The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

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,

BELLA MAYSON

Burn this as soon as perused.

Either in response to this letter or a slightly earlier lost one, Sam acknowledges with obvious relief that Isabella does, finally, seem able to see that her relationship with her parents would need to change once they were married if either of them were to have a chance of being happy.

Bouverie

Tuesday aftn

My dearest Bella,

I was most delighted with your kindest of notes, so considerably better than some sharp keel’d cutters that have sailed thro’ the post to the Milk St Haven.

You’re a dear little brick, and blessed must have been the earth of which you were baked. I could not find the slightest spec of a fault in any one of your remarks, for there exists no one more mindful of the respect and love due to a parent than your cavaliero, who is now writing to you …

Well, my own loved one, you have made me so much happier and more comfortable to-day as I see you write so firmly, yet so prettily, upon that dreaded subject of interference, that I now do quite hope that matters will not remain as they now are …

I have written you this, with many people in and out of the Office so if anything is particularly absurd, consider it not there.

But even this newfound understanding between the couple was not enough to stop Sam indulging in his old trick of dodging the Dorlings. In the middle of June, with Epsom taken over by the Derby, Granny Jerrom had escorted the children down to Brighton, to stay at the Dorling family house at 72 Marine Parade. On Friday, 13th, Isabella and her parents are due to join them, and Isabella writes hopefully to Sam suggesting that he might come down for the night. Sam, as ever, cries off, citing the excuse of work: ‘You are a very good, kind girl to invite me to Brighton, and I hope you won’t think me a barbarian for not coming, but I have so many things to do which I can do on Sunday alone.’

For some reason Isabella insisted on believing that there was still a chance of a Brighton rendezvous. Even after six months of Sam not turning up whenever her parents were present, she chose to hope that he might, which means that she chose to be permanently disappointed. By Monday, and back home in Epsom, Isabella sat down to write a letter to her elusive fiancé that is a model of wounded narcissism.

My very dear Sam,

I have just returned from Brighton and hasten to write you a few lines just to give you a short account of my trip to Brighton.

In the first place I was very much disappointed at your not coming on Saturday evening. I waited and looked out anxiously for you but no Sam did I see to gladden my eyes. Naughty and very cruel of you to serve me so … After dinner … I and Bessie walked about the Parade till long after the train was due expecting you every moment … We shall not be in Town till Thursday when I hope to see you. Could you not run down to-morrow evening to see me. I am quite sure you could if you liked. It seems such an age since I have spoken to you and I can assure you I quite long for a quiet little chat with my old man, my dear darling venerable. I want to ask so many things about I don’t know what. I shall expect to see you to-morrow evening, so goodbye till then. Accept my fondest love and believe me my dearest.

Yours ever lovingly

BELLA MAYSON

I was sorry to hear the journal had not answered your expectations, you have had scarcely time to judge yet. You must give it three or four weeks trial before you begin to despond.

Adieu

Isabella’s postscript – a hurried note to show that she is not entirely caught up in her own needs – refers to the fact that the Boy’s Own Journal which Sam had been busy launching over the past few weeks was not doing well and, indeed, would soon fail. Her blithe advice not to worry, to take the long view, betrays a lack of any real interest in Sam’s business affairs. From the minute amount of attention she gives the Boy’s Own Journal in her letters you would hardly guess that its genesis had run parallel to their engagement, nor that its aim – to provide cheap but original printed material for working-class boys – was one that lay particularly close to Sam’s heart. So in the circumstances Sam’s reply to his fiancée’s letter the very next day is extraordinarily generous. He starts by telling her something that he knows she will love to hear – that while spending the weekend in Pinner he has done nothing but think of her: ‘the moon is electro-typing at this moment with its beautiful silvery light all around, and I instinctively am walking with you on Brighton Pier.’ From here, though, he can’t resist launching a final sally at her parents, in the process betraying his real reason for failing to appear at Marine Parade. ‘Have Father and Mamma been using you to-day as of old monarchs used the man who stood behind their chair, ornamented with cap and bells – to wit – to trot him out, and then laugh at his stepping?’

But just at the point when Sam might be tipping over into giving offence – fiancés at mid century are not supposed to liken their future in-laws to medieval tyrants – he remembers the delightful fact that the wedding really is now drawing near: ‘3 Sundays more, and then the Holidays, as school-phrase has it.’ The ghastliness of the past six months is almost over. There will be no more dodging the Dorlings. Indeed, there will be no more seeing the Dorlings, since Pinner is a good thirty miles from Epsom. Sam’s letter ends with a swell of joy and thanksgiving that he is about to marry the girl whom, despite the terrible ‘wear and tear of the past few months’, he truly loves.

None can tell how grateful I feel and am to the ‘Great Good’, for having brought me thus near to a point of earthly felicity, which, twelve little months ago, I dared not have hoped for. May He bless and protect you, my own dearest one, and make us happy, and contented in each other’s true and ardent love. Je t’embrasse de tout mon Coeur.

Yours, in all things,

S. O. BEETON

INTERLUDE

Hot suppers are now very little in request, as people now generally dine at an hour which precludes the possibility of requiring supper; at all events, not one of a substantial kind.

ISABELLA BEETON, Book of Household Management

THROUGHOUT the Book of Household Management Mrs Beeton stays pointedly vague on every meal apart from dinner. Breakfast, lunch, and supper are all despatched in a couple of paragraphs, and afternoon tea never gets a mention. Nothing peculiar, though, should be read into Beeton’s haziness. During the nineteenth century the gastronomic shape of the day was changing so fast that it was almost impossible to be definite about who was eating what when.

Over the previous 150 years dinner had become a movable feast, leaving the lesser meals to be added and subtracted around this shifting main event. At the beginning of the eighteenth century you might sit down to dine as early as noon in Scotland and the north where daylight was at a premium, although in fashionable, that is artificial, London 2 p.m. was the more usual time. By the 1780s the quality were now eating as late as 5 p.m. although working people stuck to 1 p.m., opening the way for the class-marking difference of ‘lunch’ and ‘dinner’. But whether you took your main meal at noon or six or sometime in between, one thing was certain: by mid evening you were starting to feel hungry again. This was where supper came in: a light meal, often a cold collation (bread and dripping for the workers), which ensured you went to bed drowsily replete.

But by the time Mrs Beeton was writing in 1861 the shape of the day had once again been bent out of shape. Middle-class men now left the house for their place of work early in the morning, not arriving home until 6 p.m. Dinner was correspondingly shifted back to take account of the wanderers’ return. The result, as Mrs Beeton notes, was that there was no longer much call for supper at 9 p.m. since most people, except the neurotically greedy, were still perfectly full from dinner.

There was, however, one context in which supper remained important. If your dining room was small and your budget tight, then inviting a large group to what Mrs Beeton calls a ‘standing supper’ started to look like an attractive alternative to a more formal dinner party. At a standing supper people helped themselves from dishes such as ‘sandwiches, lobster and oyster patties, sausage rolls, meat rolls, lobster salad, dishes of fowls, the latter all cut up’, which certainly saved on servants. What’s more, the custom of displaying all the dishes at once made you look like a more generous host than if one course followed another as was usual with a more formal dinner.

Dinner’s slow shunt backwards inevitably ended up having an effect on the other end of the day too. With men now needing to be at their place of work across town for 9 a.m., the first meal of the day moved forwards to 8 a.m. And instead of the bread, tea, coffee, and possibly chocolate of the eighteenth century, what Mrs Beeton described as ‘that comfortable meal called breakfast’ was now turning into something more substantial. Despite her studied refusal to list ‘a long bill of cold fare’ for breakfast, Beeton does go on to suggest the following hot items: mackerel, herring, haddock, mutton chops, bacon and eggs, muffins, toast, marmalade and butter. Here are the origins of the meal that will become the Edwardian country house breakfast of popular fantasy.

With the two meals of the day now stretched nearly twelve hours apart, that left an awful lot of time to be got through on an emptying stomach. Lunch had made a sketchy appearance during the eighteenth century, but now started to become a permanent event in the timetable of the mid-Victorian household. It was still a scrappy business, though, and Mrs Beeton deigns to give it only one short paragraph and a brief description along the lines of ‘The remains of cold joints, nicely garnished, a few sweets, or a little hashed meat, poultry or game, are the usual articles placed on the table for luncheon.’ It was, after all, a lady’s meal, quite likely to be taken in the nursery where little stomachs could not be expected to last more than two hours or so without a snack. Middle-class men continued to work on heroically without a midday break, hating the way that lunch interrupted concentration and gobbled up time. Meanwhile, servants, like the rest of the working class, continued to take their main meal, their ‘dinner’, in the middle of the day, usually half an hour or so after their mistress had finished her ‘lunch’.

CHAPTER FIVE ‘Crockery and Carpets’

IN THE LAST FEVERISH WEEKS before the wedding, issues of chaperonage became more, rather than less, intense. Eliza Beeton, as moral guardian of a young man rather than a young woman, was naturally laxer, happy to find ways in which the couple could be alone together. In early May she suggested that Isabella should come up to London to view the fireworks staged to mark the end of the Crimean War. She would love to have asked all the Dorlings, Sam explained unconvincingly, but there were simply too many of them to parade around the streets. With Isabella’s parents sounding doubtful, Sam weighed in with every argument he could muster: ‘These fireworks you ought to see, not so much as a sight, but as an epoch to be remembered, and talked of afterwards, in years to come.’ Despite his offer to escort his fiancée back down to Epsom immediately the display was over, ‘if such be the rigid order’, the plan was firmly vetoed from Ormond House.

The Dorlings, as guardians of their eldest girl’s reputation, were naturally stricter about the circumstances under which the couple could meet. Six weeks before the wedding Isabella is thrilled to be able to tell Sam that she has obtained a major concession: ‘I have asked and obtained permission to spend a very happy evening with you on Thursday, although your dear Mother is not at home.’ In fact, the Dorlings had every reason to be watchful. As the wedding day drew nearer the young couple were allowing themselves an increasing degree of sexual intimacy. Following what must have been a particularly intense moment à deux, Sam writes wildly to Isabella: ‘I was traitor to my own notions through the exercise of a power: the intensity of which is almost fearful to contemplate. My only means of being saved is by keeping you in company – solus, I am powerless, vanquished, and in future I intend to surrender at discretion, (or indiscretion, possibly) without affecting a combat.’ In a later letter, after another of their rare meetings alone, he declares that he is still ‘in a state of electricity’, suggesting the afterglow of a delicious physical convulsion. During the last week of May Isabella and Sam slept for one night under the same roof, probably at the Dolphin. This physical proximity sent Sam into raptures. Writing probably on 27 May he declares:

I have been (and am) most happy since the morning of Friday last – the remembrance of your society for so many sweet hours on Thursday Eveng, and the charm of your company on Friday morng, still dwell with me most pleasantly, albeit I was so rude as to wake you so gently – I really am quite astonished at my temerity … I wish at this moment I could breathe into your ears, closely and caressingly, all the fond hopes I feel for your dear welfare …

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