KATHRYN HUGHES
The Short Life & Long Times of Mrs Beeton

DEDICATION

For my parents, Anne and John HughesAgain, again

FAMILY TREES

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Family Trees

PROLOGUE: ‘A Tub-Like Lady in Black’

CHAPTER ONE: ‘Heavy, Cold and Wet Soil’

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER TWO: ‘Chablis to Oysters’

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER THREE: ‘Paper Without End’

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER FOUR: ‘The Entire Management of Me’

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER FIVE: ‘Crockery and Carpets’

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER SIX: ‘A Most Agreeable Mélange’

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER SEVEN: ‘Dine We Must’

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER EIGHT: ‘The Alpha and the Omega’

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER NINE: ‘Perfect Fashion and Elegance’

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER TEN: ‘Her Hand Has Lost Its Cunning’

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER ELEVEN: ‘Spinnings About Town’

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER TWELVE: ‘The Best Cookery Book in the World’

INTERLUDE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: ‘A Beetonian Reverie’

NOTES AND SOURCES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

P.S.

About the Author

Q and A with Kathryn Hughes

Life at a Glance

A Writing Life

Top Ten Favourite Books

About the Book

On the Beeton Track by Kathryn Hughes

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Have You Read?

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About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE ‘A Tub-Like Lady in Black’

ON BOXING DAY 1932 the National Portrait Gallery opened an exhibition of its new acquisitions to the public. There were twenty-three likenesses on display, all of which were to be added to the nation’s permanent portrait collection of the great and the good. Cecil Rhodes, ‘South African Statesman, Imperialist and millionaire’, was one of the new arrivals, as was the Marquis of Curzon, who had until recently been Conservative Foreign Secretary. By way of political balance there was also a portrait of James Keir Hardie, the first leader of the Labour Party in the House of Commons, and a replica of Winterhalter’s magnificent portrait of the Duchess of Kent, Queen Victoria’s mother. Oddly out of place among the confident new arrivals, all oily swirls, ermine, and purposeful stares, was a small hand-tinted photograph of a young woman dressed in the fashion of nearly a hundred years ago. She had a heavy helmet of dark hair, a veritable fuss of brooch, handkerchief, neck chain, and shawl, and the fixed expression of someone who has been told they must not move for fear of ruining everything. The caption beneath her announced that here was ‘Isabella Mary Mayson, Mrs Beeton (1836–65)’, journalist and author of the famous Book of Household Management.

By the time the first members of the public filed past the photograph of Mrs Beeton on Boxing Day, her biographical details had already changed several times. Sir Mayson Beeton, who had presented the photograph of his mother to the nation nine months earlier, had insisted on an exhausting number of tweaks and fiddles to the outline of her life that would be held on record by the gallery. Even so, Beeton was still disappointed when he attended the exhibition’s private view a few days before Christmas. Particularly vexing was the way that the text beneath his mother’s photograph described her as ‘a journalist’. Beeton immediately fired off a letter to the curator, G. K. Adams, suggesting that the wording should be altered to ‘Wife of S. O. Beeton, editor-publisher, with whom she worked and with the help of whose editorial guidance and inspiration she wrote her famous BOOK OF HOUSEHOLD MANAGEMENT devoting to it “four years of incessant labour” 1857–1861’ – a huge amount of material to cram onto a little card. The reason Sir Mayson wanted this change, explained Adams wearily to his boss H. M. Hake, director of the gallery, was that ‘he said his father was an industrious publisher with a pioneer mind, who edited all his own publications, and but for him it is extremely unlikely that Mrs Beeton would have done any writing at all’.

Mayson Beeton was by now 67 and getting particular in his ways. Even so, he had every reason to fuss over exactly how his parents were posthumously presented to the nation. Over the six decades since their deaths Isabella and Samuel Beeton had all but disappeared from public consciousness. The Book of Household Management was in everyone’s kitchen, but most people, if they bothered to think about Mrs Beeton at all, assumed that she was a made-up person, a publisher’s ploy rather than an actual historical figure. Almost worse, from Mayson Beeton’s point of view, was that virtually no one realized that it was Mr, rather than Mrs, Beeton who had coaxed the famous book into being. Its original name, after all, had been Beeton’s Book of Household Management and there was no doubt about which Beeton was being referred to.

Getting the presentation of his parents just right had become an obsession with Mayson Beeton, whose birth in 1865 had been the occasion of his mother’s death. Only the previous year an article had appeared in the Manchester Guardian that managed to muddle up Mrs Beeton with Eliza Acton, a cookery writer from a slightly earlier period. Beeton’s inevitable letter pointing out the error was duly published, and from these small beginnings interest in the real identity and history of Mrs Beeton had begun to bubble. In February 1932 Florence White, an authority on British food, had written a gushy piece in The Times entitled ‘The Real Mrs Beeton’ which drew on information provided by Sir Mayson to paint a picture of a ‘lovely girl’ who enjoyed the advantages of ‘YOUTH, BEAUTY, AND BRAINS’. Mrs Beeton, it transpired, was a real person – albeit a rather two-dimensional one – after all.

H. M. Hake had happened to read White’s piece in The Times and was struck by her reference to the family owning ‘portraits’ of Mrs Beeton and wondered if there might be something suitable to hang in the National Portrait Gallery. The answer, when it came back, was disappointing. There was no portrait of Mrs Beeton, just a black and white albumen print, taken by one of the first generation of High Street photographers, probably in the early summer of 1855 when she was 19 years old. It had subsequently been hand-tinted by one of Sir Mayson’s daughters, giving it a cheap, chalky finish. This was not the kind of flotsam that the National Portrait Gallery usually bothered itself with. Still, the times were changing and it was important to change with them. After a consultative meeting on 7 April 1932 the trustees decided that they were prepared to accept, for the first time in their history, a photographic portrait to hang among their splendid oils and marble busts.

That the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery decided to hang Mrs Beeton on their walls at all says something about changing attitudes to the recent past. During the twenty-five years following the old Queen’s death, the Victorians had seemed like the sort of people to keep your distance from. Indeed, White’s article in The Times had begun: ‘Mrs Beeton lived in the Victorian era, which, as everyone under 30 knows, was dismally frumpish.’ It was lovely to be free of that mutton-chopped certainty, hideous building, starchy protocol, and, of course, endless suet pudding. But as the years went by, what had once seemed oppressively close now became intriguingly quaint and people began to wonder about the names and faces that had formed the background chatter to their childhood. When Hake had written to the assistant editor of The Times asking to be put in contact with the Beeton family, he explained why he thought the time might be right for the National Portrait Gallery to acquire a portrait of Mrs Beeton: ‘Recently we were bequeathed a portrait of Bradshaw, the originator of the Railway Guide, and I think that Mrs Beeton is at least a parallel case.’

Mayson Beeton would not have been pleased to hear Hake casually lumping his mother into a category of kitsch, brand-name Victorians. But then, he had never quite realized how lucky it was that some years previously Lytton Strachey, that arch pricker of Victorian pomposity, had abandoned his attempt to write a biography of Mrs Beeton. Strachey had been apt to tell friends that he imagined Mrs Beeton as ‘a small tub-like lady in black – rather severe of aspect, strongly resembling Queen Victoria’, which sounds as if he was lining her up for the kind of robust debunking delivered to Florence Nightingale and others in his Eminent Victorians of 1918. In the end Strachey had given up on his plans to write about Mrs Beeton because he could not find enough material, a continuing lack that explains why there have been so few biographies in total, and none at all since 1977.

Part of this absence is the result of the way that details about Mrs Beeton’s death – and hence her life – were suppressed almost from the moment she drew her last breath in 1865. In order to protect their investment in the growing ‘Mrs Beeton’ brand it made sense first for her widower Sam and then for Ward, Lock, the publishers who acquired his copyrights in 1866, to let readers think that the lady herself was alive, well, and busy testing recipes to go into the endless editions of her monumental work that were proliferating in the marketplace. For by 1880, with bestselling titles such as Mrs Beeton’s Shilling Cookery, Mrs Beeton’s Every Day Cookery and Mrs Beeton’s Cottage Cookery doing terrific business, Mrs Beeton had become the kind of goose whose eggs were solid gold. The emphasis now was on keeping her alive for as long as possible.

On top of this intentional censorship, the circumstances of Mrs Beeton’s life had managed to keep her hidden from history. She was only 28 when she died, which meant fewer letters written, fewer diaries kept and fewer photographs taken (the National Portrait Gallery picture is one of only two surviving adult portraits). After her death in 1865 the simmering tensions between her family, the Dorlings, and her widower flared into open warfare, and Sam broke off contact with her enormous brood of siblings. This naturally stalled the flow of anecdotes, ephemera, and memories about Isabella around her vast clan, and simultaneously created the conditions for rumour and innuendo to flourish, especially about what had actually happened during the nine years of her marriage. Sam’s own early death only twelve years later again acted as a kind of break in the transmission of accurate information about Mrs Beeton, while providing a further space for speculation and fantasy to grow. Brought up after Sam’s death by people who had never known Isabella, the two surviving children of the marriage, Mayson and his slightly elder brother Orchart, were left with only a small heap of fragments from which to reconstruct a mother they had never really met. There were forty or so love letters written between Sam and Isabella during their engagement in 1856, a couple of holiday diaries kept by Isabella from the 1860s, the increasingly famous photograph now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, and that was about it. In these circumstances, half contrived and half chance, Mrs Beeton had slipped straight from life into myth.

So by 1932, and after decades of foggy indifference, the public was ready to be intrigued by the revelation that Mrs Beeton, whose name they knew so well, had indeed been a living, breathing person. In a slow week for news, the presentation of the little photograph to the public had provoked a gratifying amount of press coverage, all of which Mayson Beeton hungrily collected for the slight family archive. One writer set the approving mood when he declared:

It was with some astonishment that most of us learned during the week that never till the present year did the National Portrait Gallery possess a portrait of Mrs Beeton. Mrs Beeton, it will be generally agreed, is the most famous English authoress who ever lived. Her name is a household word in thousands of homes in which Jane Austen is as little known as Sappho. Other popular authoresses … appear and disappear; but Mrs Beeton has achieved the deathlessness of a classic as well as the circulation of a best-seller.

Other journalists followed this lead, waxing lyrical about a woman they had not bothered to think much about before, but were now happy to declare ‘the Confucius of the kitchen, the benefactress of a million homes’. The man from the Mirror made a careful distinction between Mrs Beeton as an exponent of proper ‘womanly’ ways as opposed to all the ‘“feminists” in the NPG, the suffragette, the actress and the long-distance flyer’. The Evening News, meanwhile, made the shrewd suggestion that part of this sudden interest in Mrs Beeton might be the fact that she spoke from a bygone world when ‘homes were homes, when cooks were cooks and above all when incomes were incomes and not illusory sums of money in uneasy transit from the pocket of trade and industry to that of the State’. For by 1932, and with Britain mired in economic depression, political uncertainty, and social unrest, it was easy to feel wistful for a time when middle-class homes could afford to keep a full complement of domestic staff, none of whom would think of answering back.

The point that all the commentators agreed upon was that the Mrs Beeton who stared down at them from the walls of the National Portrait Gallery was light years away from the Queen Victoria look-alike that they, along with Mr Strachey, had fondly imagined. The photograph was reproduced in countless newspaper articles, and even went on sale in August 1933 as a postcard in the National Portrait Gallery’s shop, where it quickly established itself as the third most popular portrait in the whole collection, after Rupert Brooke and Emma Hamilton. From being a virtually effaced person, ‘Mrs Beeton’ started to become one of the most widely recognized images circulating in British print culture.

There was something about the enigmatic young woman in the photograph that encouraged all kinds of speculations and projections. The critic from the Daily Express suggested that from Mrs Beeton’s body language it looked as if her cook had left the room a minute earlier (she didn’t have one), while another referred to her as effortlessly ‘patrician’, which she most certainly was not. The Express again mentioned ‘the firmness of the mouth’ while someone else talked about her ‘gentle’ face. The Guardian said it was reassuring to notice she was plump, while someone else talked about her elegant slenderness. The Mail, in the strangest flight of fancy, suggested that ‘it is perhaps fortunate that she lived in a pre-Hollywood age, otherwise her undoubted charm might have borne her away on the wings of a contract’. Margaret Mackail, who wrote a brief biographical sketch to appear on the back of the postcard, referred to Mrs Beeton as ‘lovely’, which seems generous, especially given that Mackail, the daughter and favourite model of the late Edward Burne-Jones, had herself been one of the iconic beauties of her day.

Four years later, and with the looming centenary of Mrs Beeton’s birth in 1836 provoking another wave of public interest, Mayson Beeton wrote an article entitled ‘How Mrs Beeton wrote her famous book’ for the Daily Mail, the paper for which he had worked as an administrator for so much of his career. The title was telling: Beeton’s driving concern was, as ever, to rescue his father’s professional reputation from the long shadow cast by his mother’s spectacular achievement. Hence, in Mayson Beeton’s retelling of the story to Daily Mail readers, ‘Samuel Orchart Beeton was the successful young publisher who at the age of 21 took Fleet Street by storm’, while Isabella was the ‘apt pupil’ who gradually learned how to produce articles for his array of publications. Most crucially, in the gospel according to Sir Mayson, the famous Book of Household Management was the outgrowth of the ‘weekly notes’ on cookery that his mother had contributed to his father’s Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. It says something about how little Beeton really knew about his parents’ lives that the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine had actually been a monthly publication.

Such misdirections and inaccuracies aside, a gratifyingly large number of letters arrived at High Lands, Beeton’s Surrey villa, in response to the piece in the Mail. One was from an Old Marlburian who had been at school with Beeton over fifty years previously, expressing his surprise that ‘Curiously enough I never connected the book with you’, voicing a common elision between the flesh and blood ‘Mrs Beeton’ and the one that was made out of 1,000 pages of closely printed paper, and handsome calf binding. An elderly gentleman wrote with fond memories of ‘messing’ with Mrs Beeton’s recipes during his childhood in the 1860s. One British woman wrote from Paris to say that her New Zealander husband had presented her as a young bride with a Mrs Beeton in recognition of the fact that his parents had relied on it during some tough years in a lonely sheep station. Other notes arrived from correspondents who had known various members of the extended Beeton and Dorling clans in days gone by and wanted Sir Mayson to verify various dimly remembered anecdotes. Had the famous book not been written in Greenhithe where Mrs Beeton lived for the last year of her life? Surely the great work had been completed while she was sitting on a bench in the garden of Ashley House, her stepsister’s large Epsom residence?

To all these correspondents Mayson Beeton dutifully responded. ‘Wrote a chatty letter’, ‘replied with thanks’ is regularly written in pencil across the top of incoming mail. To those who asked for it, he enclosed a copy of the National Portrait Gallery postcard. And, such being the good manners of the day, the recipients inevitably wrote back thanking him for his kindness and complimenting him on his mother’s ‘beautiful’, ‘charming’, ‘kind’, ‘sweet’, ‘romantic’ and, above all, ‘Victorian’ face. To those correspondents who wrote offering photographs and recollections of his parents’ families Beeton was especially warm, inviting them to ‘run down’ to High Lands for a visit. For by now Beeton had decided that the time was right for him to write a proper ‘memoir’ of his parents and he needed all the extra material he could scavenge if he was to produce something that would stretch to the length of at least a small book.

There was never any doubt in Beeton’s mind as to who was going to write the biography of his parents. Although the documentary evidence in his possession was, on his own admission, ‘scanty’, he knew there were still plenty of awkward stories and embarrassing rumours about his parents’ life at large that would need to be deftly despatched. These would need careful handling, and Beeton had no intention of letting an outsider clamber over the project, leaking secrets in the process. He had already had to deal with one particularly annoying young woman called Joan Adeney Easdale, who seemed determined to write a biography of Mrs Beeton, with or without his approval. In the many letters Beeton fired off to producers and editors in the mid 1930s urging them to have nothing to do with Miss Easdale’s work, he always returns to the fact that it is his parents’ ‘private family life’ (the underlining is his) that he is determined to protect from the impertinent and uncomprehending gaze of strangers.

With Miss Easdale’s cautionary example in mind, Mayson Beeton dealt particularly firmly with the steady stream of lady writers who contacted him in the wake of the 1936 Daily Mail article asking for his blessing on their intention to put together a biography of his mother. To correspondents such as Winifred Valentine (Mrs), Mrs Sheriff Holt, and Mary Stollard (Miss), Beeton wrote back stiffly, discouraging any hope that he might be about to turn his precious cache of material over to them. If they wished to publish a short biographical article on Mrs Beeton in the Woman’s Magazine or the Lady or the Nursing Times he would not stop them, but he asked that they submit a proof to him first. Quite sensibly they did not, which meant that Beeton was then able to work himself up into a delicious frenzy when their chatty, anodyne pieces finally appeared. ‘Full of Inaccuracies!’ is scrawled across the top of pieces that, notwithstanding his contempt, have been pasted onto stiff card and carefully dated for posterity.

To those male, and on the whole better known, authors who wrote sounding Beeton out about the possibility of taking on his mother’s biography, he tended to use a more gentlemanly tone. Responding to the professional biographer Osbert Burdett who had made contact in April 1936, Beeton explained that he was planning to do the job himself. In addition he told Burdett what he does not seem to have told any of his lady correspondents, that he was going to be using a collaborator. Although Beeton had started his working life in magazine journalism, by the age of 35 he had shifted permanently into management. It was years since he had done any writing and the Daily Mail piece had proved an arduous task. In any case, he was now 70 years old and needed someone to do the footslogging in the central London libraries that was increasingly beyond him.

What Beeton needed above all was someone who could be relied upon to be discreet. There were things in his parents’ story that he was determined should not be put before the public, and he had to be certain that the person he worked with understood this. The chosen candidate also needed to realize that a key purpose of this ‘memoir’ was to rescue Samuel Beeton’s professional legacy from the long shadow cast over it by his wife’s flukish achievement. Which is why Sir Mayson’s choice of collaborator fell upon a young man who was actually related to him through his paternal, that is Beeton, line. Harford Montgomery Hyde was a 30-year-old barrister and professional writer whose great aunt had been married to Samuel Beeton’s second cousin and whom Sir Mayson had known since he was a boy. Hyde had already published a couple of books since leaving Oxford where, like Beeton, he had been at Magdalen. But, most important of all, he had a reputation for a tenacious yet discreet approach to research: ‘Montgomery the Mole’ would become his nickname in wartime intelligence ‘because I had the reputation of burrowing away among historical documents and discovering other people’s secrets’.

Through the late 1930s Hyde went on ‘prospecting operations’ for Sir Mayson, wading through administrative and legal records in Guildhall and Chancery to see if he could uncover any official information to supplement the family documents stored by Beeton in a series of japanned boxes at High Lands. No start, however, seems to have been made on the actual writing of the book and, just when things might really have got going, the war changed everything. Hyde went to the US where he worked in counter-espionage, and Beeton shifted his focus from family matters to national ones. The last war had been his finest hour, with his work for the Finance Department of the Ministry of Munitions partly responsible for netting him a knighthood in 1920. That sort of active public role may have been beyond him now, but Beeton was still determined to be useful. It was his fond hope that, should London be flattened by German bombs, his vast archive of antiquarian maps and topographical prints could provide the basis for the capital’s rebuilding. Thus, much of Beeton’s energy in 1941 was spent arranging with Lord Reith to have his collection transferred to the Ministry of Works and Buildings, now temporarily housed in the relative safety of Oxfordshire. Letters Beeton wrote at this time make it clear that he was still fully intending to write his parents’ ‘memoir’. However when Lady Beeton died two years later after fifty years of happy marriage, the old man found himself emotionally winded and suddenly frail. For the first time in his life he was ready to consider passing over the custodianship of his parents’ reviving reputation to someone else.

Beeton’s utterly misguided choice fell upon a young female writer called Nancy Spain. Spain was to become famous in the 1950s as one of Britain’s first media personalities, writing punchy opinion pieces for middle-brow papers, appearing on the Home Service’s My Word and hamming it up on the TV quiz show What’s My Line? where she sat alongside Lady Isobel Barnet and Gilbert Harding. Spain, a flamboyantly butch lesbian in an era that did not care to enquire too deeply into such matters, became an instantly recognizable crop-haired, trouser-wearing figure in middle Britain’s landscape, until at the age of 46 she died in a plane crash on the way to the Grand National with her female lover. All this was in the future, though, when, in 1945, Mayson Beeton asked the recently discharged WRNS officer down to High Lands. Spain had already had some success with her first book, a chatty recollection of her wartime navy service called Thank You Nelson. More significantly, as far as Beeton was concerned, she had a blood connection with the family, although this time on his mother’s side. Spain’s grandmother, the recently deceased Lucy Smiles, had been one of Isabella Beeton’s favourite half-sisters.

Given that one of the driving forces of Mayson Beeton’s biographical ambitions had been to rescue his father’s reputation from the slow drip of innuendo that had originated from his mother’s family over the previous eighty years, it does seem odd that he should have blithely handed over the project to a Dorling descendant at this late stage. Even Spain was surprised, declaring later in her autobiography, ‘to this day I don’t know why he had picked me out of all the world.’ Perhaps a certain amount of contact between the Dorlings and the Beetons since the end of the Great War had made him believe that the rift was finally healed. Maybe Lucy Smiles’ gently anodyne contributions to The Times and the Star in 1932 recalling her lovely elder half-sister and dynamic brother-in-law reassured him that this particular vertical line of his mother’s family was benign to the Beetons. Perhaps Spain, at 28, seemed so young to the old man that it was impossible to believe that she would want to carry on a feud that had started nearly a century previously. Her mother had been at Roedean with Mayson Beeton’s daughters and she herself had followed them there. Give or take her penchant for flannel trousers, she looked and sounded like one of the family. So Spain was duly invited to ‘run down’ to High Lands, and work her way through Mayson Beeton’s collection of his parents’ love letters, Isabella’s diaries, and other ephemera which were now bulked out by all the articles that had appeared on Mrs Beeton over the previous ten years.

What Beeton had missed entirely was that the wildly ambitious Spain was looking to make a splash. And since she was also an incorrigible spendthrift, she needed to make money too (not for nothing was her 1956 autobiography titled Why I’m Not A Millionaire). Spain was far less of a scholar than Hyde, and her writing on Mrs Beeton is spattered with factual errors. An early essay which she wrote for the Saturday Book in 1945 in order to raise some much needed cash manages to get not only Isabella’s death date wrong, but also the birth of her last child, and these kinds of basic errors went uncorrected into the book. Yet if Spain was sloppy over detail, she had a sharp nose for where the real drama of the Beeton story lay. Armed with a rich store of information from her late grandmother and a sole surviving great-aunt, she set about writing an account that managed to suggest, without exactly saying so, that Mrs Beeton’s home life was not quite the model of well-regulated domesticity that the nation fondly imagined.

In the circumstances it was probably lucky that Sir Mayson died before Spain’s book appeared. The reaction of his three daughters to their second cousin’s effort goes unrecorded, although Spain hints in her autobiography that getting their approval on her manuscript was a lengthy and wearisome business. Having grudgingly approved Spain’s effort, the Beeton girls lost no time in putting pressure on Harford Montgomery Hyde, now finally free of wartime duties, to revive the biography on which he had been working with their father in the 1930s. Four years later, Mr and Mrs Beeton duly appeared, bearing all the signs of being the book that Mayson Beeton would have wished to write, had he not run out of time. As if to emphasize that this really was the ‘authorized’ version of the Beeton story, Hyde included the Preface that Sir Mayson had originally written for the book back in 1936 (in fact a fuller version of his Daily Mail piece) and also appended a biographical essay sketching out Sir Mayson’s distinguished career. Whatever ‘Montgomery the Mole’ had managed to find out, he was sufficiently loyal to his kinsman’s memory not to reveal it.

And there the story might have ended, with two competing versions of the Beeton story, one originating from either side of the family, glaring at each other down the remaining decades of the twentieth century. On Mayson Beeton’s death in 1947 the archive of letters and ephemera that had formed the nucleus of both biographies was left to his only grandchild Rodney Levick on condition that the young man incorporate the Beeton family name into his. Levick, an eccentric man, lived in Budleigh Salterton for the next fifty years on his grandfather’s capital, writing periodically to the national newspapers to announce that he had devised a method of long-range weather forecasting far in advance of anything the Met Office could manage. He also took to riding his tricycle around Britain, dropping in unannounced on distant cousins from both the Beeton and Dorling sides and staying far too long. On returning to the home that he shared with his widowed mother Audrey Levick and a tribe of stuffed penguins (his father had been the surgeon on Scott’s final Antarctic trek), Levick would despatch tapes of classical music to his relieved hosts. Followed shortly, much to their astonishment, by an invoice.

From the late 1940s to the mid 1970s very few people beat a path to Budleigh Salterton to talk to the Levicks about Mrs Beeton or try to coax access to the archive. The Victorians were undergoing one of their periodic falls from favour. Increasing social and sexual post-war freedoms made them seem like the stuffy architects of everything that was now, finally, being swept away. The end of rationing had set the stage for Elizabeth David’s lyrical advocacy of the fresh, sharp flavours of sunshiny southern Europe. There was virtually no appetite for Mrs Beeton, a woman whose very name seemed synonymous with roast beef, over-cooked vegetables and foggy winter evenings.

But by the early 1970s nostalgia was back in fashion. Laura Ashley was reworking Victorianism in a pretty print frock, Upstairs Downstairs was on the television (and surely it was no coincidence that the cook was another Mrs B. – Mrs Bridges), and there was the beginning of a revival of interest in the vernacular tastes of Great Britain (there was only so much packet paella that anyone could be expected to eat). A clever young woman at Harpers & Queen magazine, who combined the job of arts editor with an interest in food and cooking, had noticed the shift in mood. Moreover, she was intrigued by the little-known fact that Queen magazine, which was one half of Harpers & Queen, had been founded by Samuel Beeton in 1861 and counted none other than Mrs Beeton as its first fashion editor. Searching around for a good subject for her first book, Sarah Freeman duly advertised in The Times in 1974 trawling for information about the Beeton archive.

The Levicks answered Freeman’s advertisement and were doubtless delighted to find such an eligible person was once again interested in their family. Sarah Freeman had not only read PPE at Somerville but had ‘come out’ as a debutante. She was beautiful, chic, had a happy marriage and two young children. After the blustery horrors of Nancy Spain, it must have been lovely to think that such a ladylike, feminine girl wanted to write the story of Mrs Beeton. Nonetheless, the elderly mother and son were not about to hand over control of the Beeton legacy. Mrs Freeman would be allowed to take away selected material to look at in batches, and these loans would be carefully logged in and out by Rodney, writing in pencil on Sir Mayson’s original archive index. But in return she must undertake to skate over those parts of the story that were potentially embarrassing and which Nancy Spain had gone on to hint at even more strongly in a revised edition of her book published in 1956. As if to reinforce the fact that this is the version of Isabella Beeton’s life that Sir Mayson had wished presented to the world, Freeman’s book, which was published in 1977, comes with a baton-passing Preface from none other than the now elderly Montgomery Hyde.

Nearly thirty years have passed since Freeman’s book. History, if not exactly the Victorians, is once again in fashion. New technologies have revolutionized – the word really is not too strong – access to archival sources. There are fresh ways of thinking about the importance of book history (and this, as much as biography, is the discipline that presses most closely on Mrs Beeton’s story). Cooking and eating practices are no longer simply the concern of domestic science teachers but stand full square in our attempts to understand how people lived and traded a century or three ago. We know more than ever about what the Victorians wrote about their domestic lives, what they felt about them and, most importantly, the gap that lay between.

But it is not simply changing contexts that make Mrs Beeton ripe for a new biography. In the late 1990s bits of the Mayson Beeton archive began to appear on the market. Some of the precious love letters were sold off at Sotheby’s, others at Bonhams, and still more items of ephemera appeared in smaller auction houses in the West Country. It is difficult to track the exact pathways by which this material, once so closely guarded, came onto the market, but it seems to have been the consequence of the fact that Rodney Levick was now elderly, insane, and in need of expensive residential accommodation. What can be said for certain is that by 2000, the year after Levick’s death, the Mayson Beeton archive had been dispersed into several different hands. In 2002, after two years of sleuthing and negotiating, I managed to buy or borrow virtually all the important pieces of the archive and reassemble it once again. The difference is that, this time, there are no restrictions on what may be done with the material.

As its title suggests, this book has attempted two distinct tasks. On the one hand it is a straightforward reconstruction of the known facts of Mrs Beeton’s life. By going deep into the public archives, and working through registers and rate books, it has been possible to find out a great deal more about the girl who was born Isabella Mary Mayson in 1836 and who, by freakish chance, became one of the most famous women in history. What is more, as the first biographer who has had untrammelled access to Beeton’s letters and diaries, I hope I have managed to get closer than before to her interior life. There are still, however, large gaps in the record and there are stretches when Mrs Beeton retreats from view, back into the lived but unrecorded past where only novelists can roam.

The second point of this book is to explore the way that, almost from the moment of her death at the age of 28 in 1865, the idea of ‘Mrs Beeton’ became a potent commercial and cultural force. Detached from her mortal body, the ghostly Mrs Beeton could be appropriated for a whole range of purposes. In the 140 years since she died she has been turned into the subject of a musical and several plays. She was once almost on Broadway. She has been used to sell every kind of foodstuff from Cornish pasties to strawberry jam. Every October images from her famous book are turned into bestselling Christmas cards. At the time of writing you can take your pick from Mrs Beeton’s Cookery in Colour, Tea with Mrs Beeton, Mrs Beeton’s Healthy Eating, and, oddest of all, Mrs Beeton’s Hand-Made Gifts (although this is nothing compared with Mrs Beeton’s Caribbean Cookery and Microwaving with Mrs Beeton from a couple of decades ago). The image of her face – that calm/stern/fat/thin face – has been worked into tea towels and stamped on table mats. You can even buy an apron adorned with Mrs Beeton’s likeness in which to wrap yourself like a second skin, in the hope perhaps that her qualities – whatever they might be exactly – will rub off. For if Mrs Beeton is still to be remembered in another 150 years’ time it will not be for writing the Book of Household Management, a book that surely very few people have read right through, but rather for holding up a mirror to our most intimate needs and desires. By representing ‘Home’ – the place we go to be loved and fed – Mrs Beeton has become part of the fabric of who we feel ourselves to be.

CHAPTER ONE ‘Heavy, Cold and Wet Soil’

MRS BEETON MAY HAVE come down to us as a shape-shifter, but her story starts in a settled enough place, at a time when most people still lived a minute from their parents, when men automatically followed their father’s trade, when girls nearly always shared their Christian name with an aunt or cousin, and when it was not unusual to die in the bed in which you had been born. Thursby, in what was then called Cumberland, is a large village wedged between the Lakes and the Borders, flanked by the Pennines on one side and the Solway Firth on the other. It is not on the way to anywhere now, nor was it in the late eighteenth century, when the daily coaches between London and Carlisle were a distant rumble 5 miles to the northwest.

Most of the 240 inhabitants of Thursby owed their living to the ‘tolerably fertile’ gravel and loam soil, which was parcelled up into a series of small mixed farms, owned by ‘statesmen’ or independent yeomen who employed anything from two to twenty men. In 1786 Thursby got a new curate, John Mayson, grandfather to the future Mrs Beeton. The curateship and the countryside taken together might suggest something rather smart, a gentleman vicar perhaps, with a private income, an MA from a minor Oxbridge college, and a passion for the flora of the Upper Lakes, the kind of man you find pottering in the background of so many of the people who made and changed the Victorian world. This, certainly, is the impression that Mrs Beeton’s family would conspire to create in years to come. When Isabella Beeton’s marriage was announced in The Times in 1856, the fact that she was the granddaughter of the late Revd John Mayson of Cumberland was shoe-horned into the brief notice. Seventy years later when dealing with the National Portrait Gallery Mayson Beeton insisted on having his mother’s background blurb rewritten to include the important fact that her grandfather had been a man of the cloth.

But if anyone had bothered to look more closely they would have discovered that Revd John Mayson was not quite the gentlemanly divine that you might suppose. He had been born in 1761 just outside Penrith to another John Mayson, a farmer who was obliged to rent his land from another man. As his Christian name suggests, John Mayson had drawn the lucky ticket of being the oldest son, the one in whom the family’s slight resources would be invested as a hedge against a chancy future (there were a couple of younger sisters who would need, somehow, to be taken care of). John would have gone to school locally and left around the age of 14, a superior kind of village boy.

The next clear sighting comes in 1785 when, at the age of 24, Mayson was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England. The following year finds him becoming a fully fledged clergyman and sent immediately as curate to St Andrew’s, Thursby. This, though, was hardly the beginning of a steady rise through the Church’s hierarchy. Stuck for an extraordinary forty years at Thursby, it looked as if the Revd John Mayson was destined to become the oldest curate in town. On two separate occasions he was passed over for the post of vicar, quite possibly because of his lack of formal education or social clout: St Andrew’s was a large parish with a fine church said to have been built by David I of Scotland – it needed a gentleman to run it. In 1805 the job went to Joseph Pattison instead and then, on his death eight years later, to William Tomkyns Briggs, whose dynastically inflected name buttressed with a Cambridge MA suggests a background altogether more solid than that of plain ‘John Mayson’.

It wasn’t until 1825 that Mayson’s luck finally changed. At the age of 64 – retirement was not an option unless you were a man of means – he was appointed vicar to the nearby parish of Great Orton, a substantial living worth perhaps £250 which brought with it the care of 200 souls. Yet even this was not quite the opportunity that it might seem. The living was in the gift of Sir Wastal Briscoe, the lord of the manor who inhabited several hundred lush acres at nearby Crofton Hall. The previous incumbent of St Giles had been Briscoe’s brother and it was his intention that the living should pass eventually to one of his young grandsons who were being educated for the Church. Mayson, who probably already owed his appointment as curate at Thursby to Briscoe in the first place, was exactly the right candidate to caretake St Giles until his patron wanted it back.

The life of a clergyman without polish, money or pull was not a particularly easy one. It was an existence geared to pleasing the big house, to judging its moods and whims, and making sure you fitted its purpose. It was, though, enough to get married on, as long as you were careful in your choice of bride. Six years into the curateship at Thursby, John Mayson married a young woman whose name suggests that she had some ballast behind her. Isabella Trimble (or Tremel or Trumble – spelling was still an infant business and names changed with each entry in the parish register) was the daughter of a reasonably prosperous maltster, that is brewer. On his death in 1785 George Trimble divided his estate in the classic manner, with his eldest son inheriting the business along with Trimble’s partner, while the younger brothers received ‘movable goods’ in the form of wheat and cash. Isabella, the only girl, was a residual legatee, which gave her perhaps £80 – not an enormous sum, but combined with the £100 that John inherited from his own father, just enough to marry on. The wedding service in January 1793 was taken by the vicar John Brown, with two of Isabella’s brothers signing the register as witnesses: a small thing, but it suggests that Mayson was busy cementing his connection with his smart new relatives.

The first baby arrived ten months after the wedding, as first babies mostly did in the nineteenth century. She was called Esther after John’s mother. Three years later she was joined by yet another John Mayson and then, five years after that, by Benjamin, named biblically for his mother’s youngest brother. The long spacing between the children, combined with the early evidence of fertility, suggests that there were probably other babies, born months too soon, some still and grey, others little more than bloody clots. These are the first of the many lost children that hover over the story of Mrs Beeton, Benjamin Mayson’s daughter, each one’s failure to spark into life marking the moment when the future had to be imagined all over again.

Of the three Mayson children living, neither of the boys would see forty. John – perhaps originally destined for the Church, to be slipped into a place where Briscoe needed a caretaker or a willing plodder – died at the age of 24 ‘after a long and severe illness’, according to a notice in the Carlisle Journal, and was buried at Thursby. The death of the elder son, that frail container of a family’s best hopes, is always hard, but twenty years later John was followed to the grave by Benjamin, now living far away in London. It was time for another entry in the Carlisle Journal: ‘Suddenly, Mr B. Mayson, linen factor, Milk Street, London, son of the Rev. John Mayson, aged 39 years’.

In the early days, though, when the Mayson children were young and bonny, there was an almost pastoral feel to life at Thursby. Although he was only the curate, Mayson was able to live in the vicarage, a handsome building that would shore up anyone’s sense of battered dignity. The diary of his fellow cleric Thomas Rumney of Watermillock tells of an Austenish existence of long tramps, impromptu tea parties and lovesick letter writing. In August 1803 Rumney walked six and a half hours to get to Thursby from his own parish, and then proceeded to conduct an epistolary courtship with one of John Mayson’s sisters at the thumping cost of 11d a letter.

It was a small life, and it was never going to be enough to hold an energetic young man with neither property or business interests binding him to the place. While John, the eldest Mayson child, was kept close to the family by failing health, his brother Benjamin had other plans. Frustratingly, all record of Benjamin’s early life has disappeared. Proving even more elusive than his daughter Isabella, Benjamin refuses to show up in school records, apprenticeship registers, or even, though we would hope not to find a clergyman’s son here, in the local assizes. He may have received his education at nearby Wigton Grammar School, where Briscoe had pull. Or it is possible that he was sent to Green Row on the coast a few miles away, a forward-looking place which imparted a ‘modern’ curriculum of maths and careful penmanship to young men who were destined for the counting house and the clerks’ bench rather than an ivy-covered quad. Benjamin’s grandsons, Isabella’s boys, will get a gentleman’s education at Marlborough, followed by Sandhurst and Oxford. But those days are seventy years away. Benjamin Mayson, the second son of a poor curate, needed a grounding that would fit him to make his way in the brisk, new commercial world that was even now impinging on rural Cumberland.

In 1780 cotton processing had been introduced into the nearby village of Dalston from Manchester. The conditions were perfect: plenty of water power from the River Cardew and good communication links back down to Manchester, Liverpool, and beyond. By the time Benjamin was thinking about his future, there were three cotton mills and a large flax mill in Dalston, and the principal owners were, as luck would have it, old friends of his mother’s family. All over the country neighbouring households like the Cowens and the Trimbles did business together, married one another’s daughters, and blended their hard-won capital in carefully judged expansion plans. It is very likely that it was to the Cowens’ Mill Ellers, on the edge of Dalston, that Benjamin was sent to serve his apprenticeship.

This, though, is a guess. Not for another eighteen years does Benjamin finally show up properly in the records. By 1831 he has moved to London and set up as a ‘Manchester Warehouseman’ – a linen wholesaler who distributes cloth woven in the hot, damp sheds of the northwest to the fashionable drapers’ shops of London. This was a common enough shift for likely young men from Cumberland’s textile trade, and it is quite possible that Mayson acted as the main agent for his mother’s friends, the Cowens. What we do know for sure is that from the spring of 1834 he was living in classy Upper Baker Street, Marylebone, paying a sizable rent of £65 a year, and that from 1831 he also had business premises across town at Clement’s Court, in the shadow of St Paul’s. If Benjamin Mayson’s daily commute of 4 miles sounds unconvincingly modern, it is worth bearing in mind that in 1829 a firm called Shillibeer’s started a regular horsedrawn omnibus service between Paddington and the City. Londoners were becoming as used as everyone else to widening horizons and for Mayson, who had made the 350-mile journey from Cumberland, the daily journey to the City must have seemed like a breeze.

So by the age of 30 Benjamin Mayson could be said to be doing rather well for himself. He was a vicar’s son and, though not quite a gentleman, was established in a gentlemanly line of business. Mayson, it is important to understand, was not a draper who stood behind a counter unrolling a yard or two of sprigged cotton for the approval of sharp-eyed housewives. He was a wholesaler, a merchant, a man who supplied the smarter kind of drapers with bulk orders and sealed deals with a handshake rather than a few warm coins. And it was a profitable business too. With the world getting both dirtier and more polite at the same time, there was a hunger for fresh linen. No one with any self-respect wanted to be seen in a smutty shirt or streaky dress. The middle-class wardrobe was expanding and becoming more particular, which was good news for anyone who supplied the materials to make all those clean sleeves and dainty collars. And, as if that weren’t enough bright fortune, Benjamin Mayson had arranged his private life carefully too. At an age when most men had already married, he was still a bachelor, having managed to avoid being jostled by loneliness or lust into a hasty match. He was, by anyone’s reckoning, quite a catch.

Elizabeth Jerrom, the woman whom Benjamin Mayson would marry, was born on 24 May 1815, three weeks before the great victory at Waterloo. Her parents Isaac and Mary were domestic servants, working for one of the big houses around Marylebone, part of that feverish development of gracious squares that had been built towards the end of the last century to house the newer aristocracy during the ‘London’ part of their wandering year. When the couple had married eleven months earlier at St Martin-in-the-Fields, they had signed the register clearly, confident in themselves and their new merged identity. The same, though, cannot be said of their witnesses. William Standage, Mary’s father, has done his best but the sprawling scratch he makes in the register is indecipherable: underneath the parish clerk has been obliged – tactfully, crossly? – to write out his name properly, for the record. Mrs Beeton is only twenty years away from people who would be happier signing themselves with a cross.

Mary Jerrom, Mrs Beeton’s grandmother and the only one of her grandparents who was to play a significant role in her life, had been born Mary Standage in 1794 in the ancient village of Westhampnett, just outside Chichester. Her father was a groom on the Duke of Richmond’s estate at nearby Goodwood. William Standage had himself been born 9 miles away, at Petworth where the huge Standage clan had for generations lived and worked with horses. The servants’ records at Petworth House show William’s father and brother driving ox and horse carts on the estate through the last decades of the eighteenth century. By 1811 another brother has a job looking after his lordship’s hunters. But it was William, born in 1763, who was the star of the stables. In 1792 he was headhunted by the horse-mad Duke of Richmond to work as a groom at Goodwood. Given that Mrs Beeton would be so exact about what you should pay your groom, it is nice to be able to report that in 1792 her great-grandfather was getting £18 a year which, by 1807, had risen to £24, with extra allowances for clothing and travel.

The horse was God at Goodwood. When the 3rd Duke of Richmond inherited in 1756 his first thought was not to rebuild the unimpressive house but to commission the architect William Chambers to build a magnificent stable block as a kind of love song to the most important creatures in his life. Complete with Doric columns and a triumphal arch, the block was home to the fifty-four lucky animals – hunters mainly, but from 1802 racers too. Family myth has it that it was William Standage who helped the Duke plot the track that would become one of the most important racecourses in the land. Whether or not this is strictly true, the story points up just what was important in this family. Horses are a recurrent presence in Mrs Beeton’s story, presiding spirits of events both happy and bad. Her grandparents will meet through them, her stepfather will make his fortune from them, her sister will lose an eye from one, while her first biographer and great-niece will fall out of the sky on the way to Aintree.

Standage, who married a woman called Elizabeth, produced a string of daughters: first Mary, next Sarah and then Harriet. All three girls married men who worked with horses. This is not as odd as it would seem today. You can only marry someone you’ve already met, and a groom’s daughter in the early nineteenth century met an awful lot of grooms. But none of the girls stayed in Sussex. Instead they followed the classic migratory pattern of their generation and poured into London, working first as servants in aristocratic mansions and then marrying men from the stables, men who knew or were known to their fathers. In time these men would set up as job masters or livery stable keepers, hiring themselves and their carriage out for a fee, doing for several families what they had formerly done for just one. By the end of the nineteenth century, you could still find the grandsons of these people working as omnibus and cab drivers, transporting restless crowds of shopgirls, clerks and housewives around a teeming central London.

Sometime around 1812 Mary came to London to work as a servant, and two years later she married 28-year-old Isaac Jerrom. Given that they married in St Martin-in-the-Fields, it looks like Isaac and Mary met while working in one of the aristocratic mansions around Piccadilly, quite possibly the London residence of the Duke of Richmond of Goodwood or Lord Egremont of Petworth. By the time their first baby Elizabeth – named for Mary’s mother – came to be christened the following year, Isaac and Mary ‘Jurrum’, as the parish clerk would have it, were living in Marylebone and gave their occupation as ‘servants’. Two years later, with the arrival of their new baby William, they are still describing themselves in the same unembarrassed way, tucked in amongst a dense urban parish swarming with labourers, gentlemen, shopkeepers, artists, clerks, peers, diplomats, musicians, and, of course, an army of domestic staff responsible for keeping this huge social beast trundling forward.

John Jerrom, Isaac’s father, who had probably migrated from Hampshire to London as a young man, now ran a livery stables in Marylebone. By 1820 Isaac starts to appear in the Marylebone rate books on his own account, running a stables just around the corner in Wyndham Mews, a newly built series of stables on the Portman Estate. Livery stables supplied carriages and drivers to those households who did not keep their own groom and horse. Most of the mansions in Marylebone had no need for this service since they were well able to make their own arrangements. Indeed, the status of a family was intimately tied up with the show it made in the streets, as it trotted around town in a carriage bearing its own insignia, driven by a couple of tall and handsome grooms. But there were households – often headed by women – who were happy to use freelance carriage services as and when they needed them. William Tayler, a footman in a Marylebone house in 1837, was edgy about the fact that his household, headed by a widow, used the services of a ‘jobber’. He knew exactly what it implied about the status of a household in which he was the only resident male servant.

Isaac and Mary Jerrom, released from the bonds of personal service, did well as small business people. The world was changing and they were quick to exploit its possibilities. People were on the move like never before and there was only so far a pair of sturdy legs could take you. As well as catering for the horseless mansions of Marylebone, Isaac provided a taxi service for its less exalted inhabitants, ferrying them around the rapidly extending city. In a classic combination, his wife Mary ran a lodging house, offering bed and board to all those bewildered new arrivals to London. Little by little Isaac rented adjoining properties in Wyndham Mews until in 1826, his high-water mark, the Jerroms were operating out of four separate properties – numbers 1, 4, 5, and 10. When extra manpower was needed, Isaac did the usual thing and turned to his extended family. In the mid 1830s he was joined in partnership by his younger cousin James Mitchell, a Londoner who turns up at all the key family events. Mitchell will be a witness at Elizabeth’s wedding in 1835 and, four years later, it is he who will inform the registrar of Isaac’s death from consumption.

We do not really know what Elizabeth Jerrom was like as a young girl. There are family stories of her as a beauty, but then family stories nearly always coopt someone to play that role. Certainly a watercolour of her at 16 shows a very pretty girl. The fact that the Jerroms could afford to have her painted and put in a frame suggests the good fortune of being the only child in a working-class family – baby William has disappeared, leaving all the resources concentrated on pretty Bessie. The way she is painted Elizabeth Jerrom could be the daughter of one of the big houses around Marylebone: the sloping shoulders, the little head with the elaborately worked hair, the snub features all suggest a dainty miss rather than a girl who has grown up with the stink and clatter of livery nags directly under her bedroom window. This class-shifting will be a theme in Elizabeth’s life over the next thirty years, as she moves from mews, to warehouse, to townhouse and, finally, to a suburban mansion with over a dozen servants and her own busy programme of balls and At Homes.

There are two anecdotes about Elizabeth that have been handed down through the family, and both hinge upon the idea of her as a social traveller. The first story comes from her great-granddaughter Nancy Spain who has Elizabeth visiting Hampton Court as a girl on two occasions, once when Adelaide, the consort of King William IV, was there to receive ‘a medallion’. There is no tag line to the anecdote, no point to it at all, apart from associating Elizabeth Jerrom, a girl born in a stable, with the dignity of queenship, her beauty implied as the link (the story comes straight after a eulogy to her good looks). In Spain’s story Elizabeth becomes both a proxy lady-in-waiting to the Queen and also the recipient by association of the oddly generic ‘medallion’.

Years later, in a book charting his family’s history, Elizabeth’s grandson Revd Edward Dorling remembered how as a young child in the 1860s he had fallen foul of her on account of some flowers that had been picked without permission from her garden. Little Edward found himself confronting a woman who regarded him with the controlled disapproval of ‘an angry queen’. No longer beautiful, and now swollen by seventeen confinements, Elizabeth’s ‘we are not amused’ expression made her, in the child’s mind, as frightful a prospect as the real Queen Victoria.

Girls who are as pretty as princesses attract all kinds of courtship stories, and Elizabeth Jerrom was no exception. Indeed, the tale that was handed down about her was so potent that it was still being rehashed in newspapers a hundred years later. The story goes that once upon a time, one of Mrs Jerrom’s lodgers was a young printer called Henry Dorling. It is impossible to confirm this, although it does make sense. Dorling’s father was a printer in Epsom who produced the running cards for the Derby. Mrs Jerrom’s father had been a key groom at Goodwood. The courses were only 30 miles from each other, and were connected by a network of owners and grooms who continuously passed between the two. Names, tips, gossip, information would have been exchanged along the way, so that when William Dorling was looking for respectable people with whom his son could lodge during his vulnerable bachelor years in London, he naturally thought of the Jerroms.

The story runs that Henry Dorling and Elizabeth Jerrom fell in love but her parents refused to countenance an engagement. Instead they favoured the suit of the gentlemanly wholesaler Mr Mayson. Mayson was an established businessman with a residence in Marylebone and a warehouse in the city. What is more, he was a vicar’s son, which to country people (which is what the Jerroms still were) meant a great deal.

The dates, however, do not work. The records show that a good nine months before Benjamin Mayson and Elizabeth Jerrom became man and wife Henry Dorling had already married a London girl called Emily Clarke. The fact that Dorling asked Benjamin Mayson to stand godson to his first child and named the boy ‘Henry Mayson Dorling’, also tends to argue against any kind of love triangle. If there was any rivalry and split loyalty at 1 Wyndham Mews it must have been of a very mild variety. As far as we know Elizabeth Jerrom never looked back on 2 May 1835 when she walked up the aisle with Benjamin Mayson.

The Maysons’ first child was born on 14 March 1836 at the fag end of the snowiest winter that anyone could remember. She was fifteen months too early to be a Victorian. The Maysons were shrewd with their naming strategies, careful to tie the child to the wealthier side of the family. The baby was named Isabella after her Mayson grandmother, the well-set-up brewer’s daughter, and Mary … after who exactly? Possibly after her other grandmother, Mrs Jerrom, the groom’s daughter, but also, perhaps, after her father’s grandmother. ‘Mary’ was one of those handily common names that provided cover for a multitude of dynastic ambitions.

Shortly after Isabella’s birth the little family of three moved from Marylebone to Benjamin’s business premises which were situated at the heart of the textile business in the City of London. In the early nineteenth century the short streets that run north from Cheapside towards Guildhall were packed with warehouses storing fabric of every kind. As well as ‘Manchester’ goods of linen and cotton, there were ‘Nottingham warehouses’ stocked with lace, as well as other businesses specializing in silk products from Coventry and Derbyshire or woollens from Yorkshire. Within a few hundred yards you could find all the new mass-produced fabrics of the industrial age, funnelled down from their place of production and disgorged into the chief marketplace of the country, indeed of the whole world.

The City of London was still a residential area in the 1830s. Warehousemen, in particular, liked to live close to their capital, setting up home on the top floor of their premises, which also provided lodgings for clerks and apprentices. Mayson’s first warehouse was in Clement’s Court, a narrow cul-de-sac which ran off the west side of Milk Street, where the fine houses had gradually been taken over by textiles. The lack of passing trade was not a problem; as a wholesaler Mayson was not supposed to sell to customers who came in off the street in search of a bargain, although plenty of smaller businesses did. Every corner of the warehouse would have been stacked high with bales of fabric: an eye-witness from twenty years later talks of the clerk in a large Cheapside warehouse ‘piling up innumerable packages in forms that would exhaust the devices of solid geometry’. During most of the year Mayson would have dealt in linen, ‘Scotch Derry’, and perhaps ‘linsey-woolsey’, but during the summer months there would have been lighter mousselines, georgettes, and silks. One corner of the warehouse might well have been set aside for crapes and ‘kindred vestments of woe’, styled and textured to denote every phase of mourning. Samples of the new season’s fabrics were sent out to valued customers in March and then again in September.

As baby Isabella crawled, then toddled, among the giant fabric pillars she would have absorbed the smells and textures of the textile trade, the sharp tang of Manchester cotton, the powdery feel of velvet, the flutter of muslin. In twenty-five years’ time, as editress of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, she will become expert at evaluating and describing the new season’s materials. Her writing is terse and expert, shot through not with the approximating gush of a Lady of Fashion but with the understanding of someone who has grown up feeling fabric between her fingers. Here she advises her readers on the styles for July 1860:

SHAWLS, of any and every material, are worn; some are made of black Grenadine, square, and with a binding of black or violet glacé all round, two inches in width, and of crossway silk; others are of the same material as the dress (some barèges being made wide for this purpose), and bound in the same manner, or have a ribbon laid on with a narrow straw trimming on each edge. A great many muslins are also made to match the dresses, the border being the same as that on the flounces. Shawls of white muslin, with embroidered borders, are very dressy and stylish, also those of plain white muslin, bound with black velvet.

Two years later, and with civil war in America cutting Lancashire and Cumberland off from their vital cotton supplies, Isabella mounted a relief effort to sustain the textiles industries’ starving workers. Old clothes, boots, bedding but above all money were to be sent to Mrs Beeton care of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in readiness for their dispersal among the cottages of northwest England. Even now, sixty years after Benjamin Mayson had first struck out from the damp, close sheds along the River Ribble, his eldest daughter still understood the way that cotton worked – and what happened when it didn’t.

Mayson prospered in the City. By 1836 he has moved out of Clement’s Court and onto Milk Street itself, buying substantial premises at number 24, an investment that brings with it the right to vote. Legend has always had it that Isabella was born here, in Milk Street, which would have made her a cockney, since the Bow Bells ring out from a few hundred yards away on Cheapside. Indeed, Nancy Spain actually has Isabella christened at St Mary-le-Bow, the result of a common enough confusion with Mary-le-bone, in a glorious christening gown covered with a pattern of ears of wheat which Spain maintains was still doing service within her family seventy years later. The story cannot be confirmed although, even allowing for Spain’s mixture of exaggeration and elision, it makes a kind of sense. If Benjamin Mayson knew anything, it was how to pick a piece of cloth that would last.

While Isabella was neither a cockney nor a Victorian, her brother and sisters were. Just as she turned 2 she was joined by Elizabeth Anne, always known as Bessie. In September 1839 came yet another John Mayson, followed by Esther, named for her Cumberland aunt, in February 1841. All were christened in St Lawrence Jewry, which stands a couple of hundred yards away in the forecourt of the Guildhall. The first three Maysons were all said to be pretty. Esther less so, but this may be because a riding accident in her twenties left her with a blinded eye. Photographs of the Maysons are not much help when it comes to working out their colouring. The iconic National Portrait Gallery portrait shows Isabella with very dark, almost black hair. However, Marjorie Killby, Mayson Beeton’s eldest daughter and a keen photographer, always maintained that this was inaccurate, the fault of the rudimentary technology of the time. Drawing on family intelligence, Killby insisted instead that Isabella had ‘light reddish auburn hair’ and even set about making a new print of the photograph in order to show her grandmother in her true colours, as a strawberry blonde. By way of confirmation, a watercolour of the four Mayson children from 1848 shows them all as redheads but with Isabella a shade or two fairer than her siblings.

It is harder to work out how the Maysons sounded. A great-niece going to visit her maiden aunts Bessie and Esther in genteel Kensington in the 1920s remembered them with cockney accents that struck her, a colonel’s granddaughter, as decidedly comic. In this incident, recorded in Sarah Freeman’s biography in 1977, Rosemary Fellowes explains away her great-aunts’ dropped aitches and their use of ‘ain’t’ as a fashionable affectation from their youth. But the fact is that by the time Edwardians were using cockney to sound smart, the Misses Mayson were already in their eighth decade. The way they spoke had been picked up much earlier, during the 1840s and before English accents had become codified by class. From their father they might have got some flat vowels, and from their mother and neighbours they would have heard the kind of cockneyfied speech in which ‘w’s were still doing service for ‘v’s. Boarding school in Germany would have added another complicating layer. Whatever the exact sound eventually arrived at, we can be fairly safe in saying that Mrs Beeton and her sisters did not speak like ladies.

The birth of Esther, the youngest Mayson child, in February 1841 must have been bittersweet. Seven months earlier Benjamin had died at the age of only 39. The notice inserted by his father in the Carlisle Journal suggests that the death was sudden: certainly there is no suggestion that he was suffering from the kind of degenerative illness that had made his brother linger for so long. The death certificate, a recent innovation, part of the new Victorians’ desire to count, clarify, and mark their hectically expanding population, says ‘Apoplexy’. This sounds sudden and convulsive, until you realize that in the 1840s it stood for many things: alcoholism, syphilis, epilepsy as well as the more obvious heart attack or stroke. It is ‘apoplexy’ that will kill Benjamin’s son, the baby John, only thirty years later.

Death may have been everywhere in early Victorian England, but to find yourself pregnant with your fourth child and suddenly responsible for a highly capitalized business is unlucky by anyone’s standards. Although her widowed mother Mary Jerrom was helping with the domestic side of life at Milk Street, Elizabeth Mayson soon buckled under her burden. The only solution, a common enough one, was to farm out the two elder children to relatives. Isabella, still only 5 years old, was sent like a parcel to the other end of the country to lodge with her clergyman grandfather at Great Orton. The census entry for 1841 gives a bleak snapshot of what she found there. Apart from the 79-year-old John Mayson, himself recently widowed, the thatched vicarage was home to one 30-year-old servant, Sarah Robinson. For a little girl, 350 miles from home, Great Orton must have seemed the strangest place to be. Instead of the companionable man-made bustle of Cheapside, there were country noises: shivering trees, rumbling carts, and endless fields of cawing sheep. In place of scurrying clerks and warehousemen there was a single shoemaker, schoolmaster, and blacksmith. It got dark early, stayed colder longer, and the food, coaxed from the ‘heavy cold and wet soil’, tasted different. The bread was made of barley, black and sour (‘Everybody knows that it is wheat flour which yields the best bread,’ noted Isabella pointedly twenty years later in the Book of Household Management). Oatmeal, meanwhile, turned up at virtually every meal. There was porridge for breakfast, and maybe crowdy – oatmeal steeped in beef marrow – for midday dinner. Ginger, which came all the way from China, made cake and biscuits burn in your mouth.

As if that weren’t enough strangeness for 5-year-old Isabella, there were the voices too, speaking in a language that she would have had to strain to understand. Just why Bessie, two years younger, was not sent with her as a consoling companion in exile is a mystery. The obvious place for both girls would have been at nearby Thursby, where Benjamin’s surviving sibling Esther lived with her yeoman husband John Burtholme and daughter Anne who, at 17, was of an age to be helpful with baby visitors. As it is, Bessie’s whereabouts in 1841 remains unknown: along with Mrs Jerrom she has temporarily vanished from Milk Street and has yet to turn up anywhere else.

Even with two fewer people to worry about, life was not easy for Elizabeth Mayson. Still only 25, she now ran the business in her own name – the trade directories describe her as a ‘warehouseman’. In the 1840s it was not unusual for widows to take over their late husband’s business, and the directories show many women heading up pubs, livery stables, and every kind of shop from baker to jeweller. Elizabeth had grown up among the artisans and tradesmen of Marylebone, watching women like her mother working alongside husbands and brothers as book-keepers, shop assistants, and storeroom supervisors. The 1841 census shows her employing one young maidservant and an older man called Robert Mitchell who was originally from Sussex. Mitchell’s father had worked alongside various Standages in the stables at Petworth House and his presence in Milk Street is a reminder of how, in the first half of the nineteenth century, rural communities had a habit of reconstituting themselves at the very heart of commercial and industrial landscapes. Elizabeth Mayson may have been operating out of one of the busiest streets in London, but when it came to investing her precious trust she relied on a network that had been forged sixty years earlier and in a different place entirely.

There remains some mystery about Elizabeth’s finances during her widowhood. Benjamin had not left a will, and ten days after his death she was granted administration as his ‘relict’. His estate amounted to £8,000, a small fortune. However, much of this must have been tied up in stock and Benjamin doubtless left a fair number of outstanding debts to his suppliers that needed to be paid before it was possible to get any sense of the real value of his legacy. For how else can one explain the fact that only two years later Elizabeth, now reunited with Isabella and Bessie, is writing a begging letter to her father-in-law in Great Orton? From John Mayson’s reply it transpires that warehousing has not been kind to Elizabeth: quite possibly the drapers to whom she tried to sell her cloth were not happy dealing with a young woman. Certainly it looks as if she was thinking of switching to another trade, perhaps lodging house keeping like her mother. We will never know the precise nature of Elizabeth’s problems, since the letter to her father-in-law has been lost. Here, though, is the Revd Mayson’s reply:

My dear Bessie

I am sorry the business you entered upon did not answer your expectations. Of the one you are going to begin I can form no opinion, as I am totally ignorant about it. You say you have seen a House which might answer your purpose. You do not mention the Rent, but I understand the first Quarter’s Rent is to be paid in advance, and if the rent be high you will observe another Quarter’s Rent will soon be due. Do you suppose you will be able to meet it at the time, as he requires a Qr. in advance? I am afraid he will be a sharp landlord.

You say you want a little money. I think I can advance you 50£, if that will do. Since last Christmas I have had a great deal to do. As I was not able to do any Duty, I was obliged to engage a curate. I think I shall never be able to attend the Church again to do Duty. If 50£ will be of any service to you, after you receive it you must send me a Note, as I wish at my Decease to have something made up for your children, and the above 50£ was part of it. I intended to make you an allowance yearly. But if I do too much there will be less afterwards. I assure you I am anxious to save something for my little grandchildren. I have my curate to pay quarterly. I do not wish you to sell your house, and also not to lay out your money extravagantly. I hope to hear that you are doing well. Carefulness will do a great deal.

I am sorry to say I do not improve much, I cannot leave Home. I do not enjoy Company. I am best when alone. I was glad to hear that you and the little ones were well. Make my love to Isabella and Bessy. The other 2 do not know me. They are very well at Thursby. I have not seen them lately except Anne who was at our House yesterday. I have not had much of Anne’s Company lately. I want to know when Esther was born. I have forgot. Write soon.

With kind regards I subscribe myself,

Yours sincerely,

JOHN MAYSON

This letter is puzzling both in what it conceals and reveals. Mayson’s quavering voice, raised in complaint at a hostile world, suggests an old man, battered by grief at having recently lost both his wife, the original Isabella, and his only living son. Obligations – to his curate, to his widowed daughter-in-law, to his grandchildren – weigh like lead upon him, yet he feels unsupported by the people who should love him back, his daughter and teenage granddaughter at nearby Thursby. To Elizabeth, a crisp young woman who had grown up watching her parents run an expanding business, it must be galling to be told by an elderly clergyman that rent comes due every quarter. The reminder that carefulness will achieve much is likewise the last thing to say to a woman who has lain awake at night worrying about how to raise four children alone and on a dwindling income. Mayson’s fussiness over his post-mortem financial plans is odd, too, when you consider that, on his death three years later, it turned out that he had not got round to making a will. His substantial estate of £1,500 passed automatically to Esther Burtholme, his only living child, an already prosperous farmer’s wife. The little cockney grandchildren, about whom the Revd Mayson said he cared so much, got nothing.

Perhaps, though, by the time of his death Mayson felt that Elizabeth’s fortunes had shifted sufficiently for him not to have to bother. For it is now that the stalled courtship story reaches its happy ending. The bare facts are these: only eight months after writing that letter to her father-in-law, we find Elizabeth getting married again. Her husband is Henry Dorling, the young printer who had lodged in her mother’s boarding house all those years ago. This means that the two young families must have stayed in touch: godparenting in the nineteenth century was a serious business, and it is highly unlikely that Benjamin Mayson, a clergyman’s son, would have let his relationship with young Henry Mayson Dorling lapse. So Elizabeth would have been quite aware that Dorling’s wife had died giving birth to her fourth child, only a few months before she had lost her own Benjamin. The early biographers see in this symmetry – both Henry and Elizabeth recently widowed, both with four children apiece – a lovely coincidence, a lucky chance to make the fairy story come out right. But the fact is that this second marriage was as cool as a business deal. Elizabeth needed a husband to rescue her from life as a ‘warehouseman’, and Henry was looking for a mother for his children.

In the spring of 1843 Elizabeth and Henry headed north to Great Orton, so that John Mayson could meet the man who was going to replace his late son. On 24 March the couple headed over the border to Gretna where they were married by John Linton the hotel keeper who doubled as ‘priest’. The witness was Anne Burtholme, now 19 years old and doubtless delighted to play a key part in such a sweetly romantic business. The wedding party – which consisted of the couple, together with Anne and her father John Burtholme – had a hearty wedding breakfast washed down with ale, whisky, and gin.

Did John Mayson, a clergyman of the Church of England, approve of this, the nineteenth-century equivalent of getting married in a Las Vegas wedding chapel? Probably not. Perhaps, too, Elizabeth and Henry had surprised themselves by their skittishness, the last time in their lives that they displayed such impulsive behaviour. Or perhaps the fact that Elizabeth was already pregnant made them rush: baby Charlotte would be born only seven and a half months later. Whatever the reason, the very next day Henry Dorling returned to London and applied for a licence to marry ‘Elizabeth Mayson, widow’ in the old-fashioned way. On 27 March they did the whole thing all over again and walked up the aisle at St Mary’s Islington, the parish where Elizabeth was temporarily living. And then shortly afterwards, gathering up her four children and her mother, the newly minted Mrs Dorling headed off to her second husband’s family home in Epsom, to the place that would become the shape, the sight, and the sound of Mrs Beeton’s childhood.

INTERLUDE

‘The Free, Fair Homes of England’

Caption to the Frontispiece of the Book of Household Management

YOU DO NOT have to get very far into the Book of Household Management (BOHM) to realize that one of its main preoccupations is the loss of Eden. The Frontispiece is an exquisitely coloured plate that shows an extended family group from the early nineteenth century, clustered around the door of a tiled cottage at harvest time. The men are plump John Bulls, prosperous in gaiters. The principal female figure is serving them beer which, judging from the golden haze in the middle distance, she has brewed from her own grain. In the foreground ducks dabble, hens peck and cows drowse under a tree, while a bulldog keeps a beady watch on the men gathering hay on the horizon. The caption underneath explains that this scene represents ‘The Free, Fair Homes of England’, a line from the Romantic poet Felicia Hemans. In other words, here is a time before industrialization scarred the land, cut a generation of town dwellers from its gentle rhythms, and replaced convivial kin groups with edgy strangers.

You just know that Mrs Beeton would love to step into that picture. The Book of Household Management is saturated with a longing for an agrarian world that has already slipped into extinction but just might, by some enormous effort of will, be brought back into play. So, in her instructions for making a syllabub Mrs Beeton suggests mixing up some sugar and nutmeg and then simply squirting the milk from the cow’s udder straight into the bowl. (For those unlucky readers who do not have their own cow immediately to hand Beeton suggests substituting a milk-filled jug poured from a great height to produce the required froth.)

Throughout the BOHM animals destined for the table are described in their natural habitat with such lulling, lyrical grace that you seem to find yourself watching them from the corner of a hot, summer meadow. Here, for instance, is Beeton describing the eating habits of a sheep: ‘indolently and luxuriously [the sheep] chews his cud with closed eyes and blissful satisfaction, only rising when his delicious repast is ended to proceed silently and without emotion to repeat the pleasing process of laying in more provender, and then returning to his dreamy siesta to renew the delightful task of rumination’. Elsewhere Beeton’s text is scattered with drawings that reinforce the unforced bounty of nature. Pigs snuffle in well-kept sties (no nasty urban courtyard here), a landrail hares through the undergrowth, while deer bound through what looks like heather with the Scottish Highlands peaking in the background. The illustration heading up the chapter on vegetables is a cornucopia of cabbage, onions, and leeks, seeming for all the world like something that has just been plucked from the soil in time for the Harvest Festival supper.

Such soft-focus rural fantasy was only possible because Mrs Beeton, like most of her readers, was actually a sharp-edged daughter of the industrial age. Her guidelines for domestic bliss have less to do with the farmhouse than the factory. Briskly she divides the working day into segments and allots each household member from the mistress to the scullery maid a precise set of tasks that read like a time and motion study. (There is no point housemaids starting work until 7 a.m. in the winter, for instance, since rising any earlier will be a waste of candle.) The labour is specialized, repetitive, and, more often than not, mechanized. Kitchen equipment is described and illustrated as if it were industrial plant; the laundry maid’s duties make her sound like the head boilerman on a steamship.

So, too, for all that Mrs Beeton gestures dewy-eyed to the days of ‘auld lang syne’ when households produced their own butter, eggs, bread, and wine, she spends much of her time urging short cuts on her readers. Commercially bottled sauces and pickles get a cautious welcome (they’re probably not as good as home-made, she admits, but at least they don’t cost any more). And when it comes to baking Beeton is ambivalent about whether you should even bother to do it yourself. The illustration to ‘General Observations on Bread, Biscuits and Cakes’ may show an artful pyramid of rustic-looking loaves, with a windmill grinding in the background, yet a few pages later Mrs Beeton dedicates several enthusiastic paragraphs to a newly patented system for mass-producing aerated bread. During this process ‘the dough is mixed in a great iron ball, inside which is a system of paddles … then the common atmospheric air is pumped out, and the pure gas turned on.’ It was from these unappetizing beginnings that the Aerated Bread Company or ABC would emerge to become a commercial giant of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, providing white sliced loaf, as smooth and tasteless as sponge, to the nation.

None of this makes Mrs Beeton’s rusticism phoney, although her vision of agrarian Britain is quaintly out of date, lacking any mention of intensive farming methods, high seasonal unemployment, and endemic poverty among the rural working class. But what Beeton shared with some of the most persuasive voices of her age was the nagging feeling that all the good things about modern urban living – heat on demand, sauces that came out the same every time, a dripping pan furnished with its own stand – arrived at a cost. But what that cost was exactly, and whether it was too high a price to pay for convenience, safety, and comfort was something that she hardly had time to consider. Whirling not so much like a dervish as a cog in a particularly intricate machine, she pressed on in a blur of activity, determined to finish her 1,112 pages in record time. ‘The Free, Fair Homes of England’ remained a lovely, compensating dream.

CHAPTER TWO ‘Chablis to Oysters’

ALTHOUGH EPSOM LIES only 14 miles away from the City of London as the crow flies, it could not have been more different from the cluttered streets and close courts in which Isabella Mayson had spent most of the first seven years of her life. Positioned on a ridge in the North Downs, the town manages to be both flat and high at the same time. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it enjoyed an extended spell as a restorative spa, when its indigenous salts were said to work wonders on jaded digestions. Samuel Pepys took the waters there a couple of times, finding it funny to watch as his fellow sippers rushed for the bushes, caught short by the salts’ laxative effect. But by the opening of the nineteenth century, the fashionably liverish had moved on to Cheltenham and Bath, leaving Epsom to its devices as a quiet market town that turned, once a year, into Gomorrah. Dickens got the scale of the transformation best, writing in 1851 that for most days of the year Epsom was virtually dead but how ‘On the three hundred and sixty fifth, or Derby Day, a population surges and rolls, and scrambles through the place, that may be counted in millions.’

For a few short days during the summer race meeting, well-mannered Epsom became the destination of every swell, Guards officer, dwarf, clerk, tart, orange-seller, thimble rigger, prize-fighter, crook, and lady of fashion in the country. Ruskin called the Derby the ‘English carnival’ and from the breaking hours on the day itself – usually in June – a spirit of excitement and misrule began to bubble far away in London. In Clapham, Mitcham, and Tooting, not to mention Belgravia, Hyde Park, and Knightsbridge people commandeered every phaeton, gig, barouche, four-in-hand, brake, tilbury, and donkey cart for the short journey south. Alongside the shambling caravan of race-goers trundled dusty sellers of every kind of snack, novelty, and stimulant, all shouting and shoving in their attempt to turn a copper, honest or otherwise. Every public house along the route was packed with Derby-goers in various stages of tipsiness and with only a passing interest in the racing. Some indeed never got further than the Swan at Clapham or the Cock at Sutton, and Dickens reckoned that most people returned from the day unable to remember the name of the winning horse, let alone its jockey. As the chaotic column of humanity approached the Surrey Downs the sheer press of numbers meant that it started to stall. A 7- or 8-mile tailback was not unknown and it could take a whole hour to clear the final 3 miles. Local hawkers took advantage of this pooling throng to press upon it anything from a racing card to pigeon pie, lemonade to a second-hand umbrella. The mood could turn merry, but seldom sour. As the Illustrated London News advised Derby-goers briskly: ‘if things are thrown at you, just throw them back.’

From 1837, if you were modern-minded, you could make the journey from London by train. The London–Brighton line took you as far as the quaintly named Stoat’s Nest, from where it was a 7-mile tramp to the Downs. Next year came the welcome news that a rival line, the London and South-Western, was to run special Derby Day excursion trains on their Southampton line. But such was the press at Nine Elms in south London, the result of thousands of people trying to pile onto eight meagre trains, that the police were called in to disperse the increasingly desperate crowd. Even then, the train only went as far as Surbiton, which was still a good 5 miles from the course. It was not for nearly another decade that a line was built all the way to Epsom.

Once the crowds were disgorged – in 1843, the year that Isabella arrived in Epsom, it was reckoned that 127,500 extra souls poured into the town for the Derby – the party continued, helped along by liberal supplies from the temporary beer and spirit stalls. Up on the Hill, the large bank rising at the edge of the racetrack, there was a temporary funfair with swings, roundabouts, Italian hurdy-gurdy players, and acrobats who insisted on twisting themselves into impossible shapes. Winding among the crowd you could see jaunty perennial eccentrics like ‘Sir’ John Bennett, a prosperous jeweller from Cheapside who resembled a beery Father Christmas and would drink anyone’s health while ambling along on his cob. Others, who liked to think themselves fashionable, bought cheap German articulated wooden dolls and crammed them around the brims of their hats – an odd craze that no one could ever quite explain.

This gaggle of humanity was augmented by a fair number of gypsies, who had gathered the previous weekend on the racecourse for ‘Show Out Sunday’, their annual meeting of the clans. Fortunes were told, palms crossed with silver, and heather thrust under reluctant noses. The place was a petty criminal’s paradise: in the squawk and clatter it was child’s play to pick a pocket or sneak off with someone else’s lunch. Prostitutes worked swiftly and unobtrusively, card sharps blended back into the crowd at a moment’s notice. A temporary magistrates’ court was set up in the Grandstand to deal with all the extra business, and additional policing was, by tradition, partly paid for by the winner of that year’s Derby. During race week the manager of the Epsom branch of the London and County Bank kept a loaded rifle with a fixed bayonet close by his desk while Baron de Tessier, one of the local grandees and Steward to the Course, hired extra police protection for his family. Yet still it felt like a losing battle: right-minded burghers could only fume over the way their lives had been so rudely interrupted by the incomers. Unless, of course, they happened to be publicans, shopkeepers or pie makers, in which case they hiked their prices and pasted on a welcoming smile.

Artists loved the Derby, although not necessarily for its horses, which they tended to paint as little rocking creatures whose hooves never quite contacted the ground. It was the crowds they came to see. Over the next century, Millais, Degas, ‘Phiz’, Doré, and Géricault would all take their turn at trying to get the spirit of the place down on paper. George Cruikshank did a brilliant 6-foot cartoon strip called ‘The Road to the Derby’, showing every aspect of human and horsey life on the long trail down from London. But the most successful execution came from William Frith. His Derby Day of 1858 (the not very inspirational title was suggested by Henry Dorling) is a wide-screen panorama of the crowd on the Hill, consisting of ninety distinct figures. Carefully composed in his London studio in a series of artful triangles, you will find smocked countrymen, sinister gypsies, tipsy ladies, flushed punters, a sly thimble rigger, and a hungry child acrobat who watches in disbelief as a top-hatted footman unpacks a feast (the child model, hired from the circus, proved to be a menace in the studio – somersaulting into props and teasing the little Friths about their posh manners).

Derby Day was so hugely popular when it was shown at the Royal Academy that it had to be protected by a policeman and an iron railing in order to stop the admiring crowds pitching forward. On the stately world tour that followed, the painting attracted huge attention wherever it went. Since Frith was known to have been paid a whopping £1,500, Derby Day naturally spawned a whole host of flattering copy-cats. The best of these, the much engraved At Epsom Races, 1863 by Alfred Hunt, rearranges the tipsy ladies, adds an urchin and some shady tradesmen in an attempt to recreate that same sense of fluxy human life.

What pulled artists to Epsom was the fact that the racetrack was a place where the lowest and the highest met, a space outside the normal social order. Or as the Illustrated London News put it: ‘there is a sort of magic in the words Epsom Races, which arouses the hopes, recollections, anticipations, and sympathies of hundreds and thousands of people of all classes of society.’ Essentially a rich man’s hobby, the track had been dominated for decades by aristocrats who travelled around the country from course to course. They were shadowed by their grooms who, in the days before horseboxes and trains, were responsible for riding the precious beasts from Goodwood to Ascot to Doncaster in preparation for the next meeting. Behind the grooms trailed a job-lot of racing ‘types’ – bookies, gypsies, hucksters of every kind. Periodically this odd caravan trundled into well-regulated market towns, took over the taverns and local manors, tumbled the servant girls, cheeked the policemen and made an almighty mess, departing before anyone could be quite sure exactly what they had seen and heard.

Corruption was part of the weft of the sport of kings, which only added to its seedy glamour. Horses were nobbled, trainers coshed, jockeys squared, fortunes won and lost, all under the shadiest of circumstances. Epsom in the 1840s was especially rich in this kind of rottenness. In 1844 the Derby was won by a horse called Running Rein, who turned out to be a 4-year-old named Maccabeus (the Derby was strictly for 3-year-olds). The concealment had been managed by painting the animal’s legs with hair dye bought from Rossi’s, a smart barber’s shop in Regent Street. There was nothing new about the trick. With record-keeping so hit-and-miss, it was simple to lie about a horse’s age or even do a straight swap. The case of Running Rein, however, was referred to the Jockey Club. The publicity surrounding the sorry business only served to show half-delighted middle-class newspaper readers what they had always suspected: that racing was run by decadent toffs and their rackety hangers-on whose glory days could not be gone too soon.

The, by now, infamous hair dye had been traced to Rossi’s by Lord George Bentinck, the ‘Napoleon of the Turf’, and the whole incident investigated initially by his protégé Henry Dorling, the Clerk of the Course at Epsom, who swiftly declared that Orlando, the horse second past the finishing post, was this year’s official Derby winner. Over his lengthy tenure it was Dorling’s great achievement to bring to Epsom his own bourgeois brand of probity, order and storming profit. His Sporting Life obituary recalled admiringly how ‘promptitude and regularity were the order of the day in all … [his] business arrangements’, although the fact that newspaper had once been managed by his son may account for some of the fulsome tone. Even so there could be no denying that by the 1850s Dorling had managed to make a substantial change in the racecourse’s culture, turning it from a discredited and slightly sleazy club for aristocrats and chancers into virtually a family business, complete with programmes, ledgers, and a tidy moral climate. The sort of thing that Queen Victoria, had she deigned to return after her damp squib of a visit in 1840, might actually quite have liked.

This process of cleaning up and sorting out had been started by Henry Dorling’s father, William, who had arrived in the town in 1821. Family legend has him riding over the Downs from Bexhill, where he worked as a printer, and seeing Epsom spread beneath him as if it were the Promised Land. Deciding that his destiny lay there, Dorling returned to Bexhill, scooped up his wife, six children, and printing press and retraced his steps over the county border into Surrey. More practically – and the Dorlings were nothing if not practical – William had spotted that Epsom, a town full of business and bustle, did not have a resident press. Moving there would assure him brisk custom from every auctioneer, estate agent, parish officer, butcher, baker, and candlestick maker in the place. In addition, he would continue as he had in Bexhill to combine his printing business with a circulating library and general store. For as well as lending you the latest novel, William Dorling could sell you a shaving cake, a set of Reeves paints or a packet of Epsom Salts, hire you a piano, supply you with fine-quality tea from the London Tea Company or a copy of Watts’s Psalms and Hymns and insure your property through the Kent Fire Office. And then, when you did eventually die, it was Dorling’s job as registrar to record the fact, along with the happier news of any births and marriages that occurred within the town. In fact there was not much you could do in Epsom without running into William Dorling.

If Epsom was basically a one-horse town for most of the year, for one week every summer it was inundated with the very finest examples of the species. For a man as canny as William Dorling, the obvious next step was to insinuate himself into the racing culture. In 1826 he started printing ‘Dorling’s Genuine Card List’, colloquially known as ‘Dorling’s Correct Card’ – a list of the runners and riders for each race. It sounds a simple thing, hardly a product on which you could found a fortune and a business dynasty, but in a world as chaotic and cliquey as racing, accurate information was at a premium. The Correct Card, put together from knowledge Dorling gleaned as he walked the Heath early every morning chatting to trainers, grooms and jockeys, was a way of communicating intelligence that would otherwise lie scattered and obscured to the ordinary race-goer. Indeed, as the Illustrated London News reported during Derby week of 1859: ‘half of the myriad who flock to the Downs on the Derby Day would know nothing of the names of the horses, the weights and colours of the riders, were it not for Dorling’s card, printed feverishly through the night in the printing shed next to the family house and sold the next morning by hoarse vendors posted at every likely point.’

As William’s eldest son, Henry Dorling gradually took over the running of the business. His appointment as Clerk of the Course in 1839 was a recognition of the family’s growing involvement in Epsom’s chief industry. But there was only so much that the position allowed him to do in the way of cleaning up the moral slurry that was keeping respectable people away. To have real influence, to pull Epsom together so that it was a smoothly integrated operation, Dorling would need to take control of the Grandstand too. When it had opened in 1830 the Grandstand had been the town’s pride and joy. Designed by William Trendall to house 5,000 spectators, it had cost just under £14,000 to build, a sum raised by a mixture of mortgage and shares. The imposing building – all Doric columns, raked seating and gracious balconies – was designed to combine the conveniences of a hotel with the practicalities of a head office. According to the Morning Chronicle, which puffed the grand opening on its front page of 12 April 1830, the Grandstand incorporated a ‘convenient betting room, saloon, balcony, roof, refreshment and separate retiring rooms for ladies’. And in case any readers of the Morning Chronicle were still doubtful that Epsom racecourse really was the kind of place for people like them to linger, they were assured that ‘The whole arrangement will be under the direction of the Committee, who are resolved that the strictest order shall be preserved.’

From the moment that the Grandstand had first been mooted back in 1824, the Dorlings had been eyeing it hungrily. William Dorling had been canny enough to buy some of the opening stock, and by 1845 Henry was the single biggest shareholder. Early on, in 1830, William suggested that he might put the prices of entry on the bottom of Dorling’s Correct Card, a stealthy way of identifying the name of Dorling with that of the Grandstand. Although the Grandstand Association initially rejected the idea, by the time of next year’s Derby the prices are firmly ensconced at the bottom of the card, where they would remain for over a century. William Dorling’s hunch about Epsom’s promise had paid off after all.

But by the 1840s, and despite all that ‘strictest order’ promised by the committee, the Grandstand was not quite the golden goose that it had once seemed. Its early glamour and promise had leaked away and it was no longer turning a profit. Now that people came to think about it properly, it was not actually very well placed, being parallel to the course and unable to offer more than a partial glimpse of the race. The majority of visitors, everyone from Guards officers to clerks, preferred to follow the action from the Hill, the large high bank which offered a much better view of the entire proceedings. Having finished their Fortnum and Mason picnic (Fortnum and Mason so dominated the feasting on the Hill that Dickens declared that if he were ever to own a horse he would call it after London’s most famous grocery store), they simply stepped up onto their hampers in order to see the race. Unless a Derby-goer was actually inside the Grandstand – and increasingly there was no reason why he would wish to be – then not a penny did he pay.

In 1845 Henry Dorling became the principal leaseholder of the Grandstand, thanks to Bentinck’s strenuous string-pulling at the Jockey Club. This meant that Dorling was now in complete charge of all aspects of racing at Epsom. But in order to deliver the 5 per cent annual return he had promised the Grandstand Association on its capital, he would need to make substantial changes to the way things were done. So he came up with a series of proposals designed to make racing more interesting for the spectators, especially those who had paid for a place in the Grandstand. Horses were now to be saddled in front of the stand itself, where punters could look over their fancy (this already worked a treat at Goodwood and Ascot). And to make the proceedings more intelligible for those who were not already initiates, Dorling instituted a telegraph board for exhibiting the numbers of riders and winners. Races were now to start bang on time (Dorling would have to pay a fine to the Jockey Club if they did not) and deliberate ‘false starts’ by jockeys anxious to unsettle their competitors were to be punished. And, not before time one might think, Dorling put up railings to prevent the crowds surging onto the course to get a better view. Finally, and most controversially, he laid out a new course – the Low Level – which incorporated a steep climb over 4 furlongs to provide extra drama for the watchers in the Grandstand.

The fact that these changes were designed for the convenience of investors rather than devotees of the turf was not lost on Dorling’s critics. For every person who benefited from his innovations – the Grandstand shareholders, Bentinck, Dorling himself – there was someone ready to carp. Different interest groups put their complaints in different ways. The Pictorial Times of 1846, for instance, suggested that as a result of Dorling’s tenure of the Grandstand (only one year old at that point) ‘the character of its visitors was perhaps less aristocratic than of old; but a more fashionable display we have never met in this spacious and, as now ordered, most convenient edifice.’ In other words, the punters were common but at least the event was running like clockwork. The modern equivalent might be the complaint that corporate sponsorship of sport has chased away the genuine fans.

Within Epsom itself the opprobrium was more personal. By the end of his life Dorling had become a rich man and, according to one maligner, strode around ‘as if all Epsom belonged to him’. The obituary in which this unattributed quote appeared went on to add, in the interests of balance, that under Dorling’s reign there had been ‘no entrance fees, no fees for weighing, no deductions’ nor the hundred other fiddles by which clerks of racecourses around the country attempted to siphon off extra income. In other words: Dorling was sharp, but he was straight. Other carpers couched their objections to his dominance by attacking the new Low Level Course which, while it might provide excitement for the Grandstanders, was actually downright dangerous for the horses and jockeys. But, no matter how the comments were dressed up, the real animus was that Henry Dorling was simply getting too rich and too powerful. A letter of complaint written by ‘concerned gentlemen’ on 30 April 1850 can still be seen in Surrey Record Office: ‘we may add that it has become a matter of great doubt whether the office of Clerk of the Course is not incompatible with that of Lessee of the Grand Stand, especially as one result has been the recent alteration of the Derby Course which we hear is so much complained of.’ Henry Dorling’s gradual monopolization of power was beginning to stink of the very corruption that he had been brought in to stamp out.

The bickering rumbled on through the 1860s and 1870s, pulling in other players along the way. There were constant disputes, some of which actually came to court, over who had right of way, who was due ground rent, who was entitled to erect a temporary stand. Timothy Barnard, a local market gardener, had the right to put up a wood and canvas structure to the right of the Grandstand, which naturally narked the Association. Local grandees who disapproved of betting (and there were some) refused to allow their land to be used for the wages of sin. The overall impression that comes through the records of Epsom racecourse is that of a bad-tempered turf war, a contest between ancient vested rights and newer commercial interests. Everyone, it seemed, wanted a slice of the pie on the Downs.

By the time Charles Dickens visited Epsom in 1851 to describe Derby Day to the readers of his magazine Household Words, Henry Dorling was sufficiently secure in his small, if squabbling, kingdom to be a legitimate target of Dickens’ pricking prose:

A railway takes us, in less than an hour, from London Bridge to the capital of the racing world, close to the abode of the Great Man who is – need we add! – the Clerk of Epsom Course. It is, necessarily, one of the best houses in the place, being – honour to literature – a flourishing bookseller’s shop. We are presented to the official. He kindly conducts to the Downs … We are preparing to ascend [the Grand Stand] when we hear the familiar sound of the printing machine. Are we deceived? O, no! The Grand Stand is like the Kingdom of China – self-supporting, self-sustaining. It scorns foreign aid; even to the printing of the Racing Lists. This is the source of the innumerable cards with which hawkers persecute the sporting world on its way to the Derby, from the Elephant and Castle to the Grand Stand. ‘Dorling’s list, Dorling’s correct list!’ with the names of the horses, and colours of the riders!

But there were limits even to Dorling’s ascendancy. No amount of cosy cooperation with Lord George Bentinck–Bentinck lent him £5,000 and Dorling responded by giving his third son the strangely hybrid moniker William George Bentinck Dorling – was going to turn Dorling into anything more than a useful ledger man as far as the aristocrats of the Jockey Club were concerned. Dorling, a small-town printer, had made a lucky fortune from Epsom racecourse and that, as far as the toffs were concerned, was that. One family anecdote has Henry complaining to his new wife Elizabeth that being Clerk of the Course was not a gentleman’s job. She was supposed to have replied, ‘You are a gentleman, Henry, and you have made it so.’ But both of them knew that, actually, it wasn’t true.

The new home to which the just-turned-seven Isabella Mayson arrived in the spring of 1843 was simply the Dorlings’ sturdy High St business premises. But by the time Dickens visited Epsom eight years later she had moved with her jumble of full, step and half siblings into one of the most imposing residences in the town. Ormond House, built as a speculative venture in 1839, stood, white and square, at the eastern end of the High Street, usefully placed both for driving the 2 miles up to the racecourse and for keeping a careful eye over the town’s goings-on. A shed adjacent to the building housed the library and, initially, the printing business too. For all that Dickens described Dorling in 1851 as a ‘great man’ with a house to match, the census of that year tells a more modest tale. By 1851 there is just one 16-year-old maid to look after the entire household which includes fifteen-year-old ‘Isabella Mason’ [sic], and a permanent lodger called James Woodruff, a coach proprietor. Whatever Epsom gossips might have said, it was not until the 1860s that Dorling really began to live like a man with money.

The emotional layout of the newly blended Mayson-Dorling household is harder to gauge. Initially there were eight children under 8 crammed into the house. The four children on each side matched each other fairly neatly in age, with Henry Mayson Dorling just the oldest at 8, followed by Isabella Mayson, a year younger. At the outset of the marriage Henry Dorling had promised that ‘his four little Maysons were to be treated exactly the same as his four little Dorlings’ and, in material terms, this certainly does seem to have been the case. There were no Cinderellas at Ormond House. The Mayson girls received the same education as their Dorling stepsisters and, as soon as he was old enough, John Mayson was integrated into the growing Dorling business empire along with Henry’s own sons. On Henry’s death in 1873 his two surviving stepchildren, Bessie and Esther, were left £3,000 each, a sum that allowed them to live independently for the rest of their very long lives.

The new Mr and Mrs Dorling quickly went about adding to their family. Charlotte’s birth, an intriguing seven and a half months after their marriage, was followed by another twelve children in all, culminating with Horace, born in 1862 when Elizabeth was 47. In total the couple had twenty-one children between them, a huge family even by early Victorian standards. People didn’t say anything to their faces, but there must have been smirking about this astonishing productivity which Henry, a touchy man, did not find funny. By 1859, 13-year-old Alfred Dorling was clearly feeling embarrassed by his parents’ spectacular fertility. As a joke, the boy sent his papa a condom anonymously through the post. Henry Dorling was not amused: condoms were the preserve of men who used prostitutes and were trying to avoid venereal disease, not of a paterfamilias who wished to limit the size of his brood. In effect, Alfred Dorling was calling his mother a tart and his father a trick. His punishment was to be sent to join the Merchant Navy where presumably he learned all about condoms and a great deal more. That Alfred drowned in Sydney harbour three years later is no one’s fault. And yet, given the way that anecdotes get compressed in their retelling, it is hard to avoid the impression that it was Henry’s awkwardness over his sexual appetite that was responsible for the death of his teenage son.

What was 7-year-old Isabella like, as she packed up her toys in the City of London, and prepared to move to Epsom? Over the previous three years, she had lost her father, been sent to live on the other side of the country with an old man she didn’t know, acquired a new papa and was now being moved from her home in Cheapside to a grassy market town. She had also acquired four stepsiblings and was now obliged to share her mother with a series of exhausting new babies who arrived almost yearly. The one thing she would have picked up from the tired and distracted adults who bustled round her was that there was no time and space in this hard-pressed world for the small worries and anxious needs of one little girl. The best thing she could do – for herself and other people – was to become a very good child, one who could be guaranteed never to make extra work for the grown-ups. And so it was that in order to distance herself from the chorus of tears, tantrums, dripping noses and dirty nappies that surrounded her in a noisy, leaking fug, little Isabella Mayson became a tiny adult herself, self-contained, brisk, useful. A sketch executed by Elizabeth Dorling in 1848 shows the entire family, at this point consisting of thirteen children, gathered in a jostling group. Elizabeth, who puts herself in the picture, is in a black dress and white cap and is nursing the latest baby, Lucy. Henry, dishevelled and standing slightly apart, gazes wild-eyed on the sketchy crew of small dependants as if contemplating how on earth he will cope. The only other figure who is properly inked in is Isabella, who stands immediately behind Elizabeth. She is wearing a black dress and white cap identical to her mother’s, with the same centre-parted hairstyle. In her arms she holds a wriggling toddler on whom her watchful gaze is fixed. She is 12, going on 25.

Soon Isabella’s nannying duties were expanded even further. As the clutch of children increased, it soon became clear that Ormond House could not hold the growing Dorling brood. The noise alone was unbearable: one day Henry Dorling, disturbed by the din, stuck his head around his study door and demanded to know what was going on. ‘That, Henry,’ Elizabeth is reported to have said, ‘is your children and my children fighting our children.’ The solution, though, was close at hand. The Grandstand was not needed for all but a few days a year. It would provide the perfect place to store extra children, those who were old enough to leave their mother but not yet sufficiently independent to be sent away to school. In this satellite nursery, housed in a building that resembled a stranded ocean liner on a sea of green, the little Dorlings would be watched over by Granny Jerrom and sensible, grown-up Isabella.

The fact that Isabella Beeton spent part of her youth in the Epsom Grandstand has insinuated itself into her mythology, until the idea has become quite fixed that she spent years at a time up there, running a kind of spooky orphanage. This, as commentators have been quick to point out, could not be in greater contrast to the cosy intimate atmosphere that Mrs Beeton urges her readers to create for their own families: ‘It ought, therefore, to enter into the domestic policy of every parent, to make her children feel that home is the happiest place in the world; that to imbue them with this delicious home-feeling is one of the choicest gifts a parent can bestow.’ What has been missed, though, in the rush to point out the discrepancy between Mrs Beeton’s advice and her personal experience, is the fact that in the first half of the nineteenth century it was entirely usual for tradesmen to shunt their families round in this way. Grocers, drapers, and chemists all used their premises flexibly, sometimes raising an entire family over the shop, and at others sending some of the children to live in other buildings associated with the business. The Dorlings’ decision to use the Grandstand as an annexe to Ormond House may seem odd to us now, but to their Epsom neighbours it was simply the way things were done. No more peculiar than the fact that the now elderly William Dorling had moved out of Ormond House and gone to live with his daughter at the post office in the High Street. People were more portable than buildings.

The second point about Isabella’s creepy kingdom on top of the hill is that there is no way of telling how often and for how long she was up on the Downs. For at least two years of her teens she was away at boarding school, first in London and then Heidelberg, and so unavailable for Grandstand duties. Once she returned home for good, probably in 1854, her letters make clear that, far from being marooned for weeks at a time, she moved constantly between Ormond House and the Downs. For instance, in a letter that she writes to her fiancé Sam Beeton in February 1856 she explains that she and her stepsister Jane have just got back from the Grandstand where they ‘have been doing the charitable to Granny. Poor old lady, she complained sadly it was so dull in the evening sitting all alone, so we posted up there to gossip with her.’ Another time she mentions that she has been up at the Grandstand all day ‘and of course have not sat down all day’, yet makes it clear that she is now writing from the relative calm of Ormond House. When the Grandstand was needed for a race meeting, it was Isabella who was responsible for ‘transporting that living cargo of children’ to alternative accommodation, usually a house at 72 Marine Parade in Brighton, close to the racecourse where Dorling also held the position of clerk. Far from being in permanent exile, Isabella Mayson was a body in a perpetual state of motion.

Still, whether or not Isabella was in attendance at any particular moment, it remains the case that the Grandstand made a strange kindergarten. A huge barn of a building, 50 yards long and 20 yards wide, and designed to hold 5,000 people, it was now home to perhaps no more than six little children and their minders. It has been suggested that the closest analogy would be that of living in a boarding school during the holidays. But there was an important difference. The Grandstand had never been built with children in mind. It was designed for adults and adult activity – betting, drinking, flirting, parading, coming up before the makeshift magistrate. On the one hand the world of the Dorlings and the world of Epsom racecourse were soldered together to the point where one had become a synonym for the other: or, as the Illustrated London News would put it in a few years’ time: ‘What cold punch is to turtle, mustard to roast beef, ice to Cliquot champagne, Chablis to oysters, that is Mr Dorling to the Derby.’ Yet, at the same time, there were occasions when those two worlds, the world of the bourgeois family and that of the seedy racetrack were a very awkward fit. It was this paradox that poor little Alfred Dorling, acquiring his fatal condom from among the ‘racy’ characters who hung around the Downs, had failed to understand.

Certainly we can say that the scale of the place was grand, designed to see and be seen in. As such it was a public theatre, something that older, aristocratic members of the racing fraternity found hard to grasp. The Duchess of Richmond of Goodwood wrote to Dorling about this time grandly informing him: ‘The Duchess of Richmond would prefer a portion of the Grand Stand railed off, if she could have it to Herself.’ But there was little chance of the Duchess, even with her Goodwood credentials, getting her way. The point about the Grandstand was that it belonged to the modern world and, as such, was a democratic space to which anyone could buy the right to enter. There was a huge pillared hall, a 30-yard-long saloon, four refreshment rooms, and a series of committee rooms. In 1840 when Queen Victoria had made her second and final visit to Epsom, £200 had been spent on getting the Grandstand’s wallpaper and carpets up to scratch, with the result that the Dorling children, quite literally, lived in a place that was fit for a queen. Eighteen years later when Prince Albert made a return visit, this time with his future son-in-law the German Crown Prince Frederick, the papers reported that on the receiving room wall was ‘the Royal Coat of Arms, executed in needlepoint by the Misses Dorling’. The nursery, then, was a curiously public and even ceremonial space inside which the children were expected to eat and sleep while leaving as little trace as possible of their small lives. At night they lay on truckle beds that could be folded up during the day. Whenever Henry Dorling needed to show a visiting dignitary around they could be herded into another room. At a moment’s notice all evidence of their existence could be made to disappear.

Particularly intriguing about the Grandstand set-up is the fact that the future Mrs Beeton spent formative stretches of her young life next to a commercial kitchen that catered to thousands at a time. Much has been made of Mrs Beeton’s picnic plans for forty people, or her dinner party menus for eighteen. Perhaps the fact that she lived on a Brobdingnagian scale – the eldest girl in a family of twenty-one and an amateur nursery maid in a space designed for thousands – explains the ease with which she came to think in large numbers. For this reason Dickens’ description of the Grandstand kitchens working at full pelt for the Derby is worth quoting in full.

To furnish the refreshment-saloon, the Grand Stand has in store two thousand four hundred tumblers, one thousand two hundred wineglasses, three thousand plates and dishes, and several of the most elegant vases we have seen out of the Glass Palace, decorated with artificial flowers. An exciting odour of cookery meets us in our descent. Rows of spits are turning rows of joints before blazing walls of fire. Cooks are trussing fowls; confectioners are making jellies; kitchen-maids are plucking pigeons; huge crates of boiled tongues are being garnished on dishes. One hundred and thirty legs of lamb, sixty-five saddles of lamb, and one hundred shoulders of lamb; in short, a whole flock of sixty-five lambs, have to be roasted, and dished and garnished, by the Derby Day. Twenty rounds of beef, four hundred lobsters, one hundred and fifty tongues, twenty fillets of veal, one hundred sirloins of beef, five hundred spring chickens, three hundred and fifty pigeon pies; a countless number of quartern loaves, and an incredible quantity of ham have to be cut up into sandwiches; eight hundred eggs have got to be boiled for the pigeon-pies and salads. The forests of lettuce, the acres of cress, and beds of radishes, which will have to be chopped up; the gallons of ‘dressing’ that will have to be poured out and converted into salads for the insatiable Derby Day, will be best understood by a memorandum from the chief of that department to the chef-de-cuisine, which happened, accidentally, to fall under our notice: ‘Pray don’t forget a large tub and a birch-broom for mixing the salad!’

We do not know if some of the Grandstand rooms were permanently out of bounds to the children, but certainly Amy Dorling, born in 1859 and still going strong during the Second World War, remembered playing tag around the huge public rooms, which must have echoed strangely to tiny thudding feet and shrill screams. The children might have turned feral were it not for the fact that Henry Dorling now ran his printing business from the Grandstand (yet more evidence of the fudging of interests which so alarmed hostile commentators) and visited almost daily. And then, of course, there was Granny Jerrom, that solid constant in this story who nonetheless left virtually no trace in the formal records. All we have to make her real is a family anecdote, and a recently discovered photograph.

First, the anecdote. Nancy Spain has the old lady sitting tight on top of the box in which the first year’s takings of the Grandstand under Henry Dorling’s regime were stored. In the story, according to Spain, Mrs Jerrom is knitting furiously. The image neatly sums up the qualities of a whole generation of pre-Victorian women. Money is crucial, far from vulgar, but needs to be watched carefully if it is not to disappear into thin air. There is no shame in guarding it with your life, or at least with your sturdy body weight. But knitting is important too. This is not the fancy needlework that will come to define a whole new generation of young ‘genteel’ middle-class women, certainly not the royal coat of arms executed a few years later by her granddaughters ‘the Misses Dorling’. Instead, Mrs Jerrom is engaged in a serviceable craft that will clothe a family, save expenditure, and eke out an income. And, what is more, there is no shame to be seen doing it.

Then there is the photograph, lately discovered among a box of prints probably taken by James Collinson, an original member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and one-time fiancé of Christina Rossetti. From 1859, and now living in Epsom, Collinson was experimenting with photography as a way of producing preliminary ‘sketches’ for his narrative paintings. And since he was far from flush, Collinson was happy to double up as a portrait photographer. During the 1860s every worthy burgher and his lady seem to have passed through Mr Collinson’s studio in their best bib and tucker, ready to be captured for posterity by this promising new process. In among Epsom’s finest commercial and even gentry families (the nobs, naturally, have made other arrangements) you can see Thomas Furniss who ran a tailoring business and was also parish clerk, Dr Thomas John Graham who was said to be the model for Dr John in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, and the Keeling family who were the town’s chief chemists and druggists. There too is a picture of 68-year-old Mrs Jerrom, probably taken in 1862, wearing a solid black dress and white cap, the standard garb of a widow. Her mouth is slightly ajar, as if surprised by the flash of Mr Collinson’s magic box. She is a neat, serviceable little woman. Perhaps because she only had two pregnancies to Elizabeth’s seventeen she has kept her figure in a way that her dropsical daughter never managed.

Mrs Jerrom’s image is in sharp contrast with that of three of her grandchildren, who were photographed during the same session: Bessie and Esther Mayson and Amy Dorling. Both the Mayson girls are fashionably dressed, smooth-haired, and look straight into the camera with the confidence of eligible young women who have no worries about the old-maidism that lies ahead (they are only 24 and 21 and, while Bessie is probably the prettiest, Esther has that striking auburn hair and slender figure that people will still be noticing when she is in her eighties). The other granddaughter photographed is Amy Dorling, who at 3 years old is a spoiled lolling brat with ringlets and a challenging look, as if she knows she is a rich man’s daughter entitled to anything she wants, including the photographer’s patience. The Mayson girls and Amy, although divided by twenty years, are both of a generation that understands the camera’s eye and can meet it on its own terms. Mrs Jerrom, by contrast, looks suspiciously over the shoulder of the photographer and into the distance, to a time before a machine could capture your soul.

Isabella Mayson’s education was patchy, but no more so than virtually every other girl of her class and time. She was sent for a while to a school in Islington, chosen more for its familiarity and convenience than anything else, since it was directly opposite 14 Duncan Terrace where Elizabeth Mayson and her little brood were living just prior to their move to Epsom. Until 1844 1 Colebrooke Row had housed a boys’ school, but in that year it started to cater for girls under the watchful eyes of Miss Lucy and Miss Mary Richardson. Five years later the school was taken over by two sisters from Hackney, with the delightfully Austenish names of Sarah and Fanny Woodhouse. The 1851 census shows them with five pupils, four of whom were either Maysons (Bessie and Esther) or Dorlings (Mary and Charlotte).

If this sounds cottagey and amateurish, it is only a fair measure of how small private boarding schools operated during the early Victorian period. Quite unlike the public and high schools of a later date, these little commercial enterprises, headed by a clergyman or a couple of spinster sisters, were flighty affairs, quite capable of closing down or changing hands at a moment’s notice when, say, a particular family decided to withdraw its patronage. The quality of the education the pupils received varied wildly, dependent entirely on the skills and abilities of the person who happened to be in charge at any moment. At 1 Colebrooke Row it is most likely that Isabella was taught to read and write, sew and perhaps speak a little French. She almost certainly learned to draw and paint, since the Misses Richardson’s brother, a portrait painter, ran his studio from the same address. The fact that Isabella’s younger sisters, stepsister, and half-sister were sent to the same establishment – though under different management – suggests that the Dorlings, who knew a good bargain when they saw one, thought that they were getting value for money.

However, to their credit, the Dorlings wanted more than a just-so education for their girls. ‘Boarding school misses’ were becoming an increasingly visible – and mockable – part of the social landscape. Social commentators saw them as part of that whole process whereby the rising commercial middle classes were trying to turn their girls into what they fondly imagined were ladies. Farmers, always the particular butt of critics’ complaints, were said to be sending their daughters to pretentious boarding schools for a year or two where they picked up a little French and piano and felt themselves, once home, too grand to help with the domestic chores. The accusation could be extended to include every chief clerk, wealthy grocer, and small-time solicitor who was now busy trying to scramble up the social ladder by turning his daughters into something very different from their mothers. Instead of moulding gracious and accomplished ladies, so the argument ran, these cheap boarding schools were churning out silly girls with ideas above their stations. It was a stereotype that a young publisher and editor called Samuel Beeton was, at this very moment, spoofing in his new magazine the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (EDM):

the young lady’s peculiar talents consisted in dress and fancy-work, with some interludes of novel-reading and playing fantasias on the piano (in company), and, as we were forced to admit on seeing her with some of her particular friends, in a great faculty of talking and laughing about nothing.

The Dorlings wanted something better for their girls, and they decided to send them abroad to school in Heidelberg, the small historic town in southwest Germany. In no way a ‘finishing school’ (the concept had no purchase in Germany), the Heidels’ establishment had started as a day school in the late 1830s, providing a rigorous syllabus for the daughters of well-to-do local people. However by 1850 the 40-year-old headmistress Miss Auguste Heidel was actively seeking British girls as boarders for her school, which occupied a series of premises in the picturesque heart of the city. Every year, in late spring, Miss Heidel visited London, took rooms in the City and invited prospective parents to deposit their daughters with her for immediate passage to Germany. These invitations took the form of announcements in The Times and the Athenaeum:

GERMAN EDUCATION, – Miss HEIDEL’S ESTABLISHMENT, Heidelberg – Miss Heidel will remain in London a short time longer, and will take charge of any YOUNG LADIES intended to be placed in her seminary. She may be spoken with, between the hours of 3 and 4 o’clock every day, Monday excepted, at Mr Young’s, Walbrook

The school timetable from 1837 – fifteen years before Isabella travelled to Heidelberg – still survives. Dance, music, and domestic economy had no part in the syllabus. Instead the curriculum centred on French and German, which was taught to the younger girls by Miss Charlotte Heidel and to the more advanced by Miss Auguste. Charlotte also taught ‘logical thinking’, natural history and mathematics. Karl Heidel, their brother and a university graduate, was in charge of history and geography. Miss Louisa, another sister, taught needlework and German to the little ones. Calligraphy and mathematics were the preserve of a visiting master, Herr Rau, who normally worked at the rigorous Höheren Bürgerschule. Teaching started at 8 a.m. and did not finish until 5 p.m.

Isabella probably entered the school in the summer of 1851, when she was fifteen and a half. It is most likely that she was accompanied by her stepsister Jane Dorling who was virtually the same age. In the following years the slightly younger Bessie and Esther Mayson and Mary Dorling would also attend the Heidel Institute, as well as a family of girls called Beeton, who had been the Maysons’ neighbours in Milk Street. This decision of friends and neighbours to send their daughters to the same school on the other side of Europe might seem quaint to modern eyes, but it made sense. Girls who already knew each other made good travelling companions and congenial schoolfellows. If ladies’ boarding schools were all about creating a home-from-home atmosphere, then what could be more natural for people who already liked each other to use the same institution? And, given that the journey to Heidelberg took a couple of days either way, sharing chaperonage represented a significant saving of time and money.

It was this tradition of sending whole clutches of sisters, friends and neighbours to the same school that gave these boarding schools a family feel. While the Heidels’ regime was rigorous by English standards, a sweetly sisterly atmosphere prevailed among the young ladies who attended. In letters which the younger Beeton and Mayson girls sent to the now married Isabella in 1857 to congratulate her on her twenty-first birthday we hear how ‘On Shrove Tuesday we girls got up a Mask Ball, and invited the governesses … to join us … Miss Louisa was perfectly enchanted with our costumes.’ Another governess, who has recently married, sends her ‘best love’ to Isabella. Writing three years later – in German – to Isabella, Miss Auguste Heidel sends her congratulations to ‘your dear parents’ on the birth of a new baby boy ‘of whose arrival my dear Bessie has just informed me’. Miss Louisa Heidel, meanwhile, chats away in the same letter to Isabella about her own health which, as the years pass, ‘becomes very delicate’, and how busy she is now that the holidays have rolled around again: ‘as you will doubtless recollect, there is always a great deal to be done’.

Quite what the young British women who attended the Heidel Institute did when they were not busy learning arithmetic and French is not entirely clear. The city was dominated by the ruins of Heidelberg Castle, a tumbledown thirteenth- to seventeenth-century palace that had done so much to spark Goethe and his contemporaries into Romantic reveries at the beginning of the century. By the time the rather stolid Mayson, Dorling, and Beeton girls got there in the 1850s, the castle had become one of those key stop-offs in the burgeoning European tourist industry. When Sam Beeton visited his half-sisters Helen and Polly at school in 1856 he felt obliged to visit ‘the renowned ruin of Germany’ first before sweeping the girls off to the Prince Carl café where they stuffed themselves with honey and chocolate. Doubtless on Sundays the young ladies from the Heidel Institute plodded up to the castle, drank lemonade bought from a vendor, and looked over the spectacular but by now wearingly familiar view of the wooded River Neckar. Perhaps they blushed when students from the renowned university strayed too near and wondered hopefully whether there was a forgotten prince somewhere in the ruins who might rescue them from intermediate German and composition. In the midst of all this chocolate box prettiness it is worth remembering the odd fact that by the time the last of these quaint young ladies had died – Isabella’s sister Esther Mayson, as it turned out, in 1931 – Hitler was only two years away from becoming Chancellor and the infamous Nazification of Heidelberg University was on its way.

By the summer of 1854, 18-year-old Isabella was back home in Epsom and ready for the role of ‘daughter at home’, that odd period between school and marriage which might last for a few months or a lifetime. She was, without doubt, a superior model of the species. She had learned French and German at the Heidels’ from native speakers and heard the languages spoken in a constant babble from dawn until dusk. She was also musical: all young ladies could bang out a waltz on the piano, but Isabella was lucky enough to be both genuinely talented and to have parents who were prepared to nurture that gift. Henry Dorling could himself play several instruments and was happy to pay for his stepdaughter to take lessons with Julius Benedict. Benedict, the son of a rich Jewish banker from Stuttgart, was by the 1850s a highly visible force in British musical theatre. Having recently ceded the job of Jenny Lind’s accompanist to her new husband, he was now concentrating on conducting new work at Her Majesty’s Theatre while running a vocal association. Coaching young ladies at the piano was the way he paid the rent. Benedict’s sessions with the promising Miss Mayson required her to make a weekly trip up to town to his rooms in Manchester Square, which happened to be virtually next door to where Isaac and Mary Jerrom had once run their stables and lodging house.

As Isabella stepped into Manchester Square each week for her lesson with Benedict she was herself a kind of pattern of what was happening to the middle classes during this first slice of Victoria’s reign. As a child she had lived over the shop, in rooms above her father’s City warehouse. As a teenager she had lived inside the shop, spending days in the Grandstand at Epsom, providing labour which the Dorlings could not afford to pay for on the market (a wealthier family would have had nurses and nursemaids and, more obviously, a bigger house). But at 15, as the stepdaughter of an increasingly wealthy man, Isabella had been sent off to Germany to acquire a good education, something more than the usual veneer that the lower middle classes were busy painting over their daughters.

The question, though, remains: why did the Dorlings decide to send their girls as far away as south Germany when France, probably Paris, would have been the obvious option? Henry Dorling seems to have had a touching faith in German educational methods. During his childhood, which ran parallel with the Napoleonic Wars, the King’s German Legion had been stationed in vulnerable coastal Bexhill, swelling the local population of one thousand to a noisy, unmissable four thousand. William Dorling, always quick to spot a commercial opportunity, had supplied the Legionnaires with the little luxuries – tea, soap, books – that made a long-term posting in a foreign country bearable. In return it appears that he had been given permission to send his eldest boy to their school. The odd legacy of this arrangement was that in adult life young Henry continued to say the Lord’s Prayer in German.

Yet Dorling’s decision to send Isabella and her sisters all the way to Heidelberg to be educated was based on something more solid than his own early conditioning. German education, from primary education right up to schools for young ladies, was better and less frivolous than its English equivalent (Scotland was another matter). What is more, Henry may have shared his generation’s lingering dislike of France, and he may also have been worried about undue Catholic influence. For the Heidels, while they welcomed Catholic pupils, were themselves impeccably Protestant.

What Dorling almost certainly didn’t account for was the fact that Isabella would return from her stay in Germany with a keen interest in baking. While the Heidels’ school was academically rigorous, it was firmly rooted in a German cultural tradition that saw no tension between women being both learned and domestic. George Eliot, the British novelist who arrived to spend some months in Weimar just as Isabella was getting ready to leave Heidelberg, put this very un-English model of cultivated, practical femininity at the heart of her fictional universe. In Middlemarch, for instance, it is Mrs Garth and her daughter Mary who most obviously win the author’s approval, with their ability to bake and teach their children Latin virtually in parallel. So while the Heidel sisters concentrated on teaching Isabella German, French and composition, they also initiated her into the pastrymaking in which southwest Germany specialized.

Isabella had clearly caught the baking bug in Heidelberg, for on returning home to Epsom in 1854 she asked for lessons in pastry-making from the local baker William Barnard. Barnard was a relative of Timothy Barnard, the market gardener who ran the annoying freelance temporary Grandstand during race week. Still, there does not seem to have been any lingering hostility and Isabella was despatched a few doors down the High Street from Ormond House to learn the art of English cakemaking.

The only reason she was allowed to go was because making cakes, and fancy cakes at that, was a thing apart from the general drudge of cookery. Isabella was not being despatched to learn how to peel potatoes or cook stew, but was participating in the one branch of cookery that gentlewomen had traditionally practised, at least during the earlier part of the previous century. Even so, the Dorlings were sufficiently jumpy about the social implications to worry whether they were doing the right thing. Nearly a hundred years later Isabella’s sessions at Barnard’s were still being recalled by her younger half-sisters as ‘ultra modern and not quite nice’.

INTERLUDE

Cherishing, then, in her breast the respected utterances of the good and the great, let the mistress of every house rise to the responsibility of its management.

ISABELLA BEETON, Book of Household Management

EVERYONE IN MRS BEETON’s imaginary household is rising, moving upwards, heading somewhere. The servants are busy working their way through the ranks (if there are no chances of promotion where they are, says Beeton, they will shift sideways to a smarter household). The mistress, meanwhile, isn’t simply getting up early for the sake of it, but in order to manage her household more efficiently, keeping a hawk-eye out for wasted time or money. Embedded in Beeton’s text is the assumption that this household is an aspirational one, busy edging itself into a style of living that currently lies just out of reach.

In order to achieve that lifestyle – an extra housemaid, a second footman – the income of the household will need to rise too, and Mrs Beeton thoughtfully provides a table showing what each jump of £200 or so will give you. So although the head of the household remains mainly off stage in the Book of Household Management, his economic efforts remain absolutely crucial to the whole enterprise. He, too, is busy improving his position in the workplace so that his wife can run a better-staffed home, and his servants can in turn push for promotion.

Since everyone in Beeton’s household is busy helping themselves (in all senses) it is a nice coincidence that 1859, the year that the Book of Household Management first started appearing in parts, is also the year that Samuel Smiles published his iconic Self-Help. These days more referred to than read, Self-Help consists of thirteen chapters with stirring titles such as ‘Application and Perseverance’ and ‘Energy and Courage’ in which lower-middle-class men are urged to emulate the educational and social trajectories of such titans as Robert Peel, James Watt, or Josiah Wedgwood. The message of Smiles’ book, repeated over and over again as if in an attempt at self-hypnosis, is that in the new industrial age pedigree and birth no longer make a gentleman. What matters now are thrift, hard work, and temperance. Properly pursued – and perseverance is everything here – these qualities won’t simply make you pleasant, civilized and cultured, they will also make you rich: ‘energy enables a man to force his way through irksome drudgery and dry details, and carries him onward and upward in every station in life’. Rich enough, in fact, to afford the cook, upper housemaid, nursemaid, under-housemaid and manservant that Mrs Beeton envisages for the household whose income is ‘About £1,000 a year’.

But Self-Help and Beeton’s Book of Household Management are bound together by more than a shared publication date and a driving concern with social advancement. The Smiles family happened to be very good friends of the Dorlings. Although Samuel Smiles was a Scotsman who had worked as both a doctor and a newspaper editor in Leeds, by 1854 he was settled in Blackheath where he was employed as a railway executive, writing his books on the side. The two families were initially intimate in south London where both households were known for their generous hospitality. This intimacy continued after Henry and Elizabeth Dorling’s deaths in the early 1870s when six of the unmarried Dorling and Mayson girls moved to Kensington, just around the corner from where the Smiles were now living in style in Pembroke Gardens. In April 1874 Lucy Dorling, the little half-sister who had always been closest to Isabella, walked up the aisle with Willy Smiles, Samuel Smiles’ second eldest son.

And there the story might have ended, with the neat coming together of the two families that between them produced the founding texts of mid-Victorian social aspiration. But there is a final, chilling coda, which suggests just what happened when Self-Help and Household Management blended a little too enthusiastically. Lucy and the tyrannical Willy, who ran the Belfast Rope Works, produced eleven children. The story goes that in order to encourage early rising, perseverance and so on in his brood, Willy insisted that every morning there would be only ten boiled eggs provided for the children’s breakfast. The last one down, the slugabed, went hungry.

CHAPTER THREE ‘Paper Without End’

AT 39 MILK STREET, on the opposite side of the road and a little further up from Benjamin Mayson’s warehouse, stood the Dolphin public house. It was on the corner with, in fact virtually part of, Honey Lane Market. In its original, medieval incarnation, the market had been at the centre of the brewing industry, the place where local beer makers, the forerunners of the Victorian giants Charrington and Whitbread, went to get their mead. At some point Honey Lane had turned into a general food market with a hundred stalls, and then, in 1787, it had been developed into a parade of thirty-six lock-up shops. Now, in 1835, two years before Benjamin Mayson brought his new bride Elizabeth and baby Isabella to live in Milk Street, the market had been knocked down to make way for the new City of London Boys’ School, which promised to provide a modern, liberal education for the sons of commercial or trading men to fit them for the brisk new world that everyone agreed was on its way.

The evolution of Honey Lane Market is a timely reminder that until well into the nineteenth century the City of London was as much a place of manufacture, retail and residence as it was the hub of the nation’s finances. To the outsider who happened to stray too far along its narrow, crooked streets it was as closed and as inscrutable as any village. Everywhere you looked in the square mile around St Paul’s you could see ordinary, everyday needs pressing on the landscape. Long before Lancashire cotton had taken over Milk Street, it was the place where you went for your dairy produce. Wood Street, which ran parallel and was now the epicentre of the textile trade, had once been thick with trees and the source of cheap and easy kindling. Just over the road, on the other side of Cheapside, were the self-explanatory Bread Street and Friday, that is Fish, Street. All these were now given over to the ubiquitous ‘Manchester warehouses’, wholesaling operations that functioned as a funnel between the textile factories of the northwest, bulked out by cheaper imports from India, and the luxury drapery stores of the West End. A hundred yards to the east was Grocers’ Hall Court and just beyond that was Old Jewry where the Jews who had come over with Norman William had settled to live and trade. Now, in a pale copy of its original self, it was the place you went if you wanted to pawn your jewellery, get a valuation, or simply have your watch set to rights.

From the beginning of the eighteenth century the pace of change picked up as men and women from the countryside poured into the City, bringing their skills as carpenters, printers, carriage builders, sign painters, butchers, glue boilers, farriers, nail makers – everything, in short, that a community needed to thrive in a pre-industrial age. On top of this, the large financial institutions that had settled in the area a hundred years earlier were beginning to expand as Britain became the money capital of the world. Threadneedle Street, home of the Bank of England, was both the heart of the financial district and the place where prostitutes queued patiently, like cabs. From there it was a short walk to the Stock Exchange, Royal Exchange, the Baltic and Lloyd’s coffee houses, not to mention the offices of bill brokers, merchant bankers, and private bankers. Yet even in the middle of the nineteenth century many of these smaller ‘houses’ were still family businesses, handed down from father to son with occasional injections of capital from a lucky marriage. Right up to the middle of Victoria’s reign the City of London continued to be a place where the public and private, professional and personal sides of life were pursued from the same streets, often, indeed, from the same set of rooms.

At the heart of these overlapping worlds stood the public house. The ‘pub’ was built as a house, looked like a house, and in this early period was indistinguishable from the family homes on either side of it. Yet it was public, in the sense that anyone might enter from the streets and use its domestic facilities – food, chairs, fire, silent companionship or lively conversation – for the price of a drink. It stank, of course, as all public places did, from a mixture of its clients’ private smells and a few extra of its own: old food, flat beer, dead mice, linen that never quite got dry. The Dolphin, just like an ordinary domestic house, had its own aura that you would recognize as instantly as that of your child’s or lover’s. The plans for the pub do not survive, but this kind of place usually had five separate rooms on the ground floor, including a public parlour, taproom, kitchen, and the publican’s private parlour. There was no bar as such; beer (not spirits, which needed a separate licence) was brought to the customers by waitresses and potboys. The effect was simply as if you had popped into someone else’s sitting room to be offered refreshment by the mistress of the house, or her maid. Often these people felt as familiar as your own.

The Dolphin, like all pubs in the first half of the nineteenth century, doubled as a community hall, council chambers, coroner’s court, labour exchange, betting shop, canteen, and park bench. It would not be until the 1840s that the temperance do-gooders would manage to forge the link in people’s minds between social respectability and total abstinence from drink. In fact until that time, which coincided with the first steps in public sanitary reform, drinking alcohol was a great deal safer than risking the local water. It was for that reason that when Milk Street tradesmen like Mr Chamberlain at number 36, a lone leather worker in a sea of cotton, came to take their lunch at the Dolphin every day, they washed it down with several glasses of port before tottering back for the afternoon’s work. And in a world before town halls and committee rooms – the very setting in which Mr Chamberlain’s own son, the Liberal politician Joseph, would eventually make his mark in faraway Birmingham – many political organizations, charities, chapters, friendly societies and trades associations including, oddly, the fledgling temperance societies, would choose to hold their meetings in the snug surroundings of a public house rather than trying to pile into someone’s inadequate lodgings.

From 1808 the Dolphin was run by Samuel Beeton, a Stowmarket man who was part of his generation’s tramp from the Suffolk countryside into the capital. Born in 1774 into a family of builders, Beeton had broken with tradition by becoming a tailor. Arriving in London in the closing years of the century he settled at a number of addresses around Smithfield Market, the centre of the skinning, cobbling and clothing trades. The market at the time was a smoking, bloody tangle of streets where life was nasty, brutal and short, at least for the livestock. Cattle and sheep were herded up from the country before being slaughtered, dismantled, and sold on in bits. The best meat went to the butchers, the bones to the glue makers, the hides to the cobblers and tailors who had settled in surrounding Clerkenwell.

It might seem lazy to use Dickens to describe the streets that Beeton knew, but there is no one else who does London – stinking, noisy, elemental London – quite so well. Here, then, is the master’s description from Oliver Twist, as Bill Sikes drags Oliver through Smithfield on their way to commit a burglary:

It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses.

Samuel Beeton lived right at the heart of all this driving, beating, whooping chaos. By 1803 he was keeping a pub, the Globe, in the aptly named Cow Lane which led straight off the marketplace and most likely catered mainly for his former colleagues, the tailors. His first daughter – by now he was married to Lucy Elsden, a Suffolk girl – was christened at nearby St Sepulchre, the church from where ‘the bells of Old Bailey’ rang out twelve times on the eve of an execution at adjoining Newgate. Perhaps the child, Ann Thomason (Thomasin had been Samuel’s mother’s name), found this doomy world too hard to bear: born in May 1807, she left it soon afterwards. Her siblings, by contrast, were patterned on what would soon emerge as the Beeton template: robust, canny, pragmatic. All seven survived into thriving middle age.

Beeton’s shift from tailoring to the hospitality business played straight to his natural strengths. He was outgoing, clubbable, the sort of man who joined organizations and rose through them by being pleasant, useful, good to have around. In October 1803, and already working as a ‘victualler’, he paid to become a member of the Pattenmakers’ Guild. Pattens, those strap-on platforms that raised the wearer’s everyday shoes above the dead cats, horse shit and other debris of the metropolitan streets, might seem exactly the right thing for filthy Smithfield. But, in fact, pattens and their makers had been in decline for some time. The guild clung to existence by exploiting the fact that it was one of the cheapest to join, and so provided an economical way into City of London politics for those who might otherwise find it too rich for their pockets. You did not need to know how to make wooden clogs in order to belong, although plenty of its members, like Beeton himself, had once belonged to the allied tailoring trade.

By 1808, and with the arrival of their second daughter Lucy, the Beetons had moved to the Dolphin in Milk Street. Samuel may not have been born to the life of a City worthy, but he lost no time in catching up. In 1813 he was elected to the Common Council for the ward of Cripplegate Within (you had to be a guild member to qualify – the Pattenmakers had come in useful) and proved both popular and effective. Fifteen years on and he was still getting the highest number of votes for re-election. The Common Council, part of the arcane City of London government, was a mixture of the powerful and the picturesque. Seen from the outside the 234 council men were pompous and reactionary, clinging to ancient rights of administration in a way that blocked London from getting the city-wide police force or sewerage system it so desperately needed. The council men, however, saw themselves as defenders against creeping bureaucracy and standardization, proud advocates of an ancient and honourable independence. The minutes for Cripplegate Ward during the period Beeton served show the council men setting the rates, choosing the beadle, worrying about street security, congratulating the alderman on his recent baronetcy and, in the manner of ponderous uncles, sending their thoughts on various topics to His Majesty. The Beetons clearly felt themselves intimately implicated in the life of the royal family: two of Samuel’s grandchildren would be christened ‘Victoria’ and ‘Edward Albert’.

Beeton was also active within his adopted trade. He served on the Committee of the Society of Licensed Victuallers, becoming their chairman in 1821. This meant attending the meetings every week on Monday at 5 p.m., either in the Fleet Street office of the publicans’ daily paper, the Morning Advertiser, or at Kennington Lane at the Licensed Victuallers’ School which, despite its name, was more orphanage than academy. The minutes from those first decades of the century show Beeton making grants from the bereavement fund: Mary Cadwallader wants £4 to bury her husband, James Pearce is given 6s a week for some unspecified purpose. In 1821, the year of his presidency, Beeton is busy investigating whether a certain Mrs Michlin really should be allowed places for her two children at the school since it looks as though she may have inherited property from her late husband (Mrs Michlin, it turns out, is in the clear). At the end of his presidency, Beeton was presented with a snuffbox, the early-nineteenth-century equivalent of the carriage clock, in recognition of his ‘exemplary conduct, strict integrity and unceasing perseverance’.

As the nineteenth century, with its new opportunities for personal advancement, got under way Beeton’s steady climb up the twin ladders of respectability and wealth provided a model for the rest of his extended family. The first of his generation to leave the countryside for London, he became a beacon, pattern, and support for those who followed in his wake. There was Benjamin, his much younger brother, who arrived in London around 1809 and set up in Marylebone as a farrier, and may well have been an acquaintance of the jobmaster Isaac Jerrom. Samuel’s nephew Robert, meanwhile, made the journey from Suffolk ten years later and also went into the pub-keeping business, initially in Spitalfields and then in St Pancras, borrowing money from his uncle to buy the substantial Yorkshire Grey. By the time he died in 1836 Samuel Beeton had built up a tidy estate, consisting not only of the Dolphin itself, but property carefully husbanded both in London and back home in Suffolk. For a man who had started out as a tramping tailor, it was a glorious finish.

The child who matters to this story is, fittingly, the eldest son of Samuel’s eldest son. First, the son. Samuel Powell Beeton – named after a fellow member of the Society of Licensed Victuallers – was born in 1804, Samuel and Lucy’s first child. He was not christened until July 1812, when he was taken to St Lawrence Jewry with his new baby brother, Robert Francis. The intervening girls – the frail Ann Thomason and Lucy – had been baptized in the usual way, as babies. This suggests two things. First, that Samuel Powell was obviously robust, so there was no need to whisk him off to the church in case he died before being formally accepted as one of God’s own. Second, that the Beetons were not religious people. They christened a child because it seemed frail, or because a nagging vicar told them they should, not out of any urgent personal need. To be a Beeton was to live squarely on the earth, planted in the here and now.

Samuel Powell did what first sons should and modelled himself on his father. In 1827 he joined the Pattenmakers, this time by patrimony rather than purchase, and from 1838 he was a member of the Common Council for Cripplegate Ward. He was prominent in City politics, to the point where he felt it necessary in January 1835 to write to The Times to explain that he was emphatically not the Beeton who had signed the Conservative address to His Majesty (his affiliation was Liberal). It was assumed that Samuel Powell would eventually take over from his father at the Dolphin. But until that moment came in 1834, he filled the years as a Manchester warehouseman, trading out of Watling Street, a stone’s throw away from Milk Street on the other side of Cheapside. In 1830 Samuel Powell married Helen Orchart, the daughter of a well-to-do baker from adjacent Wood Street. The Beetons’ first child, Samuel Orchart, was born on 2 March 1831 at 81 Watling Street and christened at All Hallows Bread Street, a church traditionally connected with the brewing trade.

As early as the 1830s Londoners were dreaming of getting out and getting away, partially retracing the journey that their fathers had made from the countryside a generation earlier. The City was getting used up, stale, filthy. In 1800 you could swim in the Thames on a hot summer’s day. By 1830 a gulp of river water would make you very ill indeed. The graveyards were so overstocked that a heavy downpour regularly uncovered the dead who were supposed to be sleeping peacefully. The streets were hung around with a greasy fug that followed you wherever you went, sticking to your clothes and working its way deep into your skin. In the circumstances, Samuel Powell and his wife, being modern kind of people, decamped to Camberwell, a short walk over London Bridge, to an area that still passed for country. It was there, south of the river, that the Beetons had a second son, a child who until now has slipped through the records, perhaps because the parish clerk at Camberwell was particularly careless, or hard of hearing. For William Beeton, born September 1832, is recorded as the son of ‘Samuel Power Beeton’ and his wife ‘Eleanor’. William must have died, because no other mention is made of him. He probably took his mother with him, for Helen Beeton – this time going by her correct name – was buried only eight weeks later. Family tradition always had it that Helen died of TB, which she bequeathed to her firstborn, Samuel Orchart. In the days before death certificates it is impossible to be certain, but it looks as if Helen Orchart was a victim of that other nineteenth-century common-or-garden tragedy, the woman who died as a result of childbirth.

Samuel Powell lost no time in doing what all sensible widowers with young children were advised to do and went looking for a new wife. Eliza Douse, the daughter of a local warehouseman, was working for people out in Romford when she and Samuel got married in 1834. On becoming mistress of the Dolphin two years later, Eliza quickly ensured that her sisters Mary and Sophia were provided for by getting them jobs and lodgings in the pub. If Helen, the first Mrs Beeton, had been a delicate merchant’s daughter, too weak for a world of bad fogs and babies, her successor Eliza proved to be a sturdy workhorse. She produced seven children, all of whom survived into adulthood and, following Samuel Powell’s early death in 1854, continued to run the pub on her own before making a second marriage three years later.

Life as a Beeton was typical of the way that the families of the trading classes organized themselves in the early nineteenth century. Every member of the family, including the women, was expected to contribute something to the family enterprise whether it was a dowry (in the case of Helen Orchart) or labour, as in the case of her successor Eliza. If an extra pair of hands was needed at the Dolphin they were supplied from the extended family, as was the case with the Douse sisters. If there was no one immediately available, then a cousin might be imported from the home county. Thus Maria Brown, a cousin from Suffolk, was brought in to help in various Beeton enterprises. She shuttled between Marylebone and Milk Street until, in an equally likely move, she married Thomas Beeton, Samuel Powell’s youngest brother who lodged at the Dolphin.

Marriage alliances were used to strengthen business connections in a way that seems cold to modern eyes. Thus Thomas Orchart, the baker from Wood Street, had a financial stake in the Dolphin before marrying his only daughter to his business partner’s eldest son. Samuel Powell, in the years before taking over the pub from his father, worked as a warehouseman in partnership with Henry Minchener who was married to his younger sister Lucy. In the next generation down, their children – first cousins Jessie Beeton and Alfred Minchener – married. Samuel Powell’s best friend, a warehouseman called George Perkes, had a son called Fred who married his second daughter Victoria. Meanwhile Samuel Powell’s second son Sidney was given the middle name of ‘Perkes’ as a token of respect and friendship. The man you did business with was the man whose name your son bore and whose daughter married your younger brother.

Old women were not exempt from responsibility to the family enterprise. Just as Mary Jerrom spent her long years of widowhood running a nursery on the Epsom Downs for the overspill of children from Ormond House, so Lucy Beeton looked after the eldest Dolphin children. In this case, though, her satellite nursery was far away in Suffolk. In 1836 the newly widowed Lucy returned to her native Hadleigh, where her elder brother Isaac was one of the chief tradesmen. Along with Lucy came her 5-year-old grandson, Samuel Orchart. With the boy’s mother dead and his stepmother busy creating a new family with his father, the Dolphin was overflowing. Family tradition puts a more benign spin upon it, saying that it was for the benefit of little Sam’s precarious lungs (the ones he was supposed, for reasons that seem increasingly unlikely, to have inherited from his mother) that he was shuffled off to the country to live with his grandmother. This is fine in principle, except that by 1841 he had been joined by his younger half-sister Eliza whose lungs, as far as we know, were clear as a bell.

The other reason why it is unlikely that Sam was sent to stay with his grandmother for the sake of his health was that life in Hadleigh was hardly a pastoral idyll. Stuck in a dip between two hills, drainage was always a problem (after a storm it was possible to sail down the High Street), and the brewery near Lucy’s house discharged its effluent into the open gutter. What’s more, the town was a byword for viciousness and street crime: arson, sheep stealing, horse theft, house breaking and ‘malicious slaying and cutting and wounding’ were all everyday hazards to be avoided by right-minded citizens, who were constantly agitating for extra policing. And yet, there can be no doubt that little Sam and his half-sister Eliza lived well in Hadleigh. Their grandmother had been left with a comfortable annuity of £140, her house in the High Street was substantial and her brother, Isaac, a wealthy maltster, had pull. And then, there was 18-year-old Aunt Carrie who acted as nursemaid, at least when she was not busy courting a local gentleman farmer called Robert Kersey. All the same, it was ten hours by coach back to the Dolphin.

We know as little about Samuel Beeton’s childhood as we do about Isabella Mayson’s. Sometime before the age of 10 he was sent to a boarding school just outside Brentwood in Essex, midway between Hadleigh and London. Part of its appeal must have been geographical convenience, since Brentwood is only half an hour’s journey by rail into the terminus at Shoreditch, which in turn is only a short cab ride away from Milk Street. Pilgrim’s Hall Academy – also known as Brentwood Academy – had been set up in 1839 to educate the sons of the very middling classes. These kinds of boys’ small private schools, very different from the ancient foundations such as Eton or Winchester, were as ephemeral as their female equivalents. Indeed, Pilgrim’s Hall managed to last only thirteen years as a school, before reverting once again to a private residence. Although the advertisement that appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1843 promises prospective parents that pupils would be prepared for the universities as well as ‘the Naval and Military Colleges’, it seems unlikely that any of them really did continue on to Oxford or Cambridge or make it into the Guards. Instead, most of the fifty-three pupils were, like young Samuel, destined for apprenticeships or posts in their fathers’ businesses: tellingly, the 1841 census shows no boy at the school over the age of 15. Rather than ivy-covered quads and ancient towers, Pilgrim’s Hall was a higgledy-piggledy domestic house from the Regency period which had been chopped and changed to make it a suitable place to house and school sixty or so boys as cheaply as possible (the house still stands but these days it caters for, on average, seven residents).

The fact that Pilgrim’s Hall Academy was started by one Cornelius Zurhort who employed Jules Doucerain as an assistant master suggests that the school concentrated on a modern syllabus of living rather than dead languages. And even once the school passed to a young Englishman, Alexander Watson from St Pancras, in 1843, the stress on modern languages remained, with the employment of another Frenchman, Louis Morell. Clearly, though, the school prided itself on developing the whole boy, rather than merely helping him to slot into a world where he might be called upon to stammer a few words of business French. The Illustrated London News advertisement promises that the pupils’ ‘religious, moral, and social habits and gentlemanly demeanour are watched with parental solicitude’ and, indeed, as early as 1839 a gallery had been built in the local church for the very purpose of accommodating the shuffling, coughing Pilgrim’s Hall boys as they trooped in every Sunday morning.

Samuel Orchart was quick and knowing, bright rather than scholarly. Like his future bride he had a flair for languages, winning a copy of Une Histoire de Napoléon le Grand for his work in French. Extrapolating from his adult personality we can assume that he was boisterous, involved, fun as a friend, cheeky with the teachers. Working back from the letters that he wrote to his own sons when they were at prep school in the mid 1870s we can guess that the young Sam was always bursting with enthusiasm for ‘the last new thing’, whether it was comets, cricket scores, spring swimming, close-run class positions, or clever chess games. Clearly keen on literature – his father gave him a complete Shakespeare when he was 12, and Samuel Powell was not the kind of man to waste his money on an empty gesture – there was, nonetheless, no question of the boy going on to university.

But a career as a publican was not quite right either, despite the fact that as the eldest son Samuel Orchart stood to inherit a thriving business. In the end none of Samuel Powell’s three sons chose to run the Dolphin. That was the problem with social mobility, you left yourself behind. There was, though, a kind of possible compromise, one that allowed Sam to follow his literary bent without taking him too far from his social or geographic roots. He had grown up a few hundred yards from Fleet Street and its continuation, the Strand, which had for two centuries been the centre of the publishing trade. Now, in the 1840s, as the demand for printed material of all kinds exploded, it seemed as if everyone who set foot in the area was in some way connected with print. Inky-fingered apprentices hurried through the streets at all hours and from the open doors of taverns around Temple Bar you could see solitary young men poring over late-night proofs while gulping down a chop. Up and down Fleet Street new-fangled rotary presses were clanking through the night, producing newspapers, magazines, and books, books, books. In Paternoster Row – an alley off St Paul’s, a hop, skip, and a jump from Milk Street – booksellers and publishers so dominated the landscape that, among those in the know, ‘the Row’ had become shorthand for the whole Republic of English Letters.

In any case, as the son and grandson of a publican Sam was already part of the newspaper trade. Pubs were frequently the only house in the street to take a daily paper, and many did a brisk trade in hiring it out at 1d an hour. In addition, the Society of Licensed Victuallers produced the Morning Advertiser, which, at that time, was the nation’s only daily newspaper apart from The Times. It was to the Advertiser’s offices at 27 Fleet Street that the original Samuel Beeton had headed every Monday afternoon during the early years of the century for the Victuallers’ committee meetings. Even more importantly, the publicans’ paper delivered a healthy profit to the society, which was regularly divvied up among the members. So as far as the Beetons were concerned, a man who went into print would never go hungry.

Sam does not seem to have served a formal apprenticeship, the kind where you were bound at 14 to a single master and graduated as a journeyman in the appropriate livery company seven years later. That system, based on a medieval way of doing things, had long been winding down. The printing industry, exploding in the 1840s, appeared so modern that it seemed increasingly irrelevant to enter your lad’s name on the rolls at Stationers’ Hall, and pay for the privilege. The vested interests, of course, were worried at this new chaotic way of doing things, in which boys learned their trade with one firm for a few years before hiring themselves out as adult workers, well before their twenty-first birthdays.

It was, in any case, not to a printer that Sam was set to learn his trade, but to a paper merchant. The main cluster of London’s paper merchants was on Lower Thames Street, situated handily on the river to receive supplies from the paper mills in estuarine Kent. New technologies meant that paper could now be made out of cheap wood pulp rather than expensive rags, with the result that barges bearing bales of paper were starting to appear almost daily in the bowels of the City. Since Lower Thames Street was only a few hundred yards from Milk Street, Sam almost certainly came back from Suffolk to live at the Dolphin in 1845, the year he turned 14. That Sam’s was not a formal apprenticeship is confirmed by the fact that in 1851, one year short of the twenty-first birthday that would have ended any contractual arrangement, he gives his employment to the census enumerator as a ‘Traveller’ in a wholesale stationery firm. Always in a hurry, it would be hard to imagine Sam Beeton serving out his time as a ‘lad’ when he knew himself to be a man, and one with places to go.

Working in a paper office may sound peripheral to the explosion in the knowledge industry, but actually it was one of the best groundings for life as a magazine editor and book publisher. Young men higher up the social scale – not university graduates, but the sons of men with more cash and clout – went into junior jobs on the staff of publishers or newspapers. Here they may have learned about the editorial side of things, but they were often left ignorant of the pounds, shillings, and pence of the business. Sam, by contrast, with his less gentlemanly training, got to grips with how the product worked from the bottom up. Whether you were publishing high literature or low farce, ladies’ fashions or children’s Bible stories, elevating texts or smutty jokes, you needed what Sam, in a letter written fifteen years later when he was a fully fledged publisher, would describe triumphantly as ‘paper without end’.

This is not to suggest that this latter phase of Sam’s education was confined to counting reams, hefting quires and sucking fingers made sore from paper cuts. Being a stationery seller took you into other people’s offices and it was here Sam made friends with a group of young men working in adjacent trades. There was Frederick Greenwood, a print setter who had probably been apprenticed to a firm in nearby New Fetter Lane but, after only a year, found himself engaged as a publisher’s reader. Greenwood would become Beeton’s right-hand man for nearly a decade, before striking out on a glittering career as an editor on his own account. He had an equally talented though more mercurial younger brother, James, who would go on to be one of the first investigative journalists of his day and who would publish much of his work under the imprint of S. O. Beeton. Then there was James Wade, who may have served an apprenticeship in the same firm as Frederick Greenwood and would print many of Beeton’s publications, especially the initial volumes of the ground-breaking Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine.

Whether your first job was in a paper merchant’s or a printing house, the work was hard, taking up to twelve hours a day and a good part of Saturday. But that did not stop these vigorous young men getting together in the evening. These were exciting times and it was impossible for them not to feel that they had been set upon the earth at just the right moment. In an interview towards the end of his life Greenwood maintained, ‘It was worth while being born in the early ’thirties’ in order ‘to feel every day a difference so much to the good’. Coming into the world around the time of the Great Reform Act, these boys had lived through the three big Chartist uprisings, witnessed the repeal of the Corn Laws and seen the beginnings of legislation that would go to create the modern state (hence Greenwood, who remembered from his early working days the sight of shoeless boys wandering around St Paul’s, maintaining that things really were getting better every day). Now as they came into manhood these young men insisted on seeing signs all around them that the world – or their world – was moving forward. After the rigours of the ‘hungry forties’ Britain was entering a golden age of prosperity, a sunny upland where it was possible to believe that hard work, material wellbeing and intellectual progress walked hand in hand.

More specifically, these young men had seen at first hand just how the social and political changes of the last few years had been lobbied, debated, modified, and publicized through the burgeoning culture of printed news. Greenwood paying to read a paper every morning from nine to ten, or Sam popping into the Dolphin for the latest edition of the Morning Advertiser were part of a new generation of people who expected to get their information quickly and accurately, rather than picking up third-hand gossip days later around the village pump. On top of this, these young men had seen their changing world refracted in the bold new fiction that was pouring off the presses. Mary Barton, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, all burst upon the world during the hectic decade that coincided with their apprenticeships. Nor was it just the content of these books – rough, even raw – that was new. The way they were produced, in cheap cardboard formats, sometimes serialized in magazines, or available in multiple volumes from Mr Mudie’s lending library in New Oxford Street or Mr Smith’s railway stands, announced a revolution in reading habits. No wonder that, years later, when writing to his elder son at prep school, a boy who had never known what it was not to have any text he wanted immediately to hand, Sam counselled sadly ‘you do not read books enough.’

There were other excitements, too, of a more immediate nature. It was now that Sam Beeton and Frederick Greenwood discovered sex and spent their lives dealing with its consequences. At the time Greenwood was living in lodgings off the Goswell Road, away from his parental home in west London. In June 1850, at the age of only 20, he married Catherine Darby. Although the marriage was not of the shotgun variety – the first baby wasn’t born until a decorous eighteen months later – it was miserable, ending in separation and a series of minders for the increasingly alcoholic and depressed Mrs Greenwood (when visitors came round for tea she promptly hid the cups under the cushions on the grounds that she didn’t want company). But in one way Greenwood was lucky. Early marriage did for him what a growing band of moralists maintained it would, providing him with a prophylactic against disease, drink, and restlessness. Marriage steadied a man and young Frederick Greenwood was nothing if not steady.

Greenwood’s friend Sam Beeton was not so fortunate. Just what happened during his crucial years of young adulthood has been obscured by embarrassment and smoothed over with awkward tact. Nancy Spain, no fan of Sam, quotes from a conversation he had in later life. Strolling through London, Sam was supposed to have pointed out ‘the window he used to climb out at night’ as a lad, adding wistfully that ‘he began life too soon’. Spain does not source the quotation and it would be easy to dismiss the whole anecdote were it not for the odd fact that H. Montgomery Hyde, who researched his biography independently of Spain, evidently had access to this same conversation. Hyde has the young man ‘confessing’ that he contrived to have ‘quite a gay time’ in his youth, before going on to point out the infamous window.

The language that both Spain and Hyde ascribe to Sam speaks volumes. Climbing out of a window immediately suggests something illicit, something which the boy did not wish his father, stepmother and gaggle of half-sisters and step-aunts to know about. ‘Beginning life too soon’ makes no sense, either, unless it refers to street life – drink, cards, whores (boys of Sam’s class were used to the idea that their working lives began at fourteen). Also telling is Hyde’s detail about Sam referring to having had a ‘gay time’ – ‘gay’ being the standard code word designating commercial heterosexual sex. (‘Fanny, how long have you been gay?’ asks one prostitute of another in a cartoon of the time.)

Once Sam had scrambled out of the Dolphin window it was only a ten-minute saunter to the Strand, that no-man’s-land between the City and the West End which had long been synonymous with prostitution. What was mostly a male space during the day – all those print shops, stationers and booksellers – turned at night into something altogether more assorted. From the nearby taverns and theatres poured groups of young men in varying states of cheeriness, while from the rabbit warren of courts and alleys came women who needed to make some money, quickly and without fuss. (Brothels were never a British thing, and most prostitutes worked the streets as freelance operators.) The young men who used the women’s services were not necessarily bad, certainly not the rakes or sadists or degenerates of our contemporary fantasies. In fact, if anything, they were probably the prudent ones, determined to delay marriage until they were 30 or so and had saved up a little nest egg. So when the coldness and loneliness of celibacy became too much, it was these careful creatures of capitalism who ‘spent’ – the polite term for male orgasm – 5 shillings on a dreary fumble which, if Sam is anything to go by, they shuddered to recall years later. In this early part of Victoria’s reign, before the social reformer Josephine Butler started to provide a woman’s perspective on the situation, there were plenty of sensible people who believed that prostitution was the price you paid for keeping young middle-class men focused, productive and mostly continent during their vital teens and twenties.

The man whom Sam accused of initiating him into the city’s night life was Charles Henry Clarke, a bookbinder ten years older than himself operating from offices at 148 Fleet Street and 25¹/₂ Bouverie Street. Clarke was in partnership with a printer called Frederick Salisbury, a 40-year-old man originally from Suffolk, who also had premises in Bouverie Street. Recently Clarke and Salisbury had branched out from simply printing and binding books for other publishers to producing them themselves, mostly reissuing existing texts (British copyright at this point was a messy, floutable business). It was this expanding side of the business that particularly attracted Sam, who wanted to be a proper publisher rather than simply a paper man. Armed with some capital, possibly from his mother’s estate, and a burning sense of destiny, Sam joined Salisbury and Clarke as a partner around the time of his twenty-first birthday in the spring of 1852 with the intention of building a publishing empire to cater for the reading needs of the rising lower middle classes, the very people from whom he had sprung. Newly confident, flush with a little surplus cash, literate but not literary, comprising everyone from elderly women who had come up from the country, through their bustling tradesmen sons to their sharp, knowing granddaughters, these were the people whom Samuel was gearing up to supply with every kind of reading material imaginable, as well as some that had yet to be thought of.

And, for a while, he was flukishly successful. During those last few months of Sam’s informal apprenticeship, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been doing huge and surprising business in her native America. Since there was no copyright agreement with the States – in fact there would be none until 1891 – a whole slew of British publishers immediately scented the possibility of making a profit simply by reprinting the book and adding their own title page and cover. One of these was Henry Vizetelly, a brilliant but permanently under-capitalized publisher and engraver who made an arrangement with Clarke and Salisbury to split the costs of publishing 2,500 copies of the book to sell at 2s 6d. Initially Uncle Tom’s Cabin made little impact in Britain, but a swift decision to bring out a 1s edition paid speedy dividends. By July 1852 it was selling at the rate of 1,000 copies a week.

Using the extra capital that Sam had brought into the firm, he and Clarke now set about exploiting this sensational demand for Mrs Stowe’s sentimental novel about life among black slaves in the southern states of America. Seventeen printing presses and four hundred people were pulled into service in order to bring out as many new editions of Uncle Tom as anyone could think of – anything from a weekly 1d serial, through a 1s railway edition to a luxury version with ‘forty superb illustrations’ for 7s 6d. This was a new way of thinking about books. Instead of a stable entity, fixed between a standard set of covers, Beeton’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a spectacularly malleable artefact, one that could be repackaged and re-presented to different markets an almost infinite number of times.

Inevitably this feeding frenzy attracted other British publishers – seventeen in fact – who lost no time in producing their own editions of Mrs Stowe’s unlikely hit, often simply reprinting Clarke and Beeton’s text and adding their own title page. What many of them had missed, though, was the fact that some of these Clarke, Beeton editions contained significant additions to the original American text, comprising a new Introduction and explanatory chapter headings written by Frederick Greenwood. By unwittingly reproducing these, publishers such as Frederick Warne were infringing Clarke and Beeton’s British copyright. As a result of this greedy mistake, Clarke and Beeton were in an extraordinarily strong position, able to insist that the pirated stock was handed over to them, whereupon they simply reissued it under their own name. Uncle Tom probably achieved the greatest short-term sale of any book published in Britain in the nineteenth century, and the firm of Clarke and Beeton walked away with a very large slice of the stupendous profits. For a young man venturing into the marketplace for the first time, the omens must have seemed stunning.

Fired by his spectacular good fortune, Sam was determined to get first dibs on Mrs Stowe’s follow-up book. And so late in that delirious summer of 1852 he took the extraordinary step of tearing off to the States to beard the middle-aged minister’s wife in her Massachusetts lair. Initially she refused to see him, then relented and almost immediately wished she had not. The young man’s opening gambit, of presenting her with the electrotype plates from the luxury British edition, was sadly misjudged. Included among these was a cover illustration comprising a highly eroticized whipping scene, exactly the kind of thing that Mrs Stowe had taken pains to avoid. ‘There is not one scene of bodily torture described in the book – they are purposely omitted,’ she explained reprovingly to him in a later letter, probably wondering whether this brash young Englishman had really got the point of her work at all.

Next Sam tried cash, offering Mrs Stowe a payment of £500. If he thought that she would roll over in gratitude, then he could not have been more mistaken. For all that she liked to present herself as an unworldly minister’s wife, Mrs Stowe had a surprising grasp of the pounds, shillings and pence of authorship. It had not escaped her sharp attention that Sam, together with other British firms, had harvested from her work ‘profits … which I know have not been inconsiderable’. In the end she accepted the £500, together with a further £250, but not before making it quite clear in a letter to Sam that this did not constitute any kind of payment, promise, or obligation.

As if to emphasize to Sam that he was not quite the uniquely coming man he thought himself to be, the Fates conspired that as he left Mrs Stowe after his first interview, he bumped into another British publisher walking up her drive. Sampson Low had crossed the Atlantic for exactly the same purpose, to coax Mrs Stowe into giving him an early advantage in publishing the sequel to Uncle Tom. In the end Mrs Stowe agreed to furnish both Beeton and Low, together with another British publisher Thomas Bosworth, with advance pages of her next work, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As it turned out, this shared arrangement was lucky, since it meant that each of the firms got to bear only one third of the colossal losses. The Key turned out to be a dreary affair, nothing more than a collection of the documentary sources on which the novel had been based. The fact that Mrs Stowe insisted beforehand that ‘My Key will be stronger than the Cabin,’ suggests how little she understood – and, perhaps, cared about – the reasons for her phenomenal popular success.

It says something about Sam’s character that, right from the start, there were people who were delighted to see him take this tumble. Vizetelly, the man who had first brought Uncle Tom to Clarke but who had missed out on the staggering profits from the subsequent editions, was particularly thrilled at the loss that Sam was now taking with The Key. When Vizetelly, who was ten years older than Beeton and already recognized as a noisy talent in Fleet Street, had approached the lad at the end of the summer of 1852 to ask about his share of the profit, he was sent away with a flea in his ear and an abiding dislike of the cocky upstart. Decades later, writing his puffily self-serving autobiography, Vizetelly was still gloating over the fact that ‘With a daring confidence, that staggered most sober-minded people, the deluded trio, Clarke, Beeton, and Salisbury, printed a first edition of fifty thousand copies, I think it was, the bulk of which eventually went to the trunk makers, while the mushroom firm was obliged to go into speedy liquidation.’

Vizetelly’s claim that Clarke, Beeton went into immediate liquidation looks like wishful thinking. Certainly there is no formal record of them being forced to close down. Nor is it true, as earlier Beeton biographers have maintained, that it was at this point that Beeton ditched Clarke and went into business on his own. Right up until 1855 Clarke and Beeton were printing some books and magazines under their joint names while also continuing to work separately. It was not until 1857 that the break finally came, with characteristic (for Sam) bad temper. In February of that year Beeton v. Clarke was heard before Lord Campbell. Both parties had hired QCs, which hardly came cheap, to argue over whether Clarke, who was now operating independently out of Paternoster Row, owed Beeton £181. The wrangle dated back to the mad days of summer 1852 when, during their scrappy coming to terms over the profits of Uncle Tom, the firm of Clarke, Beeton and Salisbury had bought from Henry Vizetelly his profitable imprint ‘Readable Books’. Now that the relationship between Clarke and Beeton had dramatically soured, they were bickering like estranged lovers over small sums of money. The jury found for Sam, one of the few occasions in his long litigious career when he would emerge vindicated.

Typically Sam made huge cultural capital from the Uncle Tom affair. Not only did he manage to win Mrs Stowe round by his charismatic presence for long enough to extract introductions to several American intellectuals, including her brother Revd H. W. Beecher of Brooklyn, Wendell Holmes, and Longfellow, he also talked up his relationship with the celebrity authoress thereafter, managing to imply that she was anxiously watching over the affairs of Clarke, Beeton from the other side of the Atlantic. The Preface to the sixth edition of Uncle Tom, published this time by ‘Clarke & Co, Foreign Booksellers’, shows just how far he was prepared to go:

In presenting this Edition to the British public the Publishers, equally on behalf of the Authoress and themselves, beg to render their acknowledgements of the sympathy and success the work has met with in England … Our Editions are the real ‘Author’s Editions’; we are in direct negotiation with Mrs Stowe; and we confidently hope that when accounts are made up we shall be in a position to award that talented lady a sum not inferior in amount to her receipts in America.

Thereafter Sam would tie his own name to Mrs Stowe’s in the public’s mind wherever possible. Thus years later, in Beeton’s Dictionary of Universal Information, he could not resist retelling the story of how he had crossed the Atlantic in the late summer of 1852 to present Mrs Stowe with a voluntary payment of £500. The fact that he had first tried to get away with giving her some printers’ plates that he no longer needed and she particularly disliked was, typically enough, never mentioned.

INTERLUDE

We are so sorry to say that the preserved meats are sometimes carelessly prepared, and, though the statement seems incredible, sometimes adulterated.

ISABELLA BEETON, Book of Household Management

MAKING SURE THAT the food that came to table was pure was something of an obsession with Mrs Beeton. Now that the average household was dependent not on the farmer but the greengrocer and baker for its provisions, the opportunities for contamination were legion. A series of investigations carried out by the Lancet between 1851 and 1854 had revealed to a horrified nation that a whole range of its staple foods were routinely watered down, bulked out, tinted up and, by a whole series of sleights of hand, turned into something that they were not. Every single one of forty-nine random samples of bread examined by the Lancet were found to contain alum; the milk turned out to have water added in amounts ranging from 10 to 50 per cent; and of twenty-nine tins of coffee examined, twenty-eight were adulterated with chicory, mangel-wurzel, and acorn, while a typical sample of tea contained up to half its own weight in iron filings.

The reasons for this terrible state of affairs are various, but mainly come down to the voracious conditions in which retailers were operating in Mrs Beeton’s day. Bread, for instance, was frequently sold below the cost of flour, which meant that the baker had to find some way of bulking out his loaves in order to avoid making a loss. Likewise, milk was bought wholesale for 3d a quart and retailed at 4d. So by adding just 10 per cent of water the tradesman reaped 40 per cent extra profit.

Popularized versions of the Lancet’s findings appeared throughout the press, creating a climate of fearful protest throughout the 1850s. Disappointingly, the resultant 1860 Adulteration of Foods Act turned out to be a toothless tiger, and responsibility for cleaning up Britain’s food was left in the hands of various voluntary groups, as well as to the manufacturers themselves. In 1855 Mr Thomas Blackwell of Crosse and Blackwell explained to a Select Committee that his firm had recently given up the habit of coppering pickles and fruits and artificially colouring sauces, despite consumers initially being disgruntled to discover that pickles were actually brown not green and that anchovies were not naturally a nice bright red. It was not until 1872 that Britain got an effective Adulteration of Food, Drinks and Drugs Act.

During the years when Isabella Beeton first started contributing to Sam’s Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine anxieties about food adulteration were running high. Readers write in wanting to know how to spot if their bread has been compounded with chalk and are in turn advised on gadgets they can buy to check whether their milk has been watered down. In the Book of Household Management itself the fear initially appears more muted, although hovering over the text you can still discern a continuing worry that the meat that is about to come to table may be off; that vegetables are apt to rot in the containers in which they are stored, thereby becoming ‘impregnated with poisonous particles’; and that the tin that lines saucepans may well be adulterated with lead, ‘a pernicious practice, which in every article connected with the cooking and preparation of food, cannot be too severely reprobated’.

In other words, Mrs Beeton’s imaginary household is in constant danger of being poisoned. What makes it all so frightening is the fact that this is an invisible threat, impossible to detect by the inexpert eye or hand. Here is a neat metaphor for how the middle-class household was beginning to think about itself in the middle of the nineteenth century. The earlier extended household consisting of apprentices, clerks, lodgers, and shopmen (remember the examples of the widowed wholesaler Elizabeth Mayson in Milk Street or the Dolphin with its sisters and cousins and aunts) had now slimmed itself down so that it was more recognizably a nuclear family. This made the boundary between the household and the world beyond the front door clearer, which in turn made the possibility of any breach doubly terrifying. Hence Mrs Beeton’s constant alertness to the danger represented by apparently harmless objects such as saucepans and vegetables that could be smuggled into the family hearth to do their corrupting work.

This is the reason why Beeton gave such a rhapsodic welcome to the introduction of mechanically preserved food. To her tinned meat and fish were not, as they might be to us, a second best option, something for the campsite or the bank holiday. For Mrs Beeton the canning of food represents the privileged opportunity to be in complete control of its purity from farm to fork.

At Leith, in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, at Aberdeen, at Bordeaux, at Marseilles, and in many parts of Germany, establishments of enormous magnitude exist, in which soup, vegetables, and viands of every description are prepared, in such a manner that they retain their freshness for years.

You get the feeling that if only it were possible, Mrs Beeton would make the household safe by putting it in a tin, soldering the covers and exposing it to boiling water for three hours. That she is forced to acknowledge that adulteration, ‘amazing to say’, can take place even before the tinning process begins, so contaminating the whole food chain, shows that – alas – it is never possible to turn an Englishman’s home into a moated castle, no matter how hard you might try.

CHAPTER FOUR ‘The Entire Management of Me’

ISABELLA MAYSON AND SAMUEL BEETON had been in and out of each other’s lives from well before they were born, five years apart, in the early springs of 1831 and 1836. The Mayson-Dorling clan may not have been related to the Beetons by blood or marriage, but they did belong to that category of people, defined by personal history, geography, commerce, and affinity, that went by the name of ‘kith’. Both Samuel Powell Beeton and Benjamin Mayson had been Manchester warehousemen. Their wives had arrived in Milk Street at exactly the same time and both proceeded to give birth to a tribe of girls and the occasional boy. Eliza and Victoria Beeton were almost exactly the same ages as Isabella and Bessie Mayson and it was only natural for the little girls to troop across the road to play together among the barrels or the bales. This intimate daily contact stopped in 1843 when the Maysons were whisked away to begin a new life with the Dorlings in Epsom. However, the friendship between the two families must have remained strong, since a few years later all the girls – Maysons, Dorlings, and Beetons – were sent, in batches, to Miss Heidel’s in Heidelberg.

There are other reasons for thinking that contact between the two families continued even once they had ceased being neighbours. Samuel Powell Beeton was a keen racing man and had turned the Dolphin into something of a sporting pub. Raising a large prize purse was, as Henry Dorling was fast discovering in his job as Clerk of the Course at Epsom, a perpetual challenge. Beeton’s canny solution in 1846 was to post subscription lists in the Dolphin and other busy City pubs, with the result that the new Epsom 2¹/₄-mile handicap was known from the outset as ‘The Publican’s Derby’ (part of the money raised went to the Licensed Victuallers’ School). Nor did Beeton’s connection with Dorling stop there. In the early 1850s he was regularly racing his own horses at various of the lesser Epsom meetings. One final point of contact: although William Dorling had set up as a printer in Bexhill all those years ago, he was actually an Ipswich man. For at least the last hundred years Dorlings and Beetons had lived and worked alongside each other in Suffolk.

So from the very moment they were old enough to register such things, Isabella and Sam would have been aware of each other’s existence through the networks of chat and mutual interest that bound their families together, the female members particularly. They may well have met as small children on those occasions when Sam came back to Milk Street from his grandmother’s house in Hadleigh to visit the Dolphin. They almost certainly encountered each other in the late 1840s and early 1850s when Samuel Powell Beeton was a regular fixture at the Epsom racetrack. In a world where you married the boy next door, or at least the boy in the next street, who also happened to be the son of your father’s business partner and a school friend of your brother, Sam was pretty much marked out for Isabella. It didn’t feel like that, of course. Arranged marriages were out of fashion, even for the aristocracy, and among young, middle-class people love matches were the order of the day. But while she probably believed that she was following her heart, Isabella was actually revealing herself as a creature of her time and place.

Since we will never know the moment they actually met, it is worth considering just what made Isabella Mary Mayson and Samuel Orchart Beeton give each other a second, third, and fourth glance. It is easy to imagine what she saw in him. He was sufficiently like her stepfather, whom she called ‘Father’, to feel familiar, part of the kith network that held her world together. Sam talked of deadlines and printing presses, proofs, boards and first copies just arrived, using a language that had been the background clatter of her childhood. But he was sufficiently different from Henry to seem exciting too. Even in twenty years’ time Sam Beeton was never going to be a mutton-chopped paterfamilias, rigid with respectability and self-regard. The excitement of the streets hung around him like the smoke from his habitual cigars. His particular pleasures included prize-fights, ratting contests, and, although Isabella probably didn’t know this, prostitutes. (Two thirds of the way through their courtship, according to Sam, she teased him about ‘what you are pleased to call my roving nature’, but it is impossible to know exactly what she meant by it.) He was both of her class and yet not quite. Although she had been at school with his sisters – one of the key indicators of a young man’s suitability as a husband – there was still a cockneyism about him that was thrilling, especially since she had been brought up by people keen to forget that sort of thing in their own backgrounds. He was that delicious thing, a familiar stranger, a buried subtext.

To Isabella, a girl who had learned to deal with her emotional needs by displacing them onto other people (all those infant tantrums and wet nappies to be calmly coped with), Sam offered thrilling access to her own occluded interior life. His intense emotionality, conveyed both in person and in the many letters he wrote to her at this time, unlocked an answering response in her. Over the length of the year’s courtship we can watch as Isabella evolves from a self-contained and defensive girl into an expansive and loving young woman. Thus while her first surviving letters to her fiancé are curt and cautious – ‘My dearest Sam … Yours most affectionately, Isabella Mayson’ – only six months later they are racing with spontaneous affection, ‘My own darling Sam, … Yours with all love’s devotion BELLA MAYSON’. A latish letter, written on 1 June just six weeks before the wedding, shows Bella taking flight into a candour and rapture that would have been impossible to predict only a few months earlier:

My dearly beloved Sam,

I take advantage of this after dinner opportunity to enjoy myself and have a small chat with you on paper although I have really nothing to say, and looking at it in a mercenary point of view my letter will not be worth the postage. I am so continually thinking of you that it seems to do me a vast amount of good even to do a little black and white business, knowing very well that a few lines of nonsense are always acceptable to a certain mutable gentleman be they ever so short or stupid …

You cannot imagine how I have missed you, and have been wishing all day that I were a bird that I might fly away and be at rest with you, my own precious one.

If Sam set Bella soaring, then she grounded him. Her phlegmatic caution and emotional steadiness provided the much needed anchor for his volatility and frighteningly labile moods. In a letter written towards the end of their engagement in which Sam starts off by reporting that he is ‘horribly blue’ he ends, four pages later, ‘I’m better now than when I began this letter – talking with you, even in this way and at this distance always makes me feel very jolly.’ At the beginning of June 1856, a few weeks before the wedding and worried to distraction by the sluggish launch of his new magazine, the Boy’s Own Journal, Sam explains beseechingly that ‘I can think and work and do so much better and so much more when I can see and feel that it is not for myself, (about whom I care nothing) I am labouring, but for her whom I so ardently prize, and so lovingly cherish in my inmost heart – my own Bella!’ Isabella was the isle of sanity that Sam created outside himself, his superego, his conscience, his place of safety.

And then there was the fact that Sam Beeton was that rare thing, a Victorian man who liked and respected women as much as he loved them. Brought up by his grandmother and surrounded by a clutch of younger half-sisters, he wanted a genuinely companionate marriage, one based on affinity rather than rigid role-play. In Isabella he had found his perfect match, although he could not yet know how profitable that match would become. If he had the flair and the imagination, she had the caution and dogged determination. If he had the manic energy of the possessed, she had the sticking power of an ambitious clerk. At the end of May 1856 and following a colossal row that nearly derailed their engagement altogether, Sam is genuinely disturbed by Isabella’s self-abnegating promise that very soon he would have the ‘entire management’ of her. Puzzled, offended even, he writes back: ‘I don’t desire, I assure you, to manage you – you can do that quite well yourself’, before proceeding to pay admiring tribute to her ‘most excellent abilities’. It was those abilities – including her capacity to ‘manage’ both herself and other people – that would be the making of them both.

Sam’s family was delighted by the news of the engagement, which was formally hatched around the time of the 1855 summer meeting. Eliza Beeton, who had always been extremely fond of her stepson, went out of her way to contrive occasions by which the young people could be alone together during the twelve bumpy months of their engagement. With the sudden loss of her husband just nine months earlier, this young love affair was a happy distraction. Sam’s sisters, too, were thrilled that the girl they had known as a classmate was now to become a member of their family. Eighteen months after the wedding Nelly Beeton, still languishing at school in Heidelberg, was tickled pink to be able to sign her letter ‘Your affectionate sister-in-law’.

Bella’s family, though, was not so sure. A contemporary painting by James Hayllar suggests how it should have been. The Only Daughter shows a beloved young woman announcing the news of her engagement to her elderly parents. With one hand she grasps her father’s in shocked delight while with the other she reaches out to her fiancé, a stolid young man who, with just the right degree of gentlemanly tact, averts his face from this sacred moment. This little scene is, in turn, watched by the girl’s grey-haired mother who puts down her sewing for a moment to contemplate the mood of solemn joy.

We do not know how things played out in the drawing room of Ormond House when Isabella announced that she was to marry Sam Beeton. In fact this scene probably never took place: since she was only 19, Sam would first have had to ask her stepfather for permission to propose. Quite why Henry agreed to his stepdaughter marrying a man he evidently disliked and soon came to loathe remains a mystery. Perhaps the fact that within nine months of her wedding Isabella would turn 21, made him think that there was little point in trying to delay the inevitable. Elizabeth Dorling, meanwhile, was in no position to warn against an early marriage: when she had walked up the aisle with Isabella’s father in 1835 she too had been barely 20.

However Sam’s formal relationship with the Dorlings actually began, it soon developed into a war of attrition that would end, ten years later, with a rupture between the two families that would take a hundred years and several generations to heal. Right from the start the older Dorling and Mayson girls lined up against Sam. Jane Dorling, just a year younger than Isabella, was edgy about the way that she was getting left behind in the marriage race. Her strenuous attempts to woo a certain Mr Wood by singing him German songs were coming to nothing just at the moment when Isabella and Sam were putting the final touches to their wedding plans. Jane responded by taking out her frustration on the happy couple. In a letter written in the middle of June Sam talks ruefully about Jane’s ‘little sharp ways’ and hopes that Mr Wood succumbs soon since ‘fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind’. (In fact it would be another five years before Jane would get married, and not to the resistant Mr Wood.)

Bessie and Esther, meanwhile, were jealous right from the start, resenting Sam for taking their eldest sister away so soon. The smaller girls Charlotte and Lucy were besotted with Sam at this point, but soon changed their minds once they were old enough to understand the hints and gossip that trickled down from their sisters. In fact, there was only one person in Epsom who was unambiguously thrilled by the news of the engagement and she didn’t count. Tucked away in the Grandstand, Granny Jerrom could not stop talking about the joys and wonders of ‘dear Sam’.

Put simply, Henry Dorling did not think that Samuel Orchart Beeton was good enough for his eldest stepdaughter, whom he regarded as his own flesh and blood. Beneath this judgement lay a fair degree of self-loathing. Sam, like Henry, was an energetic eldest son who had started out in printing before quickly spotting the potential in adjacent pursuits (racing in Henry’s case, book publishing in Sam’s). Both men were sharp, bright, keen self-publicists who knew how to make money. This meant they should have liked one another, were it not for the fact that the prime dynamic of the rising middle classes involved not looking back. Henry had not worked hard, improved his situation, and spent all that money on turning his eldest stepdaughter into a lady in order for her to marry a man who seemed and sounded like himself. His own two eldest girls, Isabella’s near contemporaries Jane and Mary, would eventually marry a lawyer and doctor respectively. A son-in-law belonging to one of the gentlemanly professions was the kind of return Henry expected on his investment, and it looked as though Bella was going to throw it – herself – away.

And then there was Sam’s rackety family. His sisters, who went to school with the Dorling girls in Heidelberg, were nice enough, but there was something raffish about the male members of the Beeton clan. Throughout the period various Beetons had a nasty habit of popping up in the Law Court reports. There is Thomas Beeton, Sam’s uncle and lodger at the Dolphin, who in 1834 is charged with making impertinent remarks to women in the street. In the next generation down things were no more promising. Sam’s younger half-brother Edward Albert would, while still in his teens, be charged with insurance fraud, go bankrupt, flee the country, and eventually serve eighteen months’ hard labour. A quick flick through The Times shows other members of the extended Beeton tribe regularly coming up on charges of arson, careless driving, and a clutch of other minor but unpleasant crimes. Significantly, one of the few times a Dorling is mentioned in the newspaper in a less than benign tone is in 1864 when Sam Beeton went into partnership with Isabella’s stepbrother Edward Dorling and managed to drag him into a bad-tempered property dispute that ended, typically, in court. Whichever way you looked at it, the Beetons were not the kind of people you would rush to call family.

So Henry and Sam embarked upon an uneasy Oedipal relationship in which the elder man could never resist a dig at the younger, and the younger could never quite throw off his need to impress and surpass the elder. During the end part of 1855 Sam, nearly always writing from his hectic office in Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street, had been sending his letters to Isabella in envelopes that were stamped with the logo of his newest venture, the Boy’s Own Journal, a companion weekly title to the well-established monthly Boy’s Own Magazine. Henry hated this vulgarism – he was already worried that the smarter part of Epsom did not consider him quite a gentleman – and insisted that it stop forthwith. In a letter of 3 January 1856 Isabella writes to Sam nervously: ‘I hope you will not be offended with me for sending you a few envelopes. Father said this morning he supposed your passion for advertising was such that you could not resist sending those stamped affairs.’ This, surely, was rather rich coming from a man who had worked hard to make sure that the name ‘Dorling’ appeared on every poster, pamphlet, and local newspaper circulating in Epsom.

Still, Sam continued to yearn for Dorling’s approval while pretending that he did not. In June 1856 he nonchalantly sends Isabella a copy of the brand-new Boy’s Own Journal hot off the press so that she could ‘show the guv’nor so that it may receive his approbation or thunders’. In the run-up to the spring races in 1856 he dutifully intones, ‘I hope your father will have a good meeting next week,’ before making sure that he isn’t available to watch Henry play the Great Man of Epsom. Sam is careful, too, to feign an unconvincing indifference to the whole horsey world. In a postscript to a letter of 10 April 1856, written a week later, Isabella explains, ‘I would have sent you a return List but I know you don’t care about racing.’

It was not even as if, by way of compensation for his rough edges, Sam was a wealthy man. Henry Dorling, whose fondness for money-making was beginning to attract jealous talk, would have noticed the way in which the small fortune Sam had made from the lucky strike of Uncle Tom had been frittered away in the debacle of The Key. And then there was the unfortunate fact that while Sam’s magazines, the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and the Boy’s Own Magazine, appeared to be selling well, this was partly because their publisher was giving away a huge number of loyalty prizes in the form of glitzy trinkets – watches, bracelets, penknives and even pianos. If Dorling was worried that he might be handing over his girl to a man with no money, then the events of February 1856 only confirmed his worst suspicions. For it was now that Sam got himself into some kind of muddle with his lottery arrangements, which meant that he forfeited a colossal £200 a year, about half his annual income. This must have led to some very heated discussions in the drawing room of Ormond House, for by the middle of the month Isabella is writing consolingly to her fiancé, ‘I am sorry to hear you are not likely to get out of your Lottery mess nicely … However, I don’t believe things will be so bad as many people try to make out; as long as you have a head on your shoulders I think you will manage to scrape a living together somehow,’ which hardly sounds like a vote of confidence.

The tensions between the Dorling and Beeton clans would deepen with each year of the nine-year marriage as Sam’s recklessness and cockneyism became more and more apparent. In the early summer of 1855, however, the full extent of these pains lay far in the future, as the newly engaged Isabella and Sam delightedly contemplated each other and the life they would make together. Two images from this time, one of each of them, have come down to us (none has ever been found of them together). The first of these is the iconic photograph of Isabella that now belongs to the National Portrait Gallery. Taken in the London studios of Maull and Polybank, probably at their Cheapside branch, it shows a solemn, solid girl weighed down by the visual signifiers of early Victorian ladyhood. First there is the poker-straight, heavy hair wound into a plaited coronet, so big and tight that it looks as if she is wearing a particularly unbecoming hat (minute inspection reveals that a sturdy chenille net is keeping the whole thing steady). Then there is the dress, made locally in Epsom out of a length of silk given to her by Ralph Sherwood, the Epsom trainer, in celebration of the fact that his horse Wild Dayrell had won the highly dramatic Derby of that year. Patterned with broad bands of colour, pinched into horizontal tucks, and decorated with fussy buttons, the whole thing looks as if it would be better suited to a sofa. The effect is finished with full lace sleeves and collar, a silk shawl edged with heraldic-looking velvet scutcheons, a faceted glass brooch and fancy wristwatch. As a final touch Isabella clutches at a voluminous handkerchief with one hand while with the other she points to her ample bust. She is 20 years old, trussed up like a fussy matron, entirely innocent of the flair that she would display in a few years’ time as fashion editor of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. A photograph taken of her when she was about 24 shows her from this later period, which was how her sisters always chose to remember her: slender, elegant, emphatically unpatterned, with just one striking row of jet beads and not a brooch or handkerchief in sight.

The surviving image of Sam from 1853, two years before the engagement, is a head and shoulders chalk drawing by Julian Portch, a well-known artist who had sketched many young men in Sam’s circle. In the sketch, Portch presents Sam as a romantic hero. His face is long, his eyes large and lingering, his mouth pronounced and sensuous (although we must beware of crude face-mapping – all the Beetons had that mouth and some of them, the women especially, lived blameless lives). The hair is wavy and longish, the necktie soft, large, and careless. This is a young man who likes to think of himself as a rebel, impatient with the ponderous respectability of his elders (significantly he has no beard). If Shelley had been reborn as a Cheapside publican’s son he might have looked a lot like Sam Beeton. A second photograph, taken when Sam was 29, shows little change. There is a light beard and moustache now (he had problems growing a full one), but the general effect is the same. The clothes are self-consciously ‘bohemian’ and the necktie appears to be identical to the one from his youth – casual and imprecise. While Isabella has matured, Sam has contrived to stand still.

During the year of their engagement Isabella continued to live with her family in Epsom while Sam was in London. Around 1853 he had moved into offices in Bouverie Street, a hop, skip and a jump from 148 Fleet Street where Charles Clarke was still running the printing side of the business. Sam mainly lodged at the Dolphin, although he frequently spent nights away at the homes of various members of his extended clan around north London. During the first six months of the engagement, until the close of 1855, the arrangement seems to have been that Sam would come down to Epsom every Sunday on the train, the standard pattern for dutiful sons and prospective sons-in-law (this was also the day that Henry Mayson Dorling and John Mayson arrived home from their busy lives in London). In addition there would be weekly rendezvous in London when Isabella went up to Manchester Square for her lesson with Benedict and returned back to London Bridge station via the Dolphin. No letters have come down from this first half of the engagement, which suggests that few needed to be written. Isabella and Sam were seeing each other a couple of times a week, and their thoughts, wishes, needs and tiffs could be saved up and played out in person, either in London or Epsom.

But by the end of six months’ worth of Sunday lunches with the chilly Dorlings, Sam had reached breaking point. Working, as always, like a maniac, he knew that he could not bear another half-year’s worth of lost and disagreeable weekends. It may even be that he was beginning to wonder whether he could go through with the marriage at all. For it was becoming painfully clear that Isabella, still only 19, was utterly under the thumb of her parents, parents who were unable to disguise the fact that they didn’t really like him. Henry and Elizabeth quizzed Isabella constantly about the relationship: ‘I trust you will not have been much tortured with many catechizings?’ asks Sam nervously in late April. They also continued to drop hints about Sam’s unsuitability to the extent that, only a couple of months before the wedding, we find Sam consoling Isabella over the ‘many cutting speeches’ that she has recently been forced to endure: ‘I fear that you are made very miserable oftentimes on my poor account.’ In addition, the Dorlings made sarcastic comments about the frequency with which the couple wrote to each other, and made sure to pass on disagreeable gossip about Sam that they knew was bound to hurt. Isabella, in turn, became pliant to the point of imbecility in her parents’ presence. Marriage should, in theory, have resolved this unpleasant state of affairs – when a woman left her father’s home for her husband’s she was supposed to switch allegiance – but what if the Dorlings continued to be a daily dogmatic presence in their eldest daughter’s life? It didn’t bear thinking about. In a state of imminent collapse, coughing compulsively, looking ‘queer’ and sunk in ‘the miserables’, Sam did something quite unheard of for him and went on holiday. Taking refuge with various Beetons in Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, he refused to budge until he had formulated a strategy for dealing with the second half of what had by now become a kind of purgatory.

The first two surviving letters that Isabella wrote to Sam come from the closing days of 1855, just before he left for Suffolk, and give a flavour of their relationship during the first half of the engagement. Writing to Sam on Boxing Day Isabella laments the fact that she has been tied up with domestic duties – mopping up after her poorly half-siblings Walter, Frank and Lucy in the Grandstand – rather than flirting with her husband-to-be: ‘I cannot say I spent a happy Christmas day, you can well guess the reason and besides that Frank being so poorly, we were not in spirits to enjoy ourselves.’ Still, there is something to look forward to: Sam has suggested coming down to Epsom that very evening to escort her up to London to see Jenny Lind in concert. For many a young Victorian woman a trip to hear the Swedish Nightingale – in this case for the second time – might seem like a sort of polite bore. Isabella, though, is genuinely musical and therefore genuinely thrilled: ‘I do not know how to thank you enough for your kind invitation, the more delightful because so unexpected.’

The next letter, again from Isabella to Sam, is written a few days later, on New Year’s Eve. Still in role as mother hen to a brood of sickly siblings, Isabella is inclined to fuss over her fiancé: ‘I was very glad to hear your cold was so much better, only mind and take proper care of yourself, as you promised me you would, for I certainly was terribly afraid you were going to be seriously ill when I left you on Friday night.’ Next she makes sure to let Sam know how well she got on with his taciturn Uncle Thomas on her last brief visit to the Dolphin after the Lind concert: ‘seldom has he been so agreeable to me before’. Then comes the pang of realization that, despite the fact that their lives are soon to be united, they are at present running on divergent tracks. Sam is about to set off for his holiday in East Anglia while she is obliged to stay in Epsom and continue on the same round of dreary duties and doubtful pleasures. Particularly grim is the thought of having to attend a looming New Year’s dinner party – ‘that terrible ordeal’ – given by the middle-aged solicitor Mr White: ‘I am very sorry you will not be able to go,’ writes Isabella ruefully, although as it turned out the meal was followed by ‘a good dance … which exactly suited me’. Isabella’s brother John, by contrast, will be celebrating New Year with Sam’s sisters at a black-tie party held by some cousins of the Beetons in Mile End. Penned up in a world of provincial domesticity, the only thing Isabella can think to do is ask Sam: ‘When do you start for Suffolk? I should like to know because then I can fancy what you are doing.’

The next letters in the sequence are, even now, 150 years later, painful to read. Isabella, unaware that Sam might be embarking on anything other than a short break of a few days, makes excited plans for a romantic reunion, which she believes will come any day now. Sam, meanwhile, stays pointedly entrenched in East Anglia, deliberately missing each deadline that she sets for their next meeting, which has the effect of sending her frantic with frustration. On 3 January, only a couple of days after Sam has left for Suffolk, Isabella is already writing to say that she had hoped that he would be home by next Saturday as ‘I intended writing to invite you to join our family circle … as we are going to the Stand to keep Christmas now the small ones are recovered,’ apparently unaware that a room full of other people’s children is hardly the sort of thing to tempt a young man about town. Sam, though, has evidently already written to explain that he has extended his stay in East Anglia, so instead Isabella floats the idea of meeting on the 11th, after her next lesson with Benedict. ‘It will then be a fortnight since I have seen you. Absence &c &c &c. I don’t know whether you have found that out. I for one have.’ But Sam, clearly, does not feel Absence &c &c &c quite as urgently, since he writes back explaining that, sadly, he still won’t be home by the 11th.

Here was the signal for Isabella to swing into action. She wanted Sam back, and she wanted him back now. In her letter of 8 January she is careful to let him know what he has been missing: ‘We spent a very merry evening at the Stand on Saturday. I was very sorry you were not present, for I am sure you would have enjoyed yourself,’ apparently unaware how unlikely this was. Having spent a couple of routine sentences saying how pleased she was to hear that Sam was feeling better, she launches into her plan.

Now for business. Will you be so kind to arrange your affairs, so that you will be home by Monday night or Tuesday morning as we are going to have a few friends to dinner and you are to be one of the dozen if you can manage to be home by then. I hope you will not disappoint me because you know very well these formal feeds I abominate, and if you come of course it will be much pleasanter for me. I am the only one of the girls going to dine with them, so pray do not leave me to sit three or four hours with some old man I do not care a straw about.

After a few more limp courtesies Isabella signs off before adding what Sam would come to know and joke about as the crucial postscript, the one in which the real purpose of her letter was revealed: ‘Let me have a letter soon telling me how you have been amusing yourself, and bear in mind Tuesday, Jany 15th.’

Notwithstanding the peremptory postscript, Sam’s response was to send a note explaining that, alas, he was not coming home until Thursday evening and so would be obliged to miss the Dorlings’ dinner party. This made Isabella redouble her efforts. Determined to get Sam down to Epsom by hook or by crook, she contrived to get the dinner party set back a couple of days. What was the point of having a fiancé, if you never got to show him off?

My dear Sam,

You say you intend returning home on Thursday evening, but as our dinner party is put off till that day perhaps you will have the kindness to favour us with your company. One day I am sure cannot make much difference to you, and besides you have had such a nice long holiday you will be quite ready to come home by that time. Mama sends her kind regards and says she cannot hear of a refusal, and the girls say they are quite sure you would not think of refusing now you have been pressed so much.

I cannot tell you how disappointed I was in reading in your last letter that you were not coming home so soon as I expected. We do not dine till 6 o.c. so I beg once more that you will come, and if you do not I shall begin to think you are a little bit unkind … Hoping you will not refuse my first request, with love of the very best quality,

Believe me, dearest Sam,

Yours devotedly,

ISABELLA

I hope you will reach your journey’s end safely and that I shall see you on Thursday. I think I shall feel desperate if you refuse to come.

Whether or not Sam did finally make it to Epsom in time for dinner at six o’clock sharp on Thursday the 17th is unclear. Certainly the atmosphere between the young couple remained watchful for the next few weeks. Over the next five months Sam would contrive to have as little contact with the Dorlings as possible. Isabella must be enticed up to London, or possibly to Brighton, a town that she considered an ‘earthly paradise’ and which they both visited regularly. And wherever possible his easy-going stepmother rather than her hawk-eyed mama should be pressed into service as chaperone. It was now, too, that Sam made a decision about where they were to live once they were married. Two months after returning from Suffolk he took a lease on a house in Pinner, a village well to the north of London. A southerly suburb like Croydon or Beckenham would have been the obvious place for the young couple to settle: both were a short shift from Epsom yet also a mere half-hour from Fleet Street and the Dolphin. Instead Sam pointedly chose a place that was about as far away from the Dorlings as it was practically possible to be.

All this made perfect sense, but unfortunately Sam did not feel able to share his ponderings and strategies with Isabella. They were not yet on terms where they could giggle together over her ghastly parents and tribe of gossipy, jealous sisters. Instead Isabella was left floundering, trying to make sense of Sam’s sudden departures and constant evasions which, inevitably, she interpreted as insults to herself. No longer able to count on meeting at least once a week or even once a fortnight, the young couple now fell back on the mail to keep their relationship ticking over, if not exactly moving forward. Isabella addressed her letters to Sam at the Dolphin because, she said, she did not want people in the office, especially Sam’s brother Edward, opening them and knowing their business.

This arrangement allowed for plenty of delay, confusion, and resentment since Sam had neither the time nor, quite probably, the inclination, to bob and weave through half a mile of heavy traffic every hour or so to see whether any communication had arrived for him at home. As a result he habitually got Bella’s letters late and wrote fewer in reply than she thought he should. Thus on 8 May she writes pointedly: ‘I should have written to you before … but waited the arrival of the middle day post, expecting to see a note from you; but fate ordained that I should go without one of your much prized epistles, much to my annoyance.’ Equally suspicious is the way that Sam seems to be unreachable on those weekends when he is busy out of town getting their new house ready: ‘They do not seem to be particularly quick in postal arrangements at Pinner, for I did not receive your note till this morning. How do you account for it?’ A few weeks later, however, she is in a more forgiving mood about Sam’s failure to make the elbow-scraping dash from Bouverie Street to Milk Street: ‘Poor dear, I suppose you felt so poorly and not equal to climbing the great hill of Ludgate.’ All the same, the Victorian post was a marvel – communications sent from Ormond House in the morning arrived only a few hours later at the Dolphin.

What emerges from the letters that Sam and Isabella wrote to each other during these intense, miserable five months was just how different were the lives of a single man and single woman at mid century. Sam’s existence is busy, crammed with people, surprises, obligations, calamities, and sudden dashes here, there, and everywhere. It is a life lived in public spaces, on the streets, in parks. ‘I have been exceedingly busy all the week, – was at Covent Garden on Monday, Dalston on Tuesday, and Holloway on Wednesday, and to-night I go again to … Manor House.’ He works late on Saturday and now usually most of Sunday too. His letters to his fiancée have to be written in snatched moments during a bursting day.

Isabella is busy too, but with domestic duties and social obligations that leave her plenty of mental energy to dream and fret. There are the hated ‘formal feeds’ with middle-aged neighbours such as Mr White and Mr Sherwood, a notecase to make for Uncle Edward (Henry’s brother), fittings with the dressmaker and, of course, the tribe of ‘children on the hill’ to be supervised and soothed and periodically transported into Epsom or down to Brighton. Significantly, Isabella’s piano playing – always remembered sentimentally by her sisters as the bedrock of her life – was often shunted aside when pressing domestic duties intervened. During Christmas week of 1855 with the younger children struck down with heavy colds, Isabella is unable to find a moment to practise and so cancels her lesson with Benedict since ‘it would be useless to come up’. Indeed, references to trips to Benedict peter out over the course of the engagement, just at the point when mentions of new clothes, furniture and window blinds increase. Just what Julius Benedict – fast on his way to becoming Sir Julius for his services to music – thought about Miss Mayson’s growing disinclination to concentrate on her art in favour of her coming nuptials goes unrecorded. Intriguingly, five years later Isabella gave Benedict’s new opera The Lily of Killarney an uncharacteristically cool response in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, which hints that she and the maestro may have parted company on less than genial terms.

Isabella’s life, then, may have been frenetic but it was small, mundane. In her letters to Sam she apologizes constantly for not having any news – ‘it is rather a scarce article in Epsom’, ‘you must put up with this news bare epistle’ – and worries that when Sam’s sisters Lizzie and Viccie come to stay in the country in late January there is nothing for them to do except take long, muddy walks and fiddle with embroidery. Isabella tries hard to empathize with Sam’s situation – the thousand letters a day spilling into his office, the crazy schedule of deadlines, and worries about spiralling costs – but it is quite apparent that she has no concept of the pressure he is under. When he fails to spend a Sunday with her she sulks, when he arrives late or leaves early she cannot resist a sly dig in her next letter. So in mid April she signs herself ‘Your loving and affectionate deserted one’, while on 3 May she grumbles, ‘It is needless to say how disappointed I am that you are not coming down this evening, rather hard lines …’. She wants his health to improve but only because it means that he will be able to spend more time with her. Without enough to think about, Isabella turns her searching intelligence onto her relationship with Sam. Letter after letter finds her mulling over their last encounter, looking for meaning in a throwaway phrase, worrying that he is angry with her when he is probably simply tired: ‘I imagine you are cross with me and don’t care so much about me.’ There are rows and reconciliations, accusations and apologies, most of them the result of the fact that this is, increasingly, a relationship that exists mainly on paper.

And yet, there is nothing out of control about Isabella’s letters. They are neatly written, crossed in order to save the postage (‘do you have any particular objection to crossed letters?’ she asks, oddly, having spent the past ten months sending them to him), about half of them are dated in full. Initially her letters are cautious and impersonal, confined to practicalities, descriptions of dull days with the children in the Grandstand, detailed arrangements for the next longed-for rendezvous. Isabella knows, though, that she sounds closed and stiff and struggles to find a voice more appropriate for what is supposed to be a letter to her lover. And yet the moment she lets down her guard, the insecurities come rushing out – worries that Sam does not love her enough, that she appears aloof, that she is untidy, even that she is fat – and she finds herself writing letters that surprise and embarrass her by their neediness. It is then that she backtracks sharply, begging Sam to take no notice of her ‘nonsense’, or ‘scribble’, maintaining, ‘I do not really know what I have said,’ and urging him to ‘burn this as soon as perused’ in case – her nightmare – other people find out that she is ‘soft’. (Sam, thankfully, did not follow this instruction and her letters were found in his coat pocket when he died.)

Sam’s letters are quite different. They are carelessly written and hardly ever dated beyond ‘Friday afternoon’ or ‘Tuesday morning’ and their punctuation consists mostly of dashes. Like the editorial voice he employs in his magazines, especially in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, Sam’s style tends to be verbose, overblown. Times change, and so do prose styles. It is Isabella’s letters – reminiscent of the crisp, clear voice of the BOHM – that have lasted best. Sam’s prolixity, his fanciful diversions, his self-conscious ‘literariness’ make him sound, to our ears, like a true Victorian. Nothing can ever be said simply. Asking Isabella to meet him next Saturday at Anerley Bridge station turns into: ‘Thus, then, fair maid, do I beseech thee to name the hour at which I shall meet thee at the ancient tryst of Anerley on the Jews’ next Sabbath Day.’ Or, describing to her how he spent last Sunday in the country at Pinner: ‘I commenced the day badly, I fear, for I was violating the Sabbath by violetting in the fields and woods, this morning.’ He can never be feeling low, but must always be ‘horribly blue, wretchedly cobalt, disagreeably desolate’. No wonder that Isabella drops hints about the length of his letters, refers ironically to ‘your large catalogue of words’ and asks him outright to avoid any ‘namby pamby nonsense’.

The five months that followed Sam’s return from Suffolk and Cambridge were inevitably turbulent as Isabella tried to fathom how she was meant to behave in a situation that had changed without her really knowing why. Her first letter after Sam’s return is written in a white-hot fury, at least if the lack of a date and frostily formal ‘Ever yours, ISABELLA MAYSON’ is anything to go by. She wastes no time getting to the point: ‘My dear Sam’ (previously he has been ‘dearest’) ‘Your sisters have kindly invited me to come up with them on Friday to the Concert [this time to see Opertz], but as you said nothing about it on Sunday to me, I thought I would write and ascertain your intentions on the subject.’ She then proceeds to tick him off, obliquely, about the indecent haste with which he scampered away from Epsom the last time she saw him: ‘You went off in such a hurry the other morning, I have scarcely recovered the shock yet. Your reason for doing I suppose was business.’ Then the imperious postscript that Sam would come to dread: ‘I shall expect a note by return of post, so please don’t disappoint.’

This sounds like the Riot Act and Sam sensibly responds immediately with a letter that, unusually for him, is dated, perhaps because he wants to prove to Isabella that he really has attended to her the first chance he has got. He gets straight to the point, making it clear that the reason for his tentativeness over making plans for the opera is entirely due to her parents’ coldness towards him: ‘the suggestions of your most humble and loving servant have been latterly so unfortunately received that I have not had the courage to utter my notions with respect to your going anywhere or doing anything.’ He is careful to explain, too, why he has not written before: ‘I did not get your letter till 10 o’c last night, or I would have posted me to you before this.’

Yet Sam was not so biddable that he was going to be shamed, nagged, or bullied into abandoning the strategy he had devised for making the last few months of the engagement bearable. He is sure enough of himself, and sure enough of Isabella, to risk weeks of escalating tension as he repeatedly tries to dodge his prospective in-laws. On 31 January he turns down yet another invitation from the hospitable Epsom lawyer Mr White and, while pronouncing himself ‘very vexed’ at not being able to attend, seems unworried by the thought of Isabella having a good time with other men: ‘you will enjoy yourself, very much, I hope, and find some good [dance] partners’, which is hardly the sort of thing any girl wants to hear from the man who is supposed to be in love with her. What Sam really wants is to be alone with Isabella and he drops constant hints to that effect. For instance, if, on her next London visit, she could arrange things so that there was time ‘to go for a short walk with me’, he would be ‘very glad’.

Three weeks later and the couple are on better terms, with Isabella more bewildered than resentful about Sam’s reluctance to visit Epsom: ‘Anyone would think our house was some Ogre’s Castle, you want so much pressing to come down. I am sure we are not so very formidable.’ Another month on and Sam has been restored, finally, to ‘My dearest Sam’. Just for once it is Isabella who is obliged to put distance between them. During the coming weekend the Grandstand is needed for the spring race meeting with the result that Ormond House will be crammed with a ‘living cargo’ of small Dorlings. Ever resourceful, though, she has come up with a contingency plan: perhaps he could come down on the first train on Sunday morning instead? Having not heard from him for a week she is feeling ‘desolate’ and begs him to write: ‘Please don’t call me silly, it is a fact, and facts are stubborn things.’

Sam’s reply is loaded with the usual ambivalence: ‘If I can rise early enough tomorrow morning, I will come down by the early train, but don’t quite expect me, as in the case of a snooze and a turn around I shall be a lost man.’ His excuse is as ever: ‘business is so very heavy, and will be for a month.’ And in one sense this is true: deep in the middle of an EDM promotion and busy launching the brand-new Boy’s Own Journal, Sam is currently drowning in a ‘huge and dreary desert of notepaper and Envelopes’. And yet, he hints, if there were a chance of seeing Bella on her own, the correspondence could magically be left to its own devices. In fact, this time it is Sam who has a plan: his stepmother is going to spend a few days at Brighton with a friend. Could Bella not ‘steal away from Surrey to its sister county, Sussex, for a few days, or even one’?

In the end, of course, Sam did not get to Epsom during the spring meeting week. At least this time he sent Isabella a note on Sunday morning to warn her, for which she thanked him profusely – ‘if you had not done so I would have expected you all day’ – and sent as a telling postscript ‘1000000 kisses’. Still, that doesn’t stop her immediately wanting to plan ahead for next weekend, and she demands to know ‘your arrangements for Sunday’. Unable to stand the thought of a trip to Epsom, it was now that Sam seems to have resorted to lying. He told Isabella that Mr Hagarty, a friend of his late father’s, was dining at the Dolphin, and he couldn’t really get out of it. For Isabella this resulted in a dreary day, one of the quietest Epsom Sundays she had ever known, and she writes to tell Sam that she wished Mr Hagarty ‘were at the bottom of the Red Sea to-day instead of at Milk St, for then he would not have deprived me of the pleasure of your company’.

But in fact Mr Hagarty was not dining that Sunday at the Dolphin, and Sam, mindful of the way that news and gossip flew back and forth between the Mayson, Dorling and Beeton girls, knew that he had to cover himself. At nine o’clock that night (a guilty conscience perhaps making him put the hour on his letter) he sat down and wrote a letter of explanation to Isabella:

First of all, by some misunderstanding, Mr Hagarty didn’t dine with us to-day and consequently I had not even the satisfaction of being able to say unto myself – Well, if you would have preferred being with Bella, still you are doing your duty in paying all the respect you can unto a good fellow, and most valued friend of your Father’s – you see I couldn’t even gammon myself with that small specific, so I ate my dinner with the best grace possible, potted everybody, was surly to all, and escaped to my den in Bouverie – have written a multitude of people on different matters, looked at Ledgers, Cash books, Cheque books, etc., and, after all this dreadful wickedness, complete the scene by annoying you.

Sam had given a suspiciously full account of his Sunday, but it was probably enough to convince Bella, who never seems quite to have understood the depths of his aversion to Ormond House. Her parents, though, were not so trusting. Henry and Elizabeth Dorling were increasingly critical of the way in which Sam was leading a life that was insultingly independent of his fiancée, the woman with whom he was supposed to be getting ready to share his life. Four days after the Mr Hagarty Sunday, Henry and Elizabeth made a point of telling Isabella that they had discovered that Sam had recently invited friends to the house in Pinner and had a tea party without bothering to ask her, or, indeed, even mentioning it to her. ‘Naughty boy to thus forget your nearest and I hope dearest friend,’ Isabella starts her next letter with gritted gaiety. And, indeed, she had every reason to be piqued: this was their house, after all, and the fact that Sam had borrowed a proper tea service showed that it was no hugger-mugger affair, unfit for ladies. From here Isabella lurches back into her usual refrain, which sounds much nearer her real feelings: ‘You are sadly tiring my patience; consider it is ten days since I saw you. Anyone would think you lived in Londonderry instead of London, you are so very sparing of your company.’

Late April finds the courting couple happier again, enjoying what will be the calm before the final big storm. Indeed, by 23 April Sam is in a positively flowery mood, perhaps because as the wedding nears he knows this ghastly regime cannot go on for ever: ‘Oh – what I would not resign to see you now for just one short half-hour? That sweet, short preface that I have read and studied during the past few days – what a joyous volume does it not foretell? – a book of bliss, with many pages to smile and be glad over.’ All the same, he still manages to get in a sly dig at Henry’s famous stinginess: next Saturday is the last Saturday that Bella’s season ticket is valid for the Great Exhibition, and surely for that reason alone she will be granted permission to visit it with him? Bella gets her parents to agree, but immediately worries that Sam will do his usual trick of not appearing, or else spoil the day by being spectacularly unpunctual. Written firmly across the top of her next letter is the stern warning: ‘Do not be too late for the train to-morrow.’

Whether or not Sam turned up on time, the trip to the Crystal Palace, on 26 April, went well, perhaps too well. Mrs Dorling was, of course, ever present as chaperone and the Crystal Palace would have been full of crowds and bustle. Still, the occasion seems to have unlocked an intensity of feeling in Bella that was both wonderful and alarming (only the previous day she had written: ‘Do not be too sanguine, dear Sam, do not look forward to too much happiness for fear of being disappointed in me’). At any rate, very soon after their outing they had a row, a terrible one. It is difficult to work out the exact sequence of events, since some of the letters have gone missing, perhaps because someone considered them too painful to retain. What we do know is that during the last few days of April Sam was too busy to write a letter to Isabella and that she paid him back by deliberately cutting off contact. Always uncertain of getting her emotional needs met, Isabella did her usual thing and simply ceased presenting them, withdrawing into the self-contained competence where she felt most comfortable. Unsurprisingly, when she does eventually deign to write on 2 May it is simply to ask Sam stiffly to bring down some embroidery that was being professionally cleaned in London. ‘I know your dislike to luggage, but as this is a parcel you can stow away in one of the large pockets of your very large coat, you will I am sure not mind troubling yourself with the said packet.’ She also pointedly reminds him of his promise to arrive on the 6.15 from London, ‘so if you do not make your appearance you will have much to answer for’, although she does soften it with an emollient ‘Goodbye with much love and many kisses.’ It looks as though it is to this letter that Sam replied with a sharp little note, the tartest he ever wrote: ‘As I think you will have so much to do, and your house be so pressingly full, I shall not have the pleasure of seeing you next Saturday and am Yours most affectionately S. O. Beeton.’

Panicked by a tone that she has not heard before, perhaps terrified that he was going to break off the engagement altogether, Isabella immediately responds with an abject apology. Writing probably on 3 May she is contrite, aware that she has been beastly.

I know I have been a very cruel, cold and neglectful naughty girl for not having written to you for so many days and cannot sufficiently reproach myself for the sad omission … What a contrast is my frigid disposition to your generous, warm-hearted dear self; it often strikes me, but you know I cannot help it, it is my nature … You have guessed my weak point, for if there is one thing more than others I detest, [it] is to be chafed in that quiet manner as you did in the note I received this morning … Now my darling I must say good bye, hoping you will freely pardon this my first offence (at least I hope so), with much love,

Believe me, my dearest boy,

Yours penitently and most lovingly,

ISABELLA MAYSON

Pray don’t write any more cutting letters as you did yesterday, or I don’t know what will be the consequence.

Isabella’s apology apparently did the trick and from this point the correspondence resumed its normal rate, although lingering tensions about the way that Bella allows her parents to dominate her continue to prevent an entirely easy exchange. Indeed, the ‘dreaded subject of interference’ (Sam’s words) is still something that can be guaranteed to trip them up, get them cross, have them each retiring to their own corners to stew and fret. On 26 May, and still cogitating on the subject, Isabella sat down in an attempt to explain her position to Sam:

My own darling Sam

As I have here two or three little matters in your note of yesterday which rather puzzled me, I thought I must write and ask an explanation; very stupid of me you will say, as I am going to see you on Wednesday morning, no doubt you will think I could just as well have my say then as trouble you with one of my unintelligible epistles. In the first place in what way does Bella sometimes now pain Sam just a little? Why does he not wish to be near her? Secondly; what right has he to conjure up in his fertile imagination any such nasty things as rough corners to smooth down, when there is one who loves him better and more fondly than ever one being did another on this earth at least. Oh Sam I think it is so wrong of you to fancy such dreadful things. You also say you don’t think I shall be able to guide myself when I am left to my own exertions. I must certainly say I have always looked up to, and respected, both parents and perhaps been too mindful of what they say (I mean respecting certain matters), but then in a very short time you will have the entire management of me and I can assure you that you will find in me a most docile and willing pupil. Pray don’t imagine when I am yours – that things will continue the same way as they are now. God forbid. Better would it be to put an end to this matter altogether if we thought there was the slightest possibility of that, so pray don’t tremble for our future happiness. Look at things in a more rosy point of view, and I have no doubt with the love I am sure there is existing between us we shall get on as merrily as crickets, with only an occasional sharp point to soften down, and not many, as you fancy … Good night, my precious pet, may angels guard and watch over you and give you pleasant dreams, not drab colours, and accept the fondest and most sincere love of,

Your devoted,

BELLA MAYSON

Burn this as soon as perused.

Either in response to this letter or a slightly earlier lost one, Sam acknowledges with obvious relief that Isabella does, finally, seem able to see that her relationship with her parents would need to change once they were married if either of them were to have a chance of being happy.

Bouverie

Tuesday aftn

My dearest Bella,

I was most delighted with your kindest of notes, so considerably better than some sharp keel’d cutters that have sailed thro’ the post to the Milk St Haven.

You’re a dear little brick, and blessed must have been the earth of which you were baked. I could not find the slightest spec of a fault in any one of your remarks, for there exists no one more mindful of the respect and love due to a parent than your cavaliero, who is now writing to you …

Well, my own loved one, you have made me so much happier and more comfortable to-day as I see you write so firmly, yet so prettily, upon that dreaded subject of interference, that I now do quite hope that matters will not remain as they now are …

I have written you this, with many people in and out of the Office so if anything is particularly absurd, consider it not there.

But even this newfound understanding between the couple was not enough to stop Sam indulging in his old trick of dodging the Dorlings. In the middle of June, with Epsom taken over by the Derby, Granny Jerrom had escorted the children down to Brighton, to stay at the Dorling family house at 72 Marine Parade. On Friday, 13th, Isabella and her parents are due to join them, and Isabella writes hopefully to Sam suggesting that he might come down for the night. Sam, as ever, cries off, citing the excuse of work: ‘You are a very good, kind girl to invite me to Brighton, and I hope you won’t think me a barbarian for not coming, but I have so many things to do which I can do on Sunday alone.’

For some reason Isabella insisted on believing that there was still a chance of a Brighton rendezvous. Even after six months of Sam not turning up whenever her parents were present, she chose to hope that he might, which means that she chose to be permanently disappointed. By Monday, and back home in Epsom, Isabella sat down to write a letter to her elusive fiancé that is a model of wounded narcissism.

My very dear Sam,

I have just returned from Brighton and hasten to write you a few lines just to give you a short account of my trip to Brighton.

In the first place I was very much disappointed at your not coming on Saturday evening. I waited and looked out anxiously for you but no Sam did I see to gladden my eyes. Naughty and very cruel of you to serve me so … After dinner … I and Bessie walked about the Parade till long after the train was due expecting you every moment … We shall not be in Town till Thursday when I hope to see you. Could you not run down to-morrow evening to see me. I am quite sure you could if you liked. It seems such an age since I have spoken to you and I can assure you I quite long for a quiet little chat with my old man, my dear darling venerable. I want to ask so many things about I don’t know what. I shall expect to see you to-morrow evening, so goodbye till then. Accept my fondest love and believe me my dearest.

Yours ever lovingly

BELLA MAYSON

I was sorry to hear the journal had not answered your expectations, you have had scarcely time to judge yet. You must give it three or four weeks trial before you begin to despond.

Adieu

Isabella’s postscript – a hurried note to show that she is not entirely caught up in her own needs – refers to the fact that the Boy’s Own Journal which Sam had been busy launching over the past few weeks was not doing well and, indeed, would soon fail. Her blithe advice not to worry, to take the long view, betrays a lack of any real interest in Sam’s business affairs. From the minute amount of attention she gives the Boy’s Own Journal in her letters you would hardly guess that its genesis had run parallel to their engagement, nor that its aim – to provide cheap but original printed material for working-class boys – was one that lay particularly close to Sam’s heart. So in the circumstances Sam’s reply to his fiancée’s letter the very next day is extraordinarily generous. He starts by telling her something that he knows she will love to hear – that while spending the weekend in Pinner he has done nothing but think of her: ‘the moon is electro-typing at this moment with its beautiful silvery light all around, and I instinctively am walking with you on Brighton Pier.’ From here, though, he can’t resist launching a final sally at her parents, in the process betraying his real reason for failing to appear at Marine Parade. ‘Have Father and Mamma been using you to-day as of old monarchs used the man who stood behind their chair, ornamented with cap and bells – to wit – to trot him out, and then laugh at his stepping?’

But just at the point when Sam might be tipping over into giving offence – fiancés at mid century are not supposed to liken their future in-laws to medieval tyrants – he remembers the delightful fact that the wedding really is now drawing near: ‘3 Sundays more, and then the Holidays, as school-phrase has it.’ The ghastliness of the past six months is almost over. There will be no more dodging the Dorlings. Indeed, there will be no more seeing the Dorlings, since Pinner is a good thirty miles from Epsom. Sam’s letter ends with a swell of joy and thanksgiving that he is about to marry the girl whom, despite the terrible ‘wear and tear of the past few months’, he truly loves.

None can tell how grateful I feel and am to the ‘Great Good’, for having brought me thus near to a point of earthly felicity, which, twelve little months ago, I dared not have hoped for. May He bless and protect you, my own dearest one, and make us happy, and contented in each other’s true and ardent love. Je t’embrasse de tout mon Coeur.

Yours, in all things,

S. O. BEETON

INTERLUDE

Hot suppers are now very little in request, as people now generally dine at an hour which precludes the possibility of requiring supper; at all events, not one of a substantial kind.

ISABELLA BEETON, Book of Household Management

THROUGHOUT the Book of Household Management Mrs Beeton stays pointedly vague on every meal apart from dinner. Breakfast, lunch, and supper are all despatched in a couple of paragraphs, and afternoon tea never gets a mention. Nothing peculiar, though, should be read into Beeton’s haziness. During the nineteenth century the gastronomic shape of the day was changing so fast that it was almost impossible to be definite about who was eating what when.

Over the previous 150 years dinner had become a movable feast, leaving the lesser meals to be added and subtracted around this shifting main event. At the beginning of the eighteenth century you might sit down to dine as early as noon in Scotland and the north where daylight was at a premium, although in fashionable, that is artificial, London 2 p.m. was the more usual time. By the 1780s the quality were now eating as late as 5 p.m. although working people stuck to 1 p.m., opening the way for the class-marking difference of ‘lunch’ and ‘dinner’. But whether you took your main meal at noon or six or sometime in between, one thing was certain: by mid evening you were starting to feel hungry again. This was where supper came in: a light meal, often a cold collation (bread and dripping for the workers), which ensured you went to bed drowsily replete.

But by the time Mrs Beeton was writing in 1861 the shape of the day had once again been bent out of shape. Middle-class men now left the house for their place of work early in the morning, not arriving home until 6 p.m. Dinner was correspondingly shifted back to take account of the wanderers’ return. The result, as Mrs Beeton notes, was that there was no longer much call for supper at 9 p.m. since most people, except the neurotically greedy, were still perfectly full from dinner.

There was, however, one context in which supper remained important. If your dining room was small and your budget tight, then inviting a large group to what Mrs Beeton calls a ‘standing supper’ started to look like an attractive alternative to a more formal dinner party. At a standing supper people helped themselves from dishes such as ‘sandwiches, lobster and oyster patties, sausage rolls, meat rolls, lobster salad, dishes of fowls, the latter all cut up’, which certainly saved on servants. What’s more, the custom of displaying all the dishes at once made you look like a more generous host than if one course followed another as was usual with a more formal dinner.

Dinner’s slow shunt backwards inevitably ended up having an effect on the other end of the day too. With men now needing to be at their place of work across town for 9 a.m., the first meal of the day moved forwards to 8 a.m. And instead of the bread, tea, coffee, and possibly chocolate of the eighteenth century, what Mrs Beeton described as ‘that comfortable meal called breakfast’ was now turning into something more substantial. Despite her studied refusal to list ‘a long bill of cold fare’ for breakfast, Beeton does go on to suggest the following hot items: mackerel, herring, haddock, mutton chops, bacon and eggs, muffins, toast, marmalade and butter. Here are the origins of the meal that will become the Edwardian country house breakfast of popular fantasy.

With the two meals of the day now stretched nearly twelve hours apart, that left an awful lot of time to be got through on an emptying stomach. Lunch had made a sketchy appearance during the eighteenth century, but now started to become a permanent event in the timetable of the mid-Victorian household. It was still a scrappy business, though, and Mrs Beeton deigns to give it only one short paragraph and a brief description along the lines of ‘The remains of cold joints, nicely garnished, a few sweets, or a little hashed meat, poultry or game, are the usual articles placed on the table for luncheon.’ It was, after all, a lady’s meal, quite likely to be taken in the nursery where little stomachs could not be expected to last more than two hours or so without a snack. Middle-class men continued to work on heroically without a midday break, hating the way that lunch interrupted concentration and gobbled up time. Meanwhile, servants, like the rest of the working class, continued to take their main meal, their ‘dinner’, in the middle of the day, usually half an hour or so after their mistress had finished her ‘lunch’.

CHAPTER FIVE ‘Crockery and Carpets’

IN THE LAST FEVERISH WEEKS before the wedding, issues of chaperonage became more, rather than less, intense. Eliza Beeton, as moral guardian of a young man rather than a young woman, was naturally laxer, happy to find ways in which the couple could be alone together. In early May she suggested that Isabella should come up to London to view the fireworks staged to mark the end of the Crimean War. She would love to have asked all the Dorlings, Sam explained unconvincingly, but there were simply too many of them to parade around the streets. With Isabella’s parents sounding doubtful, Sam weighed in with every argument he could muster: ‘These fireworks you ought to see, not so much as a sight, but as an epoch to be remembered, and talked of afterwards, in years to come.’ Despite his offer to escort his fiancée back down to Epsom immediately the display was over, ‘if such be the rigid order’, the plan was firmly vetoed from Ormond House.

The Dorlings, as guardians of their eldest girl’s reputation, were naturally stricter about the circumstances under which the couple could meet. Six weeks before the wedding Isabella is thrilled to be able to tell Sam that she has obtained a major concession: ‘I have asked and obtained permission to spend a very happy evening with you on Thursday, although your dear Mother is not at home.’ In fact, the Dorlings had every reason to be watchful. As the wedding day drew nearer the young couple were allowing themselves an increasing degree of sexual intimacy. Following what must have been a particularly intense moment à deux, Sam writes wildly to Isabella: ‘I was traitor to my own notions through the exercise of a power: the intensity of which is almost fearful to contemplate. My only means of being saved is by keeping you in company – solus, I am powerless, vanquished, and in future I intend to surrender at discretion, (or indiscretion, possibly) without affecting a combat.’ In a later letter, after another of their rare meetings alone, he declares that he is still ‘in a state of electricity’, suggesting the afterglow of a delicious physical convulsion. During the last week of May Isabella and Sam slept for one night under the same roof, probably at the Dolphin. This physical proximity sent Sam into raptures. Writing probably on 27 May he declares:

I have been (and am) most happy since the morning of Friday last – the remembrance of your society for so many sweet hours on Thursday Eveng, and the charm of your company on Friday morng, still dwell with me most pleasantly, albeit I was so rude as to wake you so gently – I really am quite astonished at my temerity … I wish at this moment I could breathe into your ears, closely and caressingly, all the fond hopes I feel for your dear welfare …

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