The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

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’ (#ulink_e4952840-0c84-52c5-af7c-9ec72b2bc80d)

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.