The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTERLUDE (#ulink_5d96911d-3357-532f-b5a2-d9391cfaa86e)

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

ISABELLA BEETON, Book of Household Management

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER THREE ‘Paper Without End’ (#ulink_2da67971-f460-5ac4-9eed-3f2902c71586)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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