Yorkshire Almanac 2025

Unedited excerpt

The excerpt in the book is shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

One election stands out among the rest as having particularly excited the town, especially the ladies of it, not on account of any especial question of politics involved in it, but because of unusual interest that attached to the persons of the candidates on that occasion. One was a Wilberforce, the other was a young baronet – touchingly young, the ladies pronounced him to be, and about him spinster imagination unceasingly busied itself. He was known to be a scion of the aristocracy too, and that was a fact particularly commendable in Hull eyes; whilst there was something plebeian in the very names of the rival candidates, Clay [actually Wood – Clay stood in 1841] and Hutt. The general enthusiasm was catching, and “Don’t you think,” Annie said, one day, “that there must be something very remarkable in the new member?” The time just then happened to be favourable for inventions; there had been a theme missing in Annie’s story-talk for some time, ever since the collapse of the nun romance, in fact, and she readily seized upon an idea for a new tale. The member became the hero of many volumes of her unpublished novels.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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Date given by the York Herald, which makes the hustings sound lively.

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Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• 1837 United Kingdom general election (2) W/G ·
• Benjamin Wood (MP) (1) W/G ·
• Conservative Party (1834-) (25) W/G ·
• James Clay (author) (1) W/G ·
• Keary, Annie (1825-79) (2), Bilton-born children's writer, novelist, poet W/G ·
• Kingston upon Hull (UK Parliament constituency) (3) W/G ·
• 📌Kingston upon Hull (74) W/G ·
• Radicals (UK) (6) W/G ·
• Walter James, 1st Baron Northbourne (2) W/G ·
• Whigs (1678-1859) (23), political faction and, later, party, supported parliamentarism, various forms of elite liberalism, manufacturing interests, opposed Catholic emancipation, succeeded by the Liberal Party W/G ·
• William Hutt (politician) (1) W/G ·
• William Wilberforce (1798–1879) (2) W/G ·

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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Date given by the York Herald, which makes the hustings sound lively.

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Similar

23 August 1837: Robert Gibson, fishmonger of Queen Street, Hull, is beggared by his Liberal landlord for favouring the Conservatives in the general election, says the (Tory) Hull Packet

29 September 1830: Tory Radical Richard Oastler: “free” white workers in the Bradford mills are worse off than their enslaved black counterparts in the colonies

4 December 1843: The Tory MP for Knaresborough recounts the death in poverty of an old woman at Harden Beck, Bingley

18 January 1966: Barbara Castle (Lab.) swings the Hull North by-election with a bridge over the Humber, convincing Harold Wilson that he has the momentum to win a general election

20 September 1819: Flags and fasces at a procession from Briggate to Hunslet Moor to protest the Peterloo Massacre

9 January 1659: The poet Andrew Marvell reacts emotionally to his nomination as “a fitting man to take our wishes unto parliament house” at a hustings of the “free and lightened voters” of Hull

30 May 1835: The (Tory-dominated) Leeds Corporation gives its assets to three cronies to prevent their being inherited by the new (Whiggish) town council created by the Municipal Corporations Act

21 February 1835: The Spectator sketches the preoccupations of Leeds’s Tory and Whig establishments – respectively, partying, and preventing implementation of the child labour provisions of the Factory Act

27 August 1754: The (Tory) Leeds Intelligencer calls on Holbeckers to accept the appointment by Samuel Kirshaw, Vicar of Leeds, of a new curate, Richard Fawcett Snr, to St Catherine’s Chapel

3 March 1825: Children’s author Annie Keary is born at Bilton-in-Ainsty, to the alarm of sister Lucy (7), as she recalls 50 years later

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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54 years later, in Eastbourne, after a long illness:

The morning and the afternoon passed, and towards evening a change began; Annie asked to be taken to bed again, and said to her attendant: “I am going home soon, Fanny, and I am very happy.”

During the night consciousness failed, and she fell into a state of torpor from which she never awoke. Four hours after her spirit passed away, early on the morning of her birthday, the 3rd of March. As she was lying down, the last night, she said to her cousin, “Now I will say a baby hymn,” and then she repeated a verse which she had been used to say to the children at the hospital:

Whether I wake, or whether I sleep,
I give my soul to Christ to keep,
Sleep I now, wake I never,
I give my soul to Christ for ever;

adding, “Your soul, Emily; yours and mine.”

With the words of little children on her lips, and with joy and tenderness in her heart, she was taken home. Home she called that life of which we can form no image. It revealed itself to her by the name that was dearest to her of any name on earth.

I guess Fanny is not the “determined pedant” of her schooldays. More on Annie, Eliza, Lucy and the extended family in Michael Keary’s book, which says that Emily is a cousin, and that Annie was killed by breast cancer (Keary 2021).

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