaries can be read as life writing and travel writing. Citing evidence from Lister’s home tours in the 1820s, I will argue that a distinctive female voice such as Lister’s is an important,but until now neglected, element in the recovery of female travel writing, which has been a recent focus for scholars. I will show that descriptions of travel in Lister’s diaries offer both a rich resource for the study of tourism and also contribute to our understanding of her emotional life and relationships.

In 1831, Anne Lister wrote that she ‘found distinctly for the first time’ her own clitoris. This culminated a search of at least eleven years, involving much exploration of her own and her female lovers’ anatomy. Of course, her explicit diaries made clear that she touched her own and her lovers’ clitorises, but she was not able to link her own sensations with the anatomical terms she found in textbooks. By looking at Lister’s quest to find the clitoris, we can understand in more detail how difficult it was for women to conceptualise this important part of their bodies. If Anne Lister, a brilliant, erudite woman very knowledgeable about science and anatomy, and very sexually experienced with women, took so long to figure it out, it must have been much more difficult for ordinary women. The most startling aspect of how discourses could affect perception was that Lister spent ten years confusing the clitoris with the cervix, leading to fruitless explorations of her own body and those of her lovers. This chapter will thus contribute to the larger historiography about the history of the clitoris - when it appeared in anatomical books, and when some medical texts started to downplay or omit it.

Through a reading of the fanbase response to Sally Wainwright’s 2019 BBC/HBO adaptation of the Anne Lister diaries, Gentleman Jack, this chapter asks the following questions: what is at stake in bringing the diaries to the screen, and how does the process of adaptation queer time? In the case of Gentleman Jack, many fans will have experienced the adaptation as the original. With her glamorous androgynous wardrobe, her butch walk and her seductive presence, Suranne Jones’s Gentleman Jack not only rewrites history for a contemporary audience, but also queers our temporal relationship to the past. This chapter analyses how the fans’ intensive affective response to Gentleman Jack - variously described as a form of community building, of self-discovery, and of mourning and loss - merges the fictional and the original archive in productive ways. In this dialogue between the present and the past, the Lister archive continues to forge a queer trajectory that highlights the losses and gains of an occluded and rediscovered queer history. Wainwright’s refashioning of the Lister diaries for today’s television audience has in fact led us back to the ‘phenomenon’ that Lister was in her own time and to a new understanding of the importance of Lister for today.