The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

Beeton’s utterly misguided choice fell upon a young female writer called Nancy Spain. Spain was to become famous in the 1950s as one of Britain’s first media personalities, writing punchy opinion pieces for middle-brow papers, appearing on the Home Service’s My Word and hamming it up on the TV quiz show What’s My Line? where she sat alongside Lady Isobel Barnet and Gilbert Harding. Spain, a flamboyantly butch lesbian in an era that did not care to enquire too deeply into such matters, became an instantly recognizable crop-haired, trouser-wearing figure in middle Britain’s landscape, until at the age of 46 she died in a plane crash on the way to the Grand National with her female lover. All this was in the future, though, when, in 1945, Mayson Beeton asked the recently discharged WRNS officer down to High Lands. Spain had already had some success with her first book, a chatty recollection of her wartime navy service called Thank You Nelson. More significantly, as far as Beeton was concerned, she had a blood connection with the family, although this time on his mother’s side. Spain’s grandmother, the recently deceased Lucy Smiles, had been one of Isabella Beeton’s favourite half-sisters.

Given that one of the driving forces of Mayson Beeton’s biographical ambitions had been to rescue his father’s reputation from the slow drip of innuendo that had originated from his mother’s family over the previous eighty years, it does seem odd that he should have blithely handed over the project to a Dorling descendant at this late stage. Even Spain was surprised, declaring later in her autobiography, ‘to this day I don’t know why he had picked me out of all the world.’ Perhaps a certain amount of contact between the Dorlings and the Beetons since the end of the Great War had made him believe that the rift was finally healed. Maybe Lucy Smiles’ gently anodyne contributions to The Times and the Star in 1932 recalling her lovely elder half-sister and dynamic brother-in-law reassured him that this particular vertical line of his mother’s family was benign to the Beetons. Perhaps Spain, at 28, seemed so young to the old man that it was impossible to believe that she would want to carry on a feud that had started nearly a century previously. Her mother had been at Roedean with Mayson Beeton’s daughters and she herself had followed them there. Give or take her penchant for flannel trousers, she looked and sounded like one of the family. So Spain was duly invited to ‘run down’ to High Lands, and work her way through Mayson Beeton’s collection of his parents’ love letters, Isabella’s diaries, and other ephemera which were now bulked out by all the articles that had appeared on Mrs Beeton over the previous ten years.

What Beeton had missed entirely was that the wildly ambitious Spain was looking to make a splash. And since she was also an incorrigible spendthrift, she needed to make money too (not for nothing was her 1956 autobiography titled Why I’m Not A Millionaire). Spain was far less of a scholar than Hyde, and her writing on Mrs Beeton is spattered with factual errors. An early essay which she wrote for the Saturday Book in 1945 in order to raise some much needed cash manages to get not only Isabella’s death date wrong, but also the birth of her last child, and these kinds of basic errors went uncorrected into the book. Yet if Spain was sloppy over detail, she had a sharp nose for where the real drama of the Beeton story lay. Armed with a rich store of information from her late grandmother and a sole surviving great-aunt, she set about writing an account that managed to suggest, without exactly saying so, that Mrs Beeton’s home life was not quite the model of well-regulated domesticity that the nation fondly imagined.

In the circumstances it was probably lucky that Sir Mayson died before Spain’s book appeared. The reaction of his three daughters to their second cousin’s effort goes unrecorded, although Spain hints in her autobiography that getting their approval on her manuscript was a lengthy and wearisome business. Having grudgingly approved Spain’s effort, the Beeton girls lost no time in putting pressure on Harford Montgomery Hyde, now finally free of wartime duties, to revive the biography on which he had been working with their father in the 1930s. Four years later, Mr and Mrs Beeton duly appeared, bearing all the signs of being the book that Mayson Beeton would have wished to write, had he not run out of time. As if to emphasize that this really was the ‘authorized’ version of the Beeton story, Hyde included the Preface that Sir Mayson had originally written for the book back in 1936 (in fact a fuller version of his Daily Mail piece) and also appended a biographical essay sketching out Sir Mayson’s distinguished career. Whatever ‘Montgomery the Mole’ had managed to find out, he was sufficiently loyal to his kinsman’s memory not to reveal it.

And there the story might have ended, with two competing versions of the Beeton story, one originating from either side of the family, glaring at each other down the remaining decades of the twentieth century. On Mayson Beeton’s death in 1947 the archive of letters and ephemera that had formed the nucleus of both biographies was left to his only grandchild Rodney Levick on condition that the young man incorporate the Beeton family name into his. Levick, an eccentric man, lived in Budleigh Salterton for the next fifty years on his grandfather’s capital, writing periodically to the national newspapers to announce that he had devised a method of long-range weather forecasting far in advance of anything the Met Office could manage. He also took to riding his tricycle around Britain, dropping in unannounced on distant cousins from both the Beeton and Dorling sides and staying far too long. On returning to the home that he shared with his widowed mother Audrey Levick and a tribe of stuffed penguins (his father had been the surgeon on Scott’s final Antarctic trek), Levick would despatch tapes of classical music to his relieved hosts. Followed shortly, much to their astonishment, by an invoice.

From the late 1940s to the mid 1970s very few people beat a path to Budleigh Salterton to talk to the Levicks about Mrs Beeton or try to coax access to the archive. The Victorians were undergoing one of their periodic falls from favour. Increasing social and sexual post-war freedoms made them seem like the stuffy architects of everything that was now, finally, being swept away. The end of rationing had set the stage for Elizabeth David’s lyrical advocacy of the fresh, sharp flavours of sunshiny southern Europe. There was virtually no appetite for Mrs Beeton, a woman whose very name seemed synonymous with roast beef, over-cooked vegetables and foggy winter evenings.

But by the early 1970s nostalgia was back in fashion. Laura Ashley was reworking Victorianism in a pretty print frock, Upstairs Downstairs was on the television (and surely it was no coincidence that the cook was another Mrs B. – Mrs Bridges), and there was the beginning of a revival of interest in the vernacular tastes of Great Britain (there was only so much packet paella that anyone could be expected to eat). A clever young woman at Harpers & Queen magazine, who combined the job of arts editor with an interest in food and cooking, had noticed the shift in mood. Moreover, she was intrigued by the little-known fact that Queen magazine, which was one half of Harpers & Queen, had been founded by Samuel Beeton in 1861 and counted none other than Mrs Beeton as its first fashion editor. Searching around for a good subject for her first book, Sarah Freeman duly advertised in The Times in 1974 trawling for information about the Beeton archive.

The Levicks answered Freeman’s advertisement and were doubtless delighted to find such an eligible person was once again interested in their family. Sarah Freeman had not only read PPE at Somerville but had ‘come out’ as a debutante. She was beautiful, chic, had a happy marriage and two young children. After the blustery horrors of Nancy Spain, it must have been lovely to think that such a ladylike, feminine girl wanted to write the story of Mrs Beeton. Nonetheless, the elderly mother and son were not about to hand over control of the Beeton legacy. Mrs Freeman would be allowed to take away selected material to look at in batches, and these loans would be carefully logged in and out by Rodney, writing in pencil on Sir Mayson’s original archive index. But in return she must undertake to skate over those parts of the story that were potentially embarrassing and which Nancy Spain had gone on to hint at even more strongly in a revised edition of her book published in 1956. As if to reinforce the fact that this is the version of Isabella Beeton’s life that Sir Mayson had wished presented to the world, Freeman’s book, which was published in 1977, comes with a baton-passing Preface from none other than the now elderly Montgomery Hyde.

Nearly thirty years have passed since Freeman’s book. History, if not exactly the Victorians, is once again in fashion. New technologies have revolutionized – the word really is not too strong – access to archival sources. There are fresh ways of thinking about the importance of book history (and this, as much as biography, is the discipline that presses most closely on Mrs Beeton’s story). Cooking and eating practices are no longer simply the concern of domestic science teachers but stand full square in our attempts to understand how people lived and traded a century or three ago. We know more than ever about what the Victorians wrote about their domestic lives, what they felt about them and, most importantly, the gap that lay between.

But it is not simply changing contexts that make Mrs Beeton ripe for a new biography. In the late 1990s bits of the Mayson Beeton archive began to appear on the market. Some of the precious love letters were sold off at Sotheby’s, others at Bonhams, and still more items of ephemera appeared in smaller auction houses in the West Country. It is difficult to track the exact pathways by which this material, once so closely guarded, came onto the market, but it seems to have been the consequence of the fact that Rodney Levick was now elderly, insane, and in need of expensive residential accommodation. What can be said for certain is that by 2000, the year after Levick’s death, the Mayson Beeton archive had been dispersed into several different hands. In 2002, after two years of sleuthing and negotiating, I managed to buy or borrow virtually all the important pieces of the archive and reassemble it once again. The difference is that, this time, there are no restrictions on what may be done with the material.

As its title suggests, this book has attempted two distinct tasks. On the one hand it is a straightforward reconstruction of the known facts of Mrs Beeton’s life. By going deep into the public archives, and working through registers and rate books, it has been possible to find out a great deal more about the girl who was born Isabella Mary Mayson in 1836 and who, by freakish chance, became one of the most famous women in history. What is more, as the first biographer who has had untrammelled access to Beeton’s letters and diaries, I hope I have managed to get closer than before to her interior life. There are still, however, large gaps in the record and there are stretches when Mrs Beeton retreats from view, back into the lived but unrecorded past where only novelists can roam.

The second point of this book is to explore the way that, almost from the moment of her death at the age of 28 in 1865, the idea of ‘Mrs Beeton’ became a potent commercial and cultural force. Detached from her mortal body, the ghostly Mrs Beeton could be appropriated for a whole range of purposes. In the 140 years since she died she has been turned into the subject of a musical and several plays. She was once almost on Broadway. She has been used to sell every kind of foodstuff from Cornish pasties to strawberry jam. Every October images from her famous book are turned into bestselling Christmas cards. At the time of writing you can take your pick from Mrs Beeton’s Cookery in Colour, Tea with Mrs Beeton, Mrs Beeton’s Healthy Eating, and, oddest of all, Mrs Beeton’s Hand-Made Gifts (although this is nothing compared with Mrs Beeton’s Caribbean Cookery and Microwaving with Mrs Beeton from a couple of decades ago). The image of her face – that calm/stern/fat/thin face – has been worked into tea towels and stamped on table mats. You can even buy an apron adorned with Mrs Beeton’s likeness in which to wrap yourself like a second skin, in the hope perhaps that her qualities – whatever they might be exactly – will rub off. For if Mrs Beeton is still to be remembered in another 150 years’ time it will not be for writing the Book of Household Management, a book that surely very few people have read right through, but rather for holding up a mirror to our most intimate needs and desires. By representing ‘Home’ – the place we go to be loved and fed – Mrs Beeton has become part of the fabric of who we feel ourselves to be.

CHAPTER ONE ‘Heavy, Cold and Wet Soil’

MRS BEETON MAY HAVE come down to us as a shape-shifter, but her story starts in a settled enough place, at a time when most people still lived a minute from their parents, when men automatically followed their father’s trade, when girls nearly always shared their Christian name with an aunt or cousin, and when it was not unusual to die in the bed in which you had been born. Thursby, in what was then called Cumberland, is a large village wedged between the Lakes and the Borders, flanked by the Pennines on one side and the Solway Firth on the other. It is not on the way to anywhere now, nor was it in the late eighteenth century, when the daily coaches between London and Carlisle were a distant rumble 5 miles to the northwest.

Most of the 240 inhabitants of Thursby owed their living to the ‘tolerably fertile’ gravel and loam soil, which was parcelled up into a series of small mixed farms, owned by ‘statesmen’ or independent yeomen who employed anything from two to twenty men. In 1786 Thursby got a new curate, John Mayson, grandfather to the future Mrs Beeton. The curateship and the countryside taken together might suggest something rather smart, a gentleman vicar perhaps, with a private income, an MA from a minor Oxbridge college, and a passion for the flora of the Upper Lakes, the kind of man you find pottering in the background of so many of the people who made and changed the Victorian world. This, certainly, is the impression that Mrs Beeton’s family would conspire to create in years to come. When Isabella Beeton’s marriage was announced in The Times in 1856, the fact that she was the granddaughter of the late Revd John Mayson of Cumberland was shoe-horned into the brief notice. Seventy years later when dealing with the National Portrait Gallery Mayson Beeton insisted on having his mother’s background blurb rewritten to include the important fact that her grandfather had been a man of the cloth.

But if anyone had bothered to look more closely they would have discovered that Revd John Mayson was not quite the gentlemanly divine that you might suppose. He had been born in 1761 just outside Penrith to another John Mayson, a farmer who was obliged to rent his land from another man. As his Christian name suggests, John Mayson had drawn the lucky ticket of being the oldest son, the one in whom the family’s slight resources would be invested as a hedge against a chancy future (there were a couple of younger sisters who would need, somehow, to be taken care of). John would have gone to school locally and left around the age of 14, a superior kind of village boy.

The next clear sighting comes in 1785 when, at the age of 24, Mayson was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England. The following year finds him becoming a fully fledged clergyman and sent immediately as curate to St Andrew’s, Thursby. This, though, was hardly the beginning of a steady rise through the Church’s hierarchy. Stuck for an extraordinary forty years at Thursby, it looked as if the Revd John Mayson was destined to become the oldest curate in town. On two separate occasions he was passed over for the post of vicar, quite possibly because of his lack of formal education or social clout: St Andrew’s was a large parish with a fine church said to have been built by David I of Scotland – it needed a gentleman to run it. In 1805 the job went to Joseph Pattison instead and then, on his death eight years later, to William Tomkyns Briggs, whose dynastically inflected name buttressed with a Cambridge MA suggests a background altogether more solid than that of plain ‘John Mayson’.

It wasn’t until 1825 that Mayson’s luck finally changed. At the age of 64 – retirement was not an option unless you were a man of means – he was appointed vicar to the nearby parish of Great Orton, a substantial living worth perhaps £250 which brought with it the care of 200 souls. Yet even this was not quite the opportunity that it might seem. The living was in the gift of Sir Wastal Briscoe, the lord of the manor who inhabited several hundred lush acres at nearby Crofton Hall. The previous incumbent of St Giles had been Briscoe’s brother and it was his intention that the living should pass eventually to one of his young grandsons who were being educated for the Church. Mayson, who probably already owed his appointment as curate at Thursby to Briscoe in the first place, was exactly the right candidate to caretake St Giles until his patron wanted it back.

The life of a clergyman without polish, money or pull was not a particularly easy one. It was an existence geared to pleasing the big house, to judging its moods and whims, and making sure you fitted its purpose. It was, though, enough to get married on, as long as you were careful in your choice of bride. Six years into the curateship at Thursby, John Mayson married a young woman whose name suggests that she had some ballast behind her. Isabella Trimble (or Tremel or Trumble – spelling was still an infant business and names changed with each entry in the parish register) was the daughter of a reasonably prosperous maltster, that is brewer. On his death in 1785 George Trimble divided his estate in the classic manner, with his eldest son inheriting the business along with Trimble’s partner, while the younger brothers received ‘movable goods’ in the form of wheat and cash. Isabella, the only girl, was a residual legatee, which gave her perhaps £80 – not an enormous sum, but combined with the £100 that John inherited from his own father, just enough to marry on. The wedding service in January 1793 was taken by the vicar John Brown, with two of Isabella’s brothers signing the register as witnesses: a small thing, but it suggests that Mayson was busy cementing his connection with his smart new relatives.

The first baby arrived ten months after the wedding, as first babies mostly did in the nineteenth century. She was called Esther after John’s mother. Three years later she was joined by yet another John Mayson and then, five years after that, by Benjamin, named biblically for his mother’s youngest brother. The long spacing between the children, combined with the early evidence of fertility, suggests that there were probably other babies, born months too soon, some still and grey, others little more than bloody clots. These are the first of the many lost children that hover over the story of Mrs Beeton, Benjamin Mayson’s daughter, each one’s failure to spark into life marking the moment when the future had to be imagined all over again.

Of the three Mayson children living, neither of the boys would see forty. John – perhaps originally destined for the Church, to be slipped into a place where Briscoe needed a caretaker or a willing plodder – died at the age of 24 ‘after a long and severe illness’, according to a notice in the Carlisle Journal, and was buried at Thursby. The death of the elder son, that frail container of a family’s best hopes, is always hard, but twenty years later John was followed to the grave by Benjamin, now living far away in London. It was time for another entry in the Carlisle Journal: ‘Suddenly, Mr B. Mayson, linen factor, Milk Street, London, son of the Rev. John Mayson, aged 39 years’.

In the early days, though, when the Mayson children were young and bonny, there was an almost pastoral feel to life at Thursby. Although he was only the curate, Mayson was able to live in the vicarage, a handsome building that would shore up anyone’s sense of battered dignity. The diary of his fellow cleric Thomas Rumney of Watermillock tells of an Austenish existence of long tramps, impromptu tea parties and lovesick letter writing. In August 1803 Rumney walked six and a half hours to get to Thursby from his own parish, and then proceeded to conduct an epistolary courtship with one of John Mayson’s sisters at the thumping cost of 11d a letter.

It was a small life, and it was never going to be enough to hold an energetic young man with neither property or business interests binding him to the place. While John, the eldest Mayson child, was kept close to the family by failing health, his brother Benjamin had other plans. Frustratingly, all record of Benjamin’s early life has disappeared. Proving even more elusive than his daughter Isabella, Benjamin refuses to show up in school records, apprenticeship registers, or even, though we would hope not to find a clergyman’s son here, in the local assizes. He may have received his education at nearby Wigton Grammar School, where Briscoe had pull. Or it is possible that he was sent to Green Row on the coast a few miles away, a forward-looking place which imparted a ‘modern’ curriculum of maths and careful penmanship to young men who were destined for the counting house and the clerks’ bench rather than an ivy-covered quad. Benjamin’s grandsons, Isabella’s boys, will get a gentleman’s education at Marlborough, followed by Sandhurst and Oxford. But those days are seventy years away. Benjamin Mayson, the second son of a poor curate, needed a grounding that would fit him to make his way in the brisk, new commercial world that was even now impinging on rural Cumberland.

In 1780 cotton processing had been introduced into the nearby village of Dalston from Manchester. The conditions were perfect: plenty of water power from the River Cardew and good communication links back down to Manchester, Liverpool, and beyond. By the time Benjamin was thinking about his future, there were three cotton mills and a large flax mill in Dalston, and the principal owners were, as luck would have it, old friends of his mother’s family. All over the country neighbouring households like the Cowens and the Trimbles did business together, married one another’s daughters, and blended their hard-won capital in carefully judged expansion plans. It is very likely that it was to the Cowens’ Mill Ellers, on the edge of Dalston, that Benjamin was sent to serve his apprenticeship.

This, though, is a guess. Not for another eighteen years does Benjamin finally show up properly in the records. By 1831 he has moved to London and set up as a ‘Manchester Warehouseman’ – a linen wholesaler who distributes cloth woven in the hot, damp sheds of the northwest to the fashionable drapers’ shops of London. This was a common enough shift for likely young men from Cumberland’s textile trade, and it is quite possible that Mayson acted as the main agent for his mother’s friends, the Cowens. What we do know for sure is that from the spring of 1834 he was living in classy Upper Baker Street, Marylebone, paying a sizable rent of £65 a year, and that from 1831 he also had business premises across town at Clement’s Court, in the shadow of St Paul’s. If Benjamin Mayson’s daily commute of 4 miles sounds unconvincingly modern, it is worth bearing in mind that in 1829 a firm called Shillibeer’s started a regular horsedrawn omnibus service between Paddington and the City. Londoners were becoming as used as everyone else to widening horizons and for Mayson, who had made the 350-mile journey from Cumberland, the daily journey to the City must have seemed like a breeze.

So by the age of 30 Benjamin Mayson could be said to be doing rather well for himself. He was a vicar’s son and, though not quite a gentleman, was established in a gentlemanly line of business. Mayson, it is important to understand, was not a draper who stood behind a counter unrolling a yard or two of sprigged cotton for the approval of sharp-eyed housewives. He was a wholesaler, a merchant, a man who supplied the smarter kind of drapers with bulk orders and sealed deals with a handshake rather than a few warm coins. And it was a profitable business too. With the world getting both dirtier and more polite at the same time, there was a hunger for fresh linen. No one with any self-respect wanted to be seen in a smutty shirt or streaky dress. The middle-class wardrobe was expanding and becoming more particular, which was good news for anyone who supplied the materials to make all those clean sleeves and dainty collars. And, as if that weren’t enough bright fortune, Benjamin Mayson had arranged his private life carefully too. At an age when most men had already married, he was still a bachelor, having managed to avoid being jostled by loneliness or lust into a hasty match. He was, by anyone’s reckoning, quite a catch.