The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

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

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

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

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

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

The man whom Sam accused of initiating him into the city’s night life was Charles Henry Clarke, a bookbinder ten years older than himself operating from offices at 148 Fleet Street and 25

/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INTERLUDE (#ulink_bc1cb863-37a4-5897-81f6-bacf472f9acd)

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

ISABELLA BEETON, Book of Household Management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER FOUR ‘The Entire Management of Me’ (#ulink_22dbc631-2c25-5585-9da4-49e45e48a5b3)

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

There are other reasons for thinking that contact between the two families continued even once they had ceased being neighbours. Samuel Powell Beeton was a keen racing man and had turned the Dolphin into something of a sporting pub. Raising a large prize purse was, as Henry Dorling was fast discovering in his job as Clerk of the Course at Epsom, a perpetual challenge. Beeton’s canny solution in 1846 was to post subscription lists in the Dolphin and other busy City pubs, with the result that the new Epsom 2

/

-mile handicap was known from the outset as ‘The Publican’s Derby’ (part of the money raised went to the Licensed Victuallers’ School). Nor did Beeton’s connection with Dorling stop there. In the early 1850s he was regularly racing his own horses at various of the lesser Epsom meetings. One final point of contact: although William Dorling had set up as a printer in Bexhill all those years ago, he was actually an Ipswich man. For at least the last hundred years Dorlings and Beetons had lived and worked alongside each other in Suffolk.

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

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

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

My dearly beloved Sam,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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