The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

Elizabeth Jerrom, the woman whom Benjamin Mayson would marry, was born on 24 May 1815, three weeks before the great victory at Waterloo. Her parents Isaac and Mary were domestic servants, working for one of the big houses around Marylebone, part of that feverish development of gracious squares that had been built towards the end of the last century to house the newer aristocracy during the ‘London’ part of their wandering year. When the couple had married eleven months earlier at St Martin-in-the-Fields, they had signed the register clearly, confident in themselves and their new merged identity. The same, though, cannot be said of their witnesses. William Standage, Mary’s father, has done his best but the sprawling scratch he makes in the register is indecipherable: underneath the parish clerk has been obliged – tactfully, crossly? – to write out his name properly, for the record. Mrs Beeton is only twenty years away from people who would be happier signing themselves with a cross.

Mary Jerrom, Mrs Beeton’s grandmother and the only one of her grandparents who was to play a significant role in her life, had been born Mary Standage in 1794 in the ancient village of Westhampnett, just outside Chichester. Her father was a groom on the Duke of Richmond’s estate at nearby Goodwood. William Standage had himself been born 9 miles away, at Petworth where the huge Standage clan had for generations lived and worked with horses. The servants’ records at Petworth House show William’s father and brother driving ox and horse carts on the estate through the last decades of the eighteenth century. By 1811 another brother has a job looking after his lordship’s hunters. But it was William, born in 1763, who was the star of the stables. In 1792 he was headhunted by the horse-mad Duke of Richmond to work as a groom at Goodwood. Given that Mrs Beeton would be so exact about what you should pay your groom, it is nice to be able to report that in 1792 her great-grandfather was getting £18 a year which, by 1807, had risen to £24, with extra allowances for clothing and travel.

The horse was God at Goodwood. When the 3rd Duke of Richmond inherited in 1756 his first thought was not to rebuild the unimpressive house but to commission the architect William Chambers to build a magnificent stable block as a kind of love song to the most important creatures in his life. Complete with Doric columns and a triumphal arch, the block was home to the fifty-four lucky animals – hunters mainly, but from 1802 racers too. Family myth has it that it was William Standage who helped the Duke plot the track that would become one of the most important racecourses in the land. Whether or not this is strictly true, the story points up just what was important in this family. Horses are a recurrent presence in Mrs Beeton’s story, presiding spirits of events both happy and bad. Her grandparents will meet through them, her stepfather will make his fortune from them, her sister will lose an eye from one, while her first biographer and great-niece will fall out of the sky on the way to Aintree.

Standage, who married a woman called Elizabeth, produced a string of daughters: first Mary, next Sarah and then Harriet. All three girls married men who worked with horses. This is not as odd as it would seem today. You can only marry someone you’ve already met, and a groom’s daughter in the early nineteenth century met an awful lot of grooms. But none of the girls stayed in Sussex. Instead they followed the classic migratory pattern of their generation and poured into London, working first as servants in aristocratic mansions and then marrying men from the stables, men who knew or were known to their fathers. In time these men would set up as job masters or livery stable keepers, hiring themselves and their carriage out for a fee, doing for several families what they had formerly done for just one. By the end of the nineteenth century, you could still find the grandsons of these people working as omnibus and cab drivers, transporting restless crowds of shopgirls, clerks and housewives around a teeming central London.

Sometime around 1812 Mary came to London to work as a servant, and two years later she married 28-year-old Isaac Jerrom. Given that they married in St Martin-in-the-Fields, it looks like Isaac and Mary met while working in one of the aristocratic mansions around Piccadilly, quite possibly the London residence of the Duke of Richmond of Goodwood or Lord Egremont of Petworth. By the time their first baby Elizabeth – named for Mary’s mother – came to be christened the following year, Isaac and Mary ‘Jurrum’, as the parish clerk would have it, were living in Marylebone and gave their occupation as ‘servants’. Two years later, with the arrival of their new baby William, they are still describing themselves in the same unembarrassed way, tucked in amongst a dense urban parish swarming with labourers, gentlemen, shopkeepers, artists, clerks, peers, diplomats, musicians, and, of course, an army of domestic staff responsible for keeping this huge social beast trundling forward.

John Jerrom, Isaac’s father, who had probably migrated from Hampshire to London as a young man, now ran a livery stables in Marylebone. By 1820 Isaac starts to appear in the Marylebone rate books on his own account, running a stables just around the corner in Wyndham Mews, a newly built series of stables on the Portman Estate. Livery stables supplied carriages and drivers to those households who did not keep their own groom and horse. Most of the mansions in Marylebone had no need for this service since they were well able to make their own arrangements. Indeed, the status of a family was intimately tied up with the show it made in the streets, as it trotted around town in a carriage bearing its own insignia, driven by a couple of tall and handsome grooms. But there were households – often headed by women – who were happy to use freelance carriage services as and when they needed them. William Tayler, a footman in a Marylebone house in 1837, was edgy about the fact that his household, headed by a widow, used the services of a ‘jobber’. He knew exactly what it implied about the status of a household in which he was the only resident male servant.

Isaac and Mary Jerrom, released from the bonds of personal service, did well as small business people. The world was changing and they were quick to exploit its possibilities. People were on the move like never before and there was only so far a pair of sturdy legs could take you. As well as catering for the horseless mansions of Marylebone, Isaac provided a taxi service for its less exalted inhabitants, ferrying them around the rapidly extending city. In a classic combination, his wife Mary ran a lodging house, offering bed and board to all those bewildered new arrivals to London. Little by little Isaac rented adjoining properties in Wyndham Mews until in 1826, his high-water mark, the Jerroms were operating out of four separate properties – numbers 1, 4, 5, and 10. When extra manpower was needed, Isaac did the usual thing and turned to his extended family. In the mid 1830s he was joined in partnership by his younger cousin James Mitchell, a Londoner who turns up at all the key family events. Mitchell will be a witness at Elizabeth’s wedding in 1835 and, four years later, it is he who will inform the registrar of Isaac’s death from consumption.

We do not really know what Elizabeth Jerrom was like as a young girl. There are family stories of her as a beauty, but then family stories nearly always coopt someone to play that role. Certainly a watercolour of her at 16 shows a very pretty girl. The fact that the Jerroms could afford to have her painted and put in a frame suggests the good fortune of being the only child in a working-class family – baby William has disappeared, leaving all the resources concentrated on pretty Bessie. The way she is painted Elizabeth Jerrom could be the daughter of one of the big houses around Marylebone: the sloping shoulders, the little head with the elaborately worked hair, the snub features all suggest a dainty miss rather than a girl who has grown up with the stink and clatter of livery nags directly under her bedroom window. This class-shifting will be a theme in Elizabeth’s life over the next thirty years, as she moves from mews, to warehouse, to townhouse and, finally, to a suburban mansion with over a dozen servants and her own busy programme of balls and At Homes.

There are two anecdotes about Elizabeth that have been handed down through the family, and both hinge upon the idea of her as a social traveller. The first story comes from her great-granddaughter Nancy Spain who has Elizabeth visiting Hampton Court as a girl on two occasions, once when Adelaide, the consort of King William IV, was there to receive ‘a medallion’. There is no tag line to the anecdote, no point to it at all, apart from associating Elizabeth Jerrom, a girl born in a stable, with the dignity of queenship, her beauty implied as the link (the story comes straight after a eulogy to her good looks). In Spain’s story Elizabeth becomes both a proxy lady-in-waiting to the Queen and also the recipient by association of the oddly generic ‘medallion’.

Years later, in a book charting his family’s history, Elizabeth’s grandson Revd Edward Dorling remembered how as a young child in the 1860s he had fallen foul of her on account of some flowers that had been picked without permission from her garden. Little Edward found himself confronting a woman who regarded him with the controlled disapproval of ‘an angry queen’. No longer beautiful, and now swollen by seventeen confinements, Elizabeth’s ‘we are not amused’ expression made her, in the child’s mind, as frightful a prospect as the real Queen Victoria.

Girls who are as pretty as princesses attract all kinds of courtship stories, and Elizabeth Jerrom was no exception. Indeed, the tale that was handed down about her was so potent that it was still being rehashed in newspapers a hundred years later. The story goes that once upon a time, one of Mrs Jerrom’s lodgers was a young printer called Henry Dorling. It is impossible to confirm this, although it does make sense. Dorling’s father was a printer in Epsom who produced the running cards for the Derby. Mrs Jerrom’s father had been a key groom at Goodwood. The courses were only 30 miles from each other, and were connected by a network of owners and grooms who continuously passed between the two. Names, tips, gossip, information would have been exchanged along the way, so that when William Dorling was looking for respectable people with whom his son could lodge during his vulnerable bachelor years in London, he naturally thought of the Jerroms.

The story runs that Henry Dorling and Elizabeth Jerrom fell in love but her parents refused to countenance an engagement. Instead they favoured the suit of the gentlemanly wholesaler Mr Mayson. Mayson was an established businessman with a residence in Marylebone and a warehouse in the city. What is more, he was a vicar’s son, which to country people (which is what the Jerroms still were) meant a great deal.

The dates, however, do not work. The records show that a good nine months before Benjamin Mayson and Elizabeth Jerrom became man and wife Henry Dorling had already married a London girl called Emily Clarke. The fact that Dorling asked Benjamin Mayson to stand godson to his first child and named the boy ‘Henry Mayson Dorling’, also tends to argue against any kind of love triangle. If there was any rivalry and split loyalty at 1 Wyndham Mews it must have been of a very mild variety. As far as we know Elizabeth Jerrom never looked back on 2 May 1835 when she walked up the aisle with Benjamin Mayson.

The Maysons’ first child was born on 14 March 1836 at the fag end of the snowiest winter that anyone could remember. She was fifteen months too early to be a Victorian. The Maysons were shrewd with their naming strategies, careful to tie the child to the wealthier side of the family. The baby was named Isabella after her Mayson grandmother, the well-set-up brewer’s daughter, and Mary … after who exactly? Possibly after her other grandmother, Mrs Jerrom, the groom’s daughter, but also, perhaps, after her father’s grandmother. ‘Mary’ was one of those handily common names that provided cover for a multitude of dynastic ambitions.

Shortly after Isabella’s birth the little family of three moved from Marylebone to Benjamin’s business premises which were situated at the heart of the textile business in the City of London. In the early nineteenth century the short streets that run north from Cheapside towards Guildhall were packed with warehouses storing fabric of every kind. As well as ‘Manchester’ goods of linen and cotton, there were ‘Nottingham warehouses’ stocked with lace, as well as other businesses specializing in silk products from Coventry and Derbyshire or woollens from Yorkshire. Within a few hundred yards you could find all the new mass-produced fabrics of the industrial age, funnelled down from their place of production and disgorged into the chief marketplace of the country, indeed of the whole world.

The City of London was still a residential area in the 1830s. Warehousemen, in particular, liked to live close to their capital, setting up home on the top floor of their premises, which also provided lodgings for clerks and apprentices. Mayson’s first warehouse was in Clement’s Court, a narrow cul-de-sac which ran off the west side of Milk Street, where the fine houses had gradually been taken over by textiles. The lack of passing trade was not a problem; as a wholesaler Mayson was not supposed to sell to customers who came in off the street in search of a bargain, although plenty of smaller businesses did. Every corner of the warehouse would have been stacked high with bales of fabric: an eye-witness from twenty years later talks of the clerk in a large Cheapside warehouse ‘piling up innumerable packages in forms that would exhaust the devices of solid geometry’. During most of the year Mayson would have dealt in linen, ‘Scotch Derry’, and perhaps ‘linsey-woolsey’, but during the summer months there would have been lighter mousselines, georgettes, and silks. One corner of the warehouse might well have been set aside for crapes and ‘kindred vestments of woe’, styled and textured to denote every phase of mourning. Samples of the new season’s fabrics were sent out to valued customers in March and then again in September.

As baby Isabella crawled, then toddled, among the giant fabric pillars she would have absorbed the smells and textures of the textile trade, the sharp tang of Manchester cotton, the powdery feel of velvet, the flutter of muslin. In twenty-five years’ time, as editress of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, she will become expert at evaluating and describing the new season’s materials. Her writing is terse and expert, shot through not with the approximating gush of a Lady of Fashion but with the understanding of someone who has grown up feeling fabric between her fingers. Here she advises her readers on the styles for July 1860:

SHAWLS, of any and every material, are worn; some are made of black Grenadine, square, and with a binding of black or violet glacé all round, two inches in width, and of crossway silk; others are of the same material as the dress (some barèges being made wide for this purpose), and bound in the same manner, or have a ribbon laid on with a narrow straw trimming on each edge. A great many muslins are also made to match the dresses, the border being the same as that on the flounces. Shawls of white muslin, with embroidered borders, are very dressy and stylish, also those of plain white muslin, bound with black velvet.

Two years later, and with civil war in America cutting Lancashire and Cumberland off from their vital cotton supplies, Isabella mounted a relief effort to sustain the textiles industries’ starving workers. Old clothes, boots, bedding but above all money were to be sent to Mrs Beeton care of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in readiness for their dispersal among the cottages of northwest England. Even now, sixty years after Benjamin Mayson had first struck out from the damp, close sheds along the River Ribble, his eldest daughter still understood the way that cotton worked – and what happened when it didn’t.

Mayson prospered in the City. By 1836 he has moved out of Clement’s Court and onto Milk Street itself, buying substantial premises at number 24, an investment that brings with it the right to vote. Legend has always had it that Isabella was born here, in Milk Street, which would have made her a cockney, since the Bow Bells ring out from a few hundred yards away on Cheapside. Indeed, Nancy Spain actually has Isabella christened at St Mary-le-Bow, the result of a common enough confusion with Mary-le-bone, in a glorious christening gown covered with a pattern of ears of wheat which Spain maintains was still doing service within her family seventy years later. The story cannot be confirmed although, even allowing for Spain’s mixture of exaggeration and elision, it makes a kind of sense. If Benjamin Mayson knew anything, it was how to pick a piece of cloth that would last.

While Isabella was neither a cockney nor a Victorian, her brother and sisters were. Just as she turned 2 she was joined by Elizabeth Anne, always known as Bessie. In September 1839 came yet another John Mayson, followed by Esther, named for her Cumberland aunt, in February 1841. All were christened in St Lawrence Jewry, which stands a couple of hundred yards away in the forecourt of the Guildhall. The first three Maysons were all said to be pretty. Esther less so, but this may be because a riding accident in her twenties left her with a blinded eye. Photographs of the Maysons are not much help when it comes to working out their colouring. The iconic National Portrait Gallery portrait shows Isabella with very dark, almost black hair. However, Marjorie Killby, Mayson Beeton’s eldest daughter and a keen photographer, always maintained that this was inaccurate, the fault of the rudimentary technology of the time. Drawing on family intelligence, Killby insisted instead that Isabella had ‘light reddish auburn hair’ and even set about making a new print of the photograph in order to show her grandmother in her true colours, as a strawberry blonde. By way of confirmation, a watercolour of the four Mayson children from 1848 shows them all as redheads but with Isabella a shade or two fairer than her siblings.

It is harder to work out how the Maysons sounded. A great-niece going to visit her maiden aunts Bessie and Esther in genteel Kensington in the 1920s remembered them with cockney accents that struck her, a colonel’s granddaughter, as decidedly comic. In this incident, recorded in Sarah Freeman’s biography in 1977, Rosemary Fellowes explains away her great-aunts’ dropped aitches and their use of ‘ain’t’ as a fashionable affectation from their youth. But the fact is that by the time Edwardians were using cockney to sound smart, the Misses Mayson were already in their eighth decade. The way they spoke had been picked up much earlier, during the 1840s and before English accents had become codified by class. From their father they might have got some flat vowels, and from their mother and neighbours they would have heard the kind of cockneyfied speech in which ‘w’s were still doing service for ‘v’s. Boarding school in Germany would have added another complicating layer. Whatever the exact sound eventually arrived at, we can be fairly safe in saying that Mrs Beeton and her sisters did not speak like ladies.

The birth of Esther, the youngest Mayson child, in February 1841 must have been bittersweet. Seven months earlier Benjamin had died at the age of only 39. The notice inserted by his father in the Carlisle Journal suggests that the death was sudden: certainly there is no suggestion that he was suffering from the kind of degenerative illness that had made his brother linger for so long. The death certificate, a recent innovation, part of the new Victorians’ desire to count, clarify, and mark their hectically expanding population, says ‘Apoplexy’. This sounds sudden and convulsive, until you realize that in the 1840s it stood for many things: alcoholism, syphilis, epilepsy as well as the more obvious heart attack or stroke. It is ‘apoplexy’ that will kill Benjamin’s son, the baby John, only thirty years later.

Death may have been everywhere in early Victorian England, but to find yourself pregnant with your fourth child and suddenly responsible for a highly capitalized business is unlucky by anyone’s standards. Although her widowed mother Mary Jerrom was helping with the domestic side of life at Milk Street, Elizabeth Mayson soon buckled under her burden. The only solution, a common enough one, was to farm out the two elder children to relatives. Isabella, still only 5 years old, was sent like a parcel to the other end of the country to lodge with her clergyman grandfather at Great Orton. The census entry for 1841 gives a bleak snapshot of what she found there. Apart from the 79-year-old John Mayson, himself recently widowed, the thatched vicarage was home to one 30-year-old servant, Sarah Robinson. For a little girl, 350 miles from home, Great Orton must have seemed the strangest place to be. Instead of the companionable man-made bustle of Cheapside, there were country noises: shivering trees, rumbling carts, and endless fields of cawing sheep. In place of scurrying clerks and warehousemen there was a single shoemaker, schoolmaster, and blacksmith. It got dark early, stayed colder longer, and the food, coaxed from the ‘heavy cold and wet soil’, tasted different. The bread was made of barley, black and sour (‘Everybody knows that it is wheat flour which yields the best bread,’ noted Isabella pointedly twenty years later in the Book of Household Management). Oatmeal, meanwhile, turned up at virtually every meal. There was porridge for breakfast, and maybe crowdy – oatmeal steeped in beef marrow – for midday dinner. Ginger, which came all the way from China, made cake and biscuits burn in your mouth.

As if that weren’t enough strangeness for 5-year-old Isabella, there were the voices too, speaking in a language that she would have had to strain to understand. Just why Bessie, two years younger, was not sent with her as a consoling companion in exile is a mystery. The obvious place for both girls would have been at nearby Thursby, where Benjamin’s surviving sibling Esther lived with her yeoman husband John Burtholme and daughter Anne who, at 17, was of an age to be helpful with baby visitors. As it is, Bessie’s whereabouts in 1841 remains unknown: along with Mrs Jerrom she has temporarily vanished from Milk Street and has yet to turn up anywhere else.

Even with two fewer people to worry about, life was not easy for Elizabeth Mayson. Still only 25, she now ran the business in her own name – the trade directories describe her as a ‘warehouseman’. In the 1840s it was not unusual for widows to take over their late husband’s business, and the directories show many women heading up pubs, livery stables, and every kind of shop from baker to jeweller. Elizabeth had grown up among the artisans and tradesmen of Marylebone, watching women like her mother working alongside husbands and brothers as book-keepers, shop assistants, and storeroom supervisors. The 1841 census shows her employing one young maidservant and an older man called Robert Mitchell who was originally from Sussex. Mitchell’s father had worked alongside various Standages in the stables at Petworth House and his presence in Milk Street is a reminder of how, in the first half of the nineteenth century, rural communities had a habit of reconstituting themselves at the very heart of commercial and industrial landscapes. Elizabeth Mayson may have been operating out of one of the busiest streets in London, but when it came to investing her precious trust she relied on a network that had been forged sixty years earlier and in a different place entirely.

There remains some mystery about Elizabeth’s finances during her widowhood. Benjamin had not left a will, and ten days after his death she was granted administration as his ‘relict’. His estate amounted to £8,000, a small fortune. However, much of this must have been tied up in stock and Benjamin doubtless left a fair number of outstanding debts to his suppliers that needed to be paid before it was possible to get any sense of the real value of his legacy. For how else can one explain the fact that only two years later Elizabeth, now reunited with Isabella and Bessie, is writing a begging letter to her father-in-law in Great Orton? From John Mayson’s reply it transpires that warehousing has not been kind to Elizabeth: quite possibly the drapers to whom she tried to sell her cloth were not happy dealing with a young woman. Certainly it looks as if she was thinking of switching to another trade, perhaps lodging house keeping like her mother. We will never know the precise nature of Elizabeth’s problems, since the letter to her father-in-law has been lost. Here, though, is the Revd Mayson’s reply: