The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

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PROLOGUE ‘A Tub-Like Lady in Black’ (#ulink_3c38f4d1-89f4-5417-a725-6ec861efc2bb)

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’ (#ulink_5ce2cc7c-2bb3-515c-af9c-48d0953e5e4a)

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.