Anne Lister's Travel Tips & Reviews

Lívia Labate, Pauline  M., Adeline LimPublished on 13 April, 2020 · Last updated on 29 June, 2023
 Cover photo: Marlene OliveiraProject Leaders: Pauline  M and Adeline Lim

Anne Lister traveled as much as her means allowed and she hoped to travel further had her journey not been cut short in Kutaisi, Georgia, in 1840. 

Through her writing we know how meticulous she was about capturing the daily weather as well as logging her expenses and business dealings,  but it is during her travels across England and abroad that we see the world from her perspective—that of someone with very high expectations of everything and who spares no words for a world deserving of critique.

Below is a collection of Anne Lister's many sharp and often humorous travel observations transcribed from her journal entries, travel journals and letters to friends and family. Every travel "review" is a verbatim quote excerpted with the specific location and date called out.

"I shall always be sure as I travel along that my observations, when made at the instant, are correct, at least as far as they can be so." 

—Anne Lister, 2 September 1822

Anne's travel tips at a glance

Explore the map to navigate the reviews geographically, or skip below to read them in full grouped by country.


Collecting Anne's travel tips... one goat at a time

Anne's opinions about the places she visits during her travels are iconic, so we collected them in a spreadsheet!


Reference tracker: Anne Lister reviews

Contributors

This project is made possible through ongoing contributions from the following people:

How to contribute to this project

Tip: Don't worry about redundancy; enter any information you have and we'll reconcile duplicates later.

All information in this spreadsheet is in English, but please preserve the spellings as written by Anne Lister and others (yes, the butchered foreign words too).

Anyone can help research and add additional information for each references in this spreadsheet.

If you want to help research information about these references or help find any of these artworks, please follow the steps above and note you would like to research the entries.

Learn more about Anne's travels from the following presentations at the Anne Lister Research Summit:

26 Sept. 2020 – Review some of Anne Lister’s adventures with discussion about her achievements, traveling companions and what it is like researching Anne’s travels.

15 Oct. 2022This session explores Anne’s travels, provides insights into the landmarks she visited that can still be visited by the 21st-century traveller and reveals how Anne’s indelible effect has changed how we experience travel.

16 Oct. 2022Dorjana Širola reconstructs Anne Lister & Ann Walker's six-day dash between St. Petersburg and Moscow, not covered in Lister’s journal or travel notebooks

16 Oct. 2022 – The Anne Lister Italia team share some highlights of their research, which covers Lister’s 1827 visit.

15 Oct. 2023Henriette Stensdal will guide us through the 17 days Lister & Walker stayed in Norway.

Anne Lister's travel reviews on TripAdvisor 

Many of the excerpts shown above were originally shared between 13-14 April, 2020 as individual travel reviews on TripAdvisor.com under @FineMorning, a profile dedicated to celebrating Anne Lister.  Fifty three reviews were posted and the profile lasted two days before TripAdvisor removed them without comment. Below is the original content of this page, for posterity:

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If Anne Lister were a modern traveler, it would be reasonable to expect she would act no different, but perhaps employ different tools. In that spirit, we have collected some of her many observations as TripAdvisor Reviews in her own dedicated profile, to celebrate her sharp and often humorous travel commentary. 

This is not a parody—every "review" is a verbatim quote transcribed from her own writing followed by the original date included in brackets (as TripAdvisor does not allow a visit date older than a year). These are real reviews in every sense, including their humor and harshness. 

See all Anne Lister TripAdvisor reviews at https://www.tripadvisor.com/Profile/FineMorning

You can follow Anne's profile to receive alerts when new reviews are added. Note that most reviews are of locations and landmarks. We avoided including reviews of businesses that are still in operation so as not to disrupt their livelihood or confuse their patrons given Anne's frequently harsh words about an earlier time. 


Review for Gwydir Castle "We have seen not one goat yet - they are all destroyed on lord Gwedyr’s estate - on account of their hurting his plantations, he about 7 years ago sent an order that every tenant should get rid of all he had by Llanrwst fair (in September) - this was giving them too little time, and caused them great loss which would have been remedied by giving them till Christmas instead of September - for goat’s flesh is not good without salting and should be killed at Christmas -  (Tuesday 16 July 1822)"

To explore more of Anne Lister's travel journeys, check out the interactive maps that include extracts from her journals and travel journals.