The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

First, the anecdote. Nancy Spain has the old lady sitting tight on top of the box in which the first year’s takings of the Grandstand under Henry Dorling’s regime were stored. In the story, according to Spain, Mrs Jerrom is knitting furiously. The image neatly sums up the qualities of a whole generation of pre-Victorian women. Money is crucial, far from vulgar, but needs to be watched carefully if it is not to disappear into thin air. There is no shame in guarding it with your life, or at least with your sturdy body weight. But knitting is important too. This is not the fancy needlework that will come to define a whole new generation of young ‘genteel’ middle-class women, certainly not the royal coat of arms executed a few years later by her granddaughters ‘the Misses Dorling’. Instead, Mrs Jerrom is engaged in a serviceable craft that will clothe a family, save expenditure, and eke out an income. And, what is more, there is no shame to be seen doing it.

Then there is the photograph, lately discovered among a box of prints probably taken by James Collinson, an original member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and one-time fiancé of Christina Rossetti. From 1859, and now living in Epsom, Collinson was experimenting with photography as a way of producing preliminary ‘sketches’ for his narrative paintings. And since he was far from flush, Collinson was happy to double up as a portrait photographer. During the 1860s every worthy burgher and his lady seem to have passed through Mr Collinson’s studio in their best bib and tucker, ready to be captured for posterity by this promising new process. In among Epsom’s finest commercial and even gentry families (the nobs, naturally, have made other arrangements) you can see Thomas Furniss who ran a tailoring business and was also parish clerk, Dr Thomas John Graham who was said to be the model for Dr John in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, and the Keeling family who were the town’s chief chemists and druggists. There too is a picture of 68-year-old Mrs Jerrom, probably taken in 1862, wearing a solid black dress and white cap, the standard garb of a widow. Her mouth is slightly ajar, as if surprised by the flash of Mr Collinson’s magic box. She is a neat, serviceable little woman. Perhaps because she only had two pregnancies to Elizabeth’s seventeen she has kept her figure in a way that her dropsical daughter never managed.

Mrs Jerrom’s image is in sharp contrast with that of three of her grandchildren, who were photographed during the same session: Bessie and Esther Mayson and Amy Dorling. Both the Mayson girls are fashionably dressed, smooth-haired, and look straight into the camera with the confidence of eligible young women who have no worries about the old-maidism that lies ahead (they are only 24 and 21 and, while Bessie is probably the prettiest, Esther has that striking auburn hair and slender figure that people will still be noticing when she is in her eighties). The other granddaughter photographed is Amy Dorling, who at 3 years old is a spoiled lolling brat with ringlets and a challenging look, as if she knows she is a rich man’s daughter entitled to anything she wants, including the photographer’s patience. The Mayson girls and Amy, although divided by twenty years, are both of a generation that understands the camera’s eye and can meet it on its own terms. Mrs Jerrom, by contrast, looks suspiciously over the shoulder of the photographer and into the distance, to a time before a machine could capture your soul.

Isabella Mayson’s education was patchy, but no more so than virtually every other girl of her class and time. She was sent for a while to a school in Islington, chosen more for its familiarity and convenience than anything else, since it was directly opposite 14 Duncan Terrace where Elizabeth Mayson and her little brood were living just prior to their move to Epsom. Until 1844 1 Colebrooke Row had housed a boys’ school, but in that year it started to cater for girls under the watchful eyes of Miss Lucy and Miss Mary Richardson. Five years later the school was taken over by two sisters from Hackney, with the delightfully Austenish names of Sarah and Fanny Woodhouse. The 1851 census shows them with five pupils, four of whom were either Maysons (Bessie and Esther) or Dorlings (Mary and Charlotte).

If this sounds cottagey and amateurish, it is only a fair measure of how small private boarding schools operated during the early Victorian period. Quite unlike the public and high schools of a later date, these little commercial enterprises, headed by a clergyman or a couple of spinster sisters, were flighty affairs, quite capable of closing down or changing hands at a moment’s notice when, say, a particular family decided to withdraw its patronage. The quality of the education the pupils received varied wildly, dependent entirely on the skills and abilities of the person who happened to be in charge at any moment. At 1 Colebrooke Row it is most likely that Isabella was taught to read and write, sew and perhaps speak a little French. She almost certainly learned to draw and paint, since the Misses Richardson’s brother, a portrait painter, ran his studio from the same address. The fact that Isabella’s younger sisters, stepsister, and half-sister were sent to the same establishment – though under different management – suggests that the Dorlings, who knew a good bargain when they saw one, thought that they were getting value for money.

However, to their credit, the Dorlings wanted more than a just-so education for their girls. ‘Boarding school misses’ were becoming an increasingly visible – and mockable – part of the social landscape. Social commentators saw them as part of that whole process whereby the rising commercial middle classes were trying to turn their girls into what they fondly imagined were ladies. Farmers, always the particular butt of critics’ complaints, were said to be sending their daughters to pretentious boarding schools for a year or two where they picked up a little French and piano and felt themselves, once home, too grand to help with the domestic chores. The accusation could be extended to include every chief clerk, wealthy grocer, and small-time solicitor who was now busy trying to scramble up the social ladder by turning his daughters into something very different from their mothers. Instead of moulding gracious and accomplished ladies, so the argument ran, these cheap boarding schools were churning out silly girls with ideas above their stations. It was a stereotype that a young publisher and editor called Samuel Beeton was, at this very moment, spoofing in his new magazine the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (EDM):

the young lady’s peculiar talents consisted in dress and fancy-work, with some interludes of novel-reading and playing fantasias on the piano (in company), and, as we were forced to admit on seeing her with some of her particular friends, in a great faculty of talking and laughing about nothing.

The Dorlings wanted something better for their girls, and they decided to send them abroad to school in Heidelberg, the small historic town in southwest Germany. In no way a ‘finishing school’ (the concept had no purchase in Germany), the Heidels’ establishment had started as a day school in the late 1830s, providing a rigorous syllabus for the daughters of well-to-do local people. However by 1850 the 40-year-old headmistress Miss Auguste Heidel was actively seeking British girls as boarders for her school, which occupied a series of premises in the picturesque heart of the city. Every year, in late spring, Miss Heidel visited London, took rooms in the City and invited prospective parents to deposit their daughters with her for immediate passage to Germany. These invitations took the form of announcements in The Times and the Athenaeum:

GERMAN EDUCATION, – Miss HEIDEL’S ESTABLISHMENT, Heidelberg – Miss Heidel will remain in London a short time longer, and will take charge of any YOUNG LADIES intended to be placed in her seminary. She may be spoken with, between the hours of 3 and 4 o’clock every day, Monday excepted, at Mr Young’s, Walbrook

The school timetable from 1837 – fifteen years before Isabella travelled to Heidelberg – still survives. Dance, music, and domestic economy had no part in the syllabus. Instead the curriculum centred on French and German, which was taught to the younger girls by Miss Charlotte Heidel and to the more advanced by Miss Auguste. Charlotte also taught ‘logical thinking’, natural history and mathematics. Karl Heidel, their brother and a university graduate, was in charge of history and geography. Miss Louisa, another sister, taught needlework and German to the little ones. Calligraphy and mathematics were the preserve of a visiting master, Herr Rau, who normally worked at the rigorous Höheren Bürgerschule. Teaching started at 8 a.m. and did not finish until 5 p.m.

Isabella probably entered the school in the summer of 1851, when she was fifteen and a half. It is most likely that she was accompanied by her stepsister Jane Dorling who was virtually the same age. In the following years the slightly younger Bessie and Esther Mayson and Mary Dorling would also attend the Heidel Institute, as well as a family of girls called Beeton, who had been the Maysons’ neighbours in Milk Street. This decision of friends and neighbours to send their daughters to the same school on the other side of Europe might seem quaint to modern eyes, but it made sense. Girls who already knew each other made good travelling companions and congenial schoolfellows. If ladies’ boarding schools were all about creating a home-from-home atmosphere, then what could be more natural for people who already liked each other to use the same institution? And, given that the journey to Heidelberg took a couple of days either way, sharing chaperonage represented a significant saving of time and money.

It was this tradition of sending whole clutches of sisters, friends and neighbours to the same school that gave these boarding schools a family feel. While the Heidels’ regime was rigorous by English standards, a sweetly sisterly atmosphere prevailed among the young ladies who attended. In letters which the younger Beeton and Mayson girls sent to the now married Isabella in 1857 to congratulate her on her twenty-first birthday we hear how ‘On Shrove Tuesday we girls got up a Mask Ball, and invited the governesses … to join us … Miss Louisa was perfectly enchanted with our costumes.’ Another governess, who has recently married, sends her ‘best love’ to Isabella. Writing three years later – in German – to Isabella, Miss Auguste Heidel sends her congratulations to ‘your dear parents’ on the birth of a new baby boy ‘of whose arrival my dear Bessie has just informed me’. Miss Louisa Heidel, meanwhile, chats away in the same letter to Isabella about her own health which, as the years pass, ‘becomes very delicate’, and how busy she is now that the holidays have rolled around again: ‘as you will doubtless recollect, there is always a great deal to be done’.

Quite what the young British women who attended the Heidel Institute did when they were not busy learning arithmetic and French is not entirely clear. The city was dominated by the ruins of Heidelberg Castle, a tumbledown thirteenth- to seventeenth-century palace that had done so much to spark Goethe and his contemporaries into Romantic reveries at the beginning of the century. By the time the rather stolid Mayson, Dorling, and Beeton girls got there in the 1850s, the castle had become one of those key stop-offs in the burgeoning European tourist industry. When Sam Beeton visited his half-sisters Helen and Polly at school in 1856 he felt obliged to visit ‘the renowned ruin of Germany’ first before sweeping the girls off to the Prince Carl café where they stuffed themselves with honey and chocolate. Doubtless on Sundays the young ladies from the Heidel Institute plodded up to the castle, drank lemonade bought from a vendor, and looked over the spectacular but by now wearingly familiar view of the wooded River Neckar. Perhaps they blushed when students from the renowned university strayed too near and wondered hopefully whether there was a forgotten prince somewhere in the ruins who might rescue them from intermediate German and composition. In the midst of all this chocolate box prettiness it is worth remembering the odd fact that by the time the last of these quaint young ladies had died – Isabella’s sister Esther Mayson, as it turned out, in 1931 – Hitler was only two years away from becoming Chancellor and the infamous Nazification of Heidelberg University was on its way.

By the summer of 1854, 18-year-old Isabella was back home in Epsom and ready for the role of ‘daughter at home’, that odd period between school and marriage which might last for a few months or a lifetime. She was, without doubt, a superior model of the species. She had learned French and German at the Heidels’ from native speakers and heard the languages spoken in a constant babble from dawn until dusk. She was also musical: all young ladies could bang out a waltz on the piano, but Isabella was lucky enough to be both genuinely talented and to have parents who were prepared to nurture that gift. Henry Dorling could himself play several instruments and was happy to pay for his stepdaughter to take lessons with Julius Benedict. Benedict, the son of a rich Jewish banker from Stuttgart, was by the 1850s a highly visible force in British musical theatre. Having recently ceded the job of Jenny Lind’s accompanist to her new husband, he was now concentrating on conducting new work at Her Majesty’s Theatre while running a vocal association. Coaching young ladies at the piano was the way he paid the rent. Benedict’s sessions with the promising Miss Mayson required her to make a weekly trip up to town to his rooms in Manchester Square, which happened to be virtually next door to where Isaac and Mary Jerrom had once run their stables and lodging house.

As Isabella stepped into Manchester Square each week for her lesson with Benedict she was herself a kind of pattern of what was happening to the middle classes during this first slice of Victoria’s reign. As a child she had lived over the shop, in rooms above her father’s City warehouse. As a teenager she had lived inside the shop, spending days in the Grandstand at Epsom, providing labour which the Dorlings could not afford to pay for on the market (a wealthier family would have had nurses and nursemaids and, more obviously, a bigger house). But at 15, as the stepdaughter of an increasingly wealthy man, Isabella had been sent off to Germany to acquire a good education, something more than the usual veneer that the lower middle classes were busy painting over their daughters.

The question, though, remains: why did the Dorlings decide to send their girls as far away as south Germany when France, probably Paris, would have been the obvious option? Henry Dorling seems to have had a touching faith in German educational methods. During his childhood, which ran parallel with the Napoleonic Wars, the King’s German Legion had been stationed in vulnerable coastal Bexhill, swelling the local population of one thousand to a noisy, unmissable four thousand. William Dorling, always quick to spot a commercial opportunity, had supplied the Legionnaires with the little luxuries – tea, soap, books – that made a long-term posting in a foreign country bearable. In return it appears that he had been given permission to send his eldest boy to their school. The odd legacy of this arrangement was that in adult life young Henry continued to say the Lord’s Prayer in German.

Yet Dorling’s decision to send Isabella and her sisters all the way to Heidelberg to be educated was based on something more solid than his own early conditioning. German education, from primary education right up to schools for young ladies, was better and less frivolous than its English equivalent (Scotland was another matter). What is more, Henry may have shared his generation’s lingering dislike of France, and he may also have been worried about undue Catholic influence. For the Heidels, while they welcomed Catholic pupils, were themselves impeccably Protestant.

What Dorling almost certainly didn’t account for was the fact that Isabella would return from her stay in Germany with a keen interest in baking. While the Heidels’ school was academically rigorous, it was firmly rooted in a German cultural tradition that saw no tension between women being both learned and domestic. George Eliot, the British novelist who arrived to spend some months in Weimar just as Isabella was getting ready to leave Heidelberg, put this very un-English model of cultivated, practical femininity at the heart of her fictional universe. In Middlemarch, for instance, it is Mrs Garth and her daughter Mary who most obviously win the author’s approval, with their ability to bake and teach their children Latin virtually in parallel. So while the Heidel sisters concentrated on teaching Isabella German, French and composition, they also initiated her into the pastrymaking in which southwest Germany specialized.

Isabella had clearly caught the baking bug in Heidelberg, for on returning home to Epsom in 1854 she asked for lessons in pastry-making from the local baker William Barnard. Barnard was a relative of Timothy Barnard, the market gardener who ran the annoying freelance temporary Grandstand during race week. Still, there does not seem to have been any lingering hostility and Isabella was despatched a few doors down the High Street from Ormond House to learn the art of English cakemaking.

The only reason she was allowed to go was because making cakes, and fancy cakes at that, was a thing apart from the general drudge of cookery. Isabella was not being despatched to learn how to peel potatoes or cook stew, but was participating in the one branch of cookery that gentlewomen had traditionally practised, at least during the earlier part of the previous century. Even so, the Dorlings were sufficiently jumpy about the social implications to worry whether they were doing the right thing. Nearly a hundred years later Isabella’s sessions at Barnard’s were still being recalled by her younger half-sisters as ‘ultra modern and not quite nice’.

INTERLUDE

Cherishing, then, in her breast the respected utterances of the good and the great, let the mistress of every house rise to the responsibility of its management.

ISABELLA BEETON, Book of Household Management

EVERYONE IN MRS BEETON’s imaginary household is rising, moving upwards, heading somewhere. The servants are busy working their way through the ranks (if there are no chances of promotion where they are, says Beeton, they will shift sideways to a smarter household). The mistress, meanwhile, isn’t simply getting up early for the sake of it, but in order to manage her household more efficiently, keeping a hawk-eye out for wasted time or money. Embedded in Beeton’s text is the assumption that this household is an aspirational one, busy edging itself into a style of living that currently lies just out of reach.

In order to achieve that lifestyle – an extra housemaid, a second footman – the income of the household will need to rise too, and Mrs Beeton thoughtfully provides a table showing what each jump of £200 or so will give you. So although the head of the household remains mainly off stage in the Book of Household Management, his economic efforts remain absolutely crucial to the whole enterprise. He, too, is busy improving his position in the workplace so that his wife can run a better-staffed home, and his servants can in turn push for promotion.

Since everyone in Beeton’s household is busy helping themselves (in all senses) it is a nice coincidence that 1859, the year that the Book of Household Management first started appearing in parts, is also the year that Samuel Smiles published his iconic Self-Help. These days more referred to than read, Self-Help consists of thirteen chapters with stirring titles such as ‘Application and Perseverance’ and ‘Energy and Courage’ in which lower-middle-class men are urged to emulate the educational and social trajectories of such titans as Robert Peel, James Watt, or Josiah Wedgwood. The message of Smiles’ book, repeated over and over again as if in an attempt at self-hypnosis, is that in the new industrial age pedigree and birth no longer make a gentleman. What matters now are thrift, hard work, and temperance. Properly pursued – and perseverance is everything here – these qualities won’t simply make you pleasant, civilized and cultured, they will also make you rich: ‘energy enables a man to force his way through irksome drudgery and dry details, and carries him onward and upward in every station in life’. Rich enough, in fact, to afford the cook, upper housemaid, nursemaid, under-housemaid and manservant that Mrs Beeton envisages for the household whose income is ‘About £1,000 a year’.

But Self-Help and Beeton’s Book of Household Management are bound together by more than a shared publication date and a driving concern with social advancement. The Smiles family happened to be very good friends of the Dorlings. Although Samuel Smiles was a Scotsman who had worked as both a doctor and a newspaper editor in Leeds, by 1854 he was settled in Blackheath where he was employed as a railway executive, writing his books on the side. The two families were initially intimate in south London where both households were known for their generous hospitality. This intimacy continued after Henry and Elizabeth Dorling’s deaths in the early 1870s when six of the unmarried Dorling and Mayson girls moved to Kensington, just around the corner from where the Smiles were now living in style in Pembroke Gardens. In April 1874 Lucy Dorling, the little half-sister who had always been closest to Isabella, walked up the aisle with Willy Smiles, Samuel Smiles’ second eldest son.

And there the story might have ended, with the neat coming together of the two families that between them produced the founding texts of mid-Victorian social aspiration. But there is a final, chilling coda, which suggests just what happened when Self-Help and Household Management blended a little too enthusiastically. Lucy and the tyrannical Willy, who ran the Belfast Rope Works, produced eleven children. The story goes that in order to encourage early rising, perseverance and so on in his brood, Willy insisted that every morning there would be only ten boiled eggs provided for the children’s breakfast. The last one down, the slugabed, went hungry.

CHAPTER THREE ‘Paper Without End’

AT 39 MILK STREET, on the opposite side of the road and a little further up from Benjamin Mayson’s warehouse, stood the Dolphin public house. It was on the corner with, in fact virtually part of, Honey Lane Market. In its original, medieval incarnation, the market had been at the centre of the brewing industry, the place where local beer makers, the forerunners of the Victorian giants Charrington and Whitbread, went to get their mead. At some point Honey Lane had turned into a general food market with a hundred stalls, and then, in 1787, it had been developed into a parade of thirty-six lock-up shops. Now, in 1835, two years before Benjamin Mayson brought his new bride Elizabeth and baby Isabella to live in Milk Street, the market had been knocked down to make way for the new City of London Boys’ School, which promised to provide a modern, liberal education for the sons of commercial or trading men to fit them for the brisk new world that everyone agreed was on its way.

The evolution of Honey Lane Market is a timely reminder that until well into the nineteenth century the City of London was as much a place of manufacture, retail and residence as it was the hub of the nation’s finances. To the outsider who happened to stray too far along its narrow, crooked streets it was as closed and as inscrutable as any village. Everywhere you looked in the square mile around St Paul’s you could see ordinary, everyday needs pressing on the landscape. Long before Lancashire cotton had taken over Milk Street, it was the place where you went for your dairy produce. Wood Street, which ran parallel and was now the epicentre of the textile trade, had once been thick with trees and the source of cheap and easy kindling. Just over the road, on the other side of Cheapside, were the self-explanatory Bread Street and Friday, that is Fish, Street. All these were now given over to the ubiquitous ‘Manchester warehouses’, wholesaling operations that functioned as a funnel between the textile factories of the northwest, bulked out by cheaper imports from India, and the luxury drapery stores of the West End. A hundred yards to the east was Grocers’ Hall Court and just beyond that was Old Jewry where the Jews who had come over with Norman William had settled to live and trade. Now, in a pale copy of its original self, it was the place you went if you wanted to pawn your jewellery, get a valuation, or simply have your watch set to rights.