The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My dear Sam,

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

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

Believe me, dearest Sam,

Yours devotedly,

ISABELLA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Believe me, my dearest boy,

Yours penitently and most lovingly,

ISABELLA MAYSON

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

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

My own darling Sam

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

Your devoted,