The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

In any case, as the son and grandson of a publican Sam was already part of the newspaper trade. Pubs were frequently the only house in the street to take a daily paper, and many did a brisk trade in hiring it out at 1d an hour. In addition, the Society of Licensed Victuallers produced the Morning Advertiser, which, at that time, was the nation’s only daily newspaper apart from The Times. It was to the Advertiser’s offices at 27 Fleet Street that the original Samuel Beeton had headed every Monday afternoon during the early years of the century for the Victuallers’ committee meetings. Even more importantly, the publicans’ paper delivered a healthy profit to the society, which was regularly divvied up among the members. So as far as the Beetons were concerned, a man who went into print would never go hungry.

Sam does not seem to have served a formal apprenticeship, the kind where you were bound at 14 to a single master and graduated as a journeyman in the appropriate livery company seven years later. That system, based on a medieval way of doing things, had long been winding down. The printing industry, exploding in the 1840s, appeared so modern that it seemed increasingly irrelevant to enter your lad’s name on the rolls at Stationers’ Hall, and pay for the privilege. The vested interests, of course, were worried at this new chaotic way of doing things, in which boys learned their trade with one firm for a few years before hiring themselves out as adult workers, well before their twenty-first birthdays.

It was, in any case, not to a printer that Sam was set to learn his trade, but to a paper merchant. The main cluster of London’s paper merchants was on Lower Thames Street, situated handily on the river to receive supplies from the paper mills in estuarine Kent. New technologies meant that paper could now be made out of cheap wood pulp rather than expensive rags, with the result that barges bearing bales of paper were starting to appear almost daily in the bowels of the City. Since Lower Thames Street was only a few hundred yards from Milk Street, Sam almost certainly came back from Suffolk to live at the Dolphin in 1845, the year he turned 14. That Sam’s was not a formal apprenticeship is confirmed by the fact that in 1851, one year short of the twenty-first birthday that would have ended any contractual arrangement, he gives his employment to the census enumerator as a ‘Traveller’ in a wholesale stationery firm. Always in a hurry, it would be hard to imagine Sam Beeton serving out his time as a ‘lad’ when he knew himself to be a man, and one with places to go.

Working in a paper office may sound peripheral to the explosion in the knowledge industry, but actually it was one of the best groundings for life as a magazine editor and book publisher. Young men higher up the social scale – not university graduates, but the sons of men with more cash and clout – went into junior jobs on the staff of publishers or newspapers. Here they may have learned about the editorial side of things, but they were often left ignorant of the pounds, shillings, and pence of the business. Sam, by contrast, with his less gentlemanly training, got to grips with how the product worked from the bottom up. Whether you were publishing high literature or low farce, ladies’ fashions or children’s Bible stories, elevating texts or smutty jokes, you needed what Sam, in a letter written fifteen years later when he was a fully fledged publisher, would describe triumphantly as ‘paper without end’.

This is not to suggest that this latter phase of Sam’s education was confined to counting reams, hefting quires and sucking fingers made sore from paper cuts. Being a stationery seller took you into other people’s offices and it was here Sam made friends with a group of young men working in adjacent trades. There was Frederick Greenwood, a print setter who had probably been apprenticed to a firm in nearby New Fetter Lane but, after only a year, found himself engaged as a publisher’s reader. Greenwood would become Beeton’s right-hand man for nearly a decade, before striking out on a glittering career as an editor on his own account. He had an equally talented though more mercurial younger brother, James, who would go on to be one of the first investigative journalists of his day and who would publish much of his work under the imprint of S. O. Beeton. Then there was James Wade, who may have served an apprenticeship in the same firm as Frederick Greenwood and would print many of Beeton’s publications, especially the initial volumes of the ground-breaking Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine.

Whether your first job was in a paper merchant’s or a printing house, the work was hard, taking up to twelve hours a day and a good part of Saturday. But that did not stop these vigorous young men getting together in the evening. These were exciting times and it was impossible for them not to feel that they had been set upon the earth at just the right moment. In an interview towards the end of his life Greenwood maintained, ‘It was worth while being born in the early ’thirties’ in order ‘to feel every day a difference so much to the good’. Coming into the world around the time of the Great Reform Act, these boys had lived through the three big Chartist uprisings, witnessed the repeal of the Corn Laws and seen the beginnings of legislation that would go to create the modern state (hence Greenwood, who remembered from his early working days the sight of shoeless boys wandering around St Paul’s, maintaining that things really were getting better every day). Now as they came into manhood these young men insisted on seeing signs all around them that the world – or their world – was moving forward. After the rigours of the ‘hungry forties’ Britain was entering a golden age of prosperity, a sunny upland where it was possible to believe that hard work, material wellbeing and intellectual progress walked hand in hand.

More specifically, these young men had seen at first hand just how the social and political changes of the last few years had been lobbied, debated, modified, and publicized through the burgeoning culture of printed news. Greenwood paying to read a paper every morning from nine to ten, or Sam popping into the Dolphin for the latest edition of the Morning Advertiser were part of a new generation of people who expected to get their information quickly and accurately, rather than picking up third-hand gossip days later around the village pump. On top of this, these young men had seen their changing world refracted in the bold new fiction that was pouring off the presses. Mary Barton, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, all burst upon the world during the hectic decade that coincided with their apprenticeships. Nor was it just the content of these books – rough, even raw – that was new. The way they were produced, in cheap cardboard formats, sometimes serialized in magazines, or available in multiple volumes from Mr Mudie’s lending library in New Oxford Street or Mr Smith’s railway stands, announced a revolution in reading habits. No wonder that, years later, when writing to his elder son at prep school, a boy who had never known what it was not to have any text he wanted immediately to hand, Sam counselled sadly ‘you do not read books enough.’

There were other excitements, too, of a more immediate nature. It was now that Sam Beeton and Frederick Greenwood discovered sex and spent their lives dealing with its consequences. At the time Greenwood was living in lodgings off the Goswell Road, away from his parental home in west London. In June 1850, at the age of only 20, he married Catherine Darby. Although the marriage was not of the shotgun variety – the first baby wasn’t born until a decorous eighteen months later – it was miserable, ending in separation and a series of minders for the increasingly alcoholic and depressed Mrs Greenwood (when visitors came round for tea she promptly hid the cups under the cushions on the grounds that she didn’t want company). But in one way Greenwood was lucky. Early marriage did for him what a growing band of moralists maintained it would, providing him with a prophylactic against disease, drink, and restlessness. Marriage steadied a man and young Frederick Greenwood was nothing if not steady.

Greenwood’s friend Sam Beeton was not so fortunate. Just what happened during his crucial years of young adulthood has been obscured by embarrassment and smoothed over with awkward tact. Nancy Spain, no fan of Sam, quotes from a conversation he had in later life. Strolling through London, Sam was supposed to have pointed out ‘the window he used to climb out at night’ as a lad, adding wistfully that ‘he began life too soon’. Spain does not source the quotation and it would be easy to dismiss the whole anecdote were it not for the odd fact that H. Montgomery Hyde, who researched his biography independently of Spain, evidently had access to this same conversation. Hyde has the young man ‘confessing’ that he contrived to have ‘quite a gay time’ in his youth, before going on to point out the infamous window.

The language that both Spain and Hyde ascribe to Sam speaks volumes. Climbing out of a window immediately suggests something illicit, something which the boy did not wish his father, stepmother and gaggle of half-sisters and step-aunts to know about. ‘Beginning life too soon’ makes no sense, either, unless it refers to street life – drink, cards, whores (boys of Sam’s class were used to the idea that their working lives began at fourteen). Also telling is Hyde’s detail about Sam referring to having had a ‘gay time’ – ‘gay’ being the standard code word designating commercial heterosexual sex. (‘Fanny, how long have you been gay?’ asks one prostitute of another in a cartoon of the time.)

Once Sam had scrambled out of the Dolphin window it was only a ten-minute saunter to the Strand, that no-man’s-land between the City and the West End which had long been synonymous with prostitution. What was mostly a male space during the day – all those print shops, stationers and booksellers – turned at night into something altogether more assorted. From the nearby taverns and theatres poured groups of young men in varying states of cheeriness, while from the rabbit warren of courts and alleys came women who needed to make some money, quickly and without fuss. (Brothels were never a British thing, and most prostitutes worked the streets as freelance operators.) The young men who used the women’s services were not necessarily bad, certainly not the rakes or sadists or degenerates of our contemporary fantasies. In fact, if anything, they were probably the prudent ones, determined to delay marriage until they were 30 or so and had saved up a little nest egg. So when the coldness and loneliness of celibacy became too much, it was these careful creatures of capitalism who ‘spent’ – the polite term for male orgasm – 5 shillings on a dreary fumble which, if Sam is anything to go by, they shuddered to recall years later. In this early part of Victoria’s reign, before the social reformer Josephine Butler started to provide a woman’s perspective on the situation, there were plenty of sensible people who believed that prostitution was the price you paid for keeping young middle-class men focused, productive and mostly continent during their vital teens and twenties.

The man whom Sam accused of initiating him into the city’s night life was Charles Henry Clarke, a bookbinder ten years older than himself operating from offices at 148 Fleet Street and 251/2 Bouverie Street. Clarke was in partnership with a printer called Frederick Salisbury, a 40-year-old man originally from Suffolk, who also had premises in Bouverie Street. Recently Clarke and Salisbury had branched out from simply printing and binding books for other publishers to producing them themselves, mostly reissuing existing texts (British copyright at this point was a messy, floutable business). It was this expanding side of the business that particularly attracted Sam, who wanted to be a proper publisher rather than simply a paper man. Armed with some capital, possibly from his mother’s estate, and a burning sense of destiny, Sam joined Salisbury and Clarke as a partner around the time of his twenty-first birthday in the spring of 1852 with the intention of building a publishing empire to cater for the reading needs of the rising lower middle classes, the very people from whom he had sprung. Newly confident, flush with a little surplus cash, literate but not literary, comprising everyone from elderly women who had come up from the country, through their bustling tradesmen sons to their sharp, knowing granddaughters, these were the people whom Samuel was gearing up to supply with every kind of reading material imaginable, as well as some that had yet to be thought of.

And, for a while, he was flukishly successful. During those last few months of Sam’s informal apprenticeship, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been doing huge and surprising business in her native America. Since there was no copyright agreement with the States – in fact there would be none until 1891 – a whole slew of British publishers immediately scented the possibility of making a profit simply by reprinting the book and adding their own title page and cover. One of these was Henry Vizetelly, a brilliant but permanently under-capitalized publisher and engraver who made an arrangement with Clarke and Salisbury to split the costs of publishing 2,500 copies of the book to sell at 2s 6d. Initially Uncle Tom’s Cabin made little impact in Britain, but a swift decision to bring out a 1s edition paid speedy dividends. By July 1852 it was selling at the rate of 1,000 copies a week.

Using the extra capital that Sam had brought into the firm, he and Clarke now set about exploiting this sensational demand for Mrs Stowe’s sentimental novel about life among black slaves in the southern states of America. Seventeen printing presses and four hundred people were pulled into service in order to bring out as many new editions of Uncle Tom as anyone could think of – anything from a weekly 1d serial, through a 1s railway edition to a luxury version with ‘forty superb illustrations’ for 7s 6d. This was a new way of thinking about books. Instead of a stable entity, fixed between a standard set of covers, Beeton’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a spectacularly malleable artefact, one that could be repackaged and re-presented to different markets an almost infinite number of times.

Inevitably this feeding frenzy attracted other British publishers – seventeen in fact – who lost no time in producing their own editions of Mrs Stowe’s unlikely hit, often simply reprinting Clarke and Beeton’s text and adding their own title page. What many of them had missed, though, was the fact that some of these Clarke, Beeton editions contained significant additions to the original American text, comprising a new Introduction and explanatory chapter headings written by Frederick Greenwood. By unwittingly reproducing these, publishers such as Frederick Warne were infringing Clarke and Beeton’s British copyright. As a result of this greedy mistake, Clarke and Beeton were in an extraordinarily strong position, able to insist that the pirated stock was handed over to them, whereupon they simply reissued it under their own name. Uncle Tom probably achieved the greatest short-term sale of any book published in Britain in the nineteenth century, and the firm of Clarke and Beeton walked away with a very large slice of the stupendous profits. For a young man venturing into the marketplace for the first time, the omens must have seemed stunning.

Fired by his spectacular good fortune, Sam was determined to get first dibs on Mrs Stowe’s follow-up book. And so late in that delirious summer of 1852 he took the extraordinary step of tearing off to the States to beard the middle-aged minister’s wife in her Massachusetts lair. Initially she refused to see him, then relented and almost immediately wished she had not. The young man’s opening gambit, of presenting her with the electrotype plates from the luxury British edition, was sadly misjudged. Included among these was a cover illustration comprising a highly eroticized whipping scene, exactly the kind of thing that Mrs Stowe had taken pains to avoid. ‘There is not one scene of bodily torture described in the book – they are purposely omitted,’ she explained reprovingly to him in a later letter, probably wondering whether this brash young Englishman had really got the point of her work at all.

Next Sam tried cash, offering Mrs Stowe a payment of £500. If he thought that she would roll over in gratitude, then he could not have been more mistaken. For all that she liked to present herself as an unworldly minister’s wife, Mrs Stowe had a surprising grasp of the pounds, shillings and pence of authorship. It had not escaped her sharp attention that Sam, together with other British firms, had harvested from her work ‘profits … which I know have not been inconsiderable’. In the end she accepted the £500, together with a further £250, but not before making it quite clear in a letter to Sam that this did not constitute any kind of payment, promise, or obligation.

As if to emphasize to Sam that he was not quite the uniquely coming man he thought himself to be, the Fates conspired that as he left Mrs Stowe after his first interview, he bumped into another British publisher walking up her drive. Sampson Low had crossed the Atlantic for exactly the same purpose, to coax Mrs Stowe into giving him an early advantage in publishing the sequel to Uncle Tom. In the end Mrs Stowe agreed to furnish both Beeton and Low, together with another British publisher Thomas Bosworth, with advance pages of her next work, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As it turned out, this shared arrangement was lucky, since it meant that each of the firms got to bear only one third of the colossal losses. The Key turned out to be a dreary affair, nothing more than a collection of the documentary sources on which the novel had been based. The fact that Mrs Stowe insisted beforehand that ‘My Key will be stronger than the Cabin,’ suggests how little she understood – and, perhaps, cared about – the reasons for her phenomenal popular success.

It says something about Sam’s character that, right from the start, there were people who were delighted to see him take this tumble. Vizetelly, the man who had first brought Uncle Tom to Clarke but who had missed out on the staggering profits from the subsequent editions, was particularly thrilled at the loss that Sam was now taking with The Key. When Vizetelly, who was ten years older than Beeton and already recognized as a noisy talent in Fleet Street, had approached the lad at the end of the summer of 1852 to ask about his share of the profit, he was sent away with a flea in his ear and an abiding dislike of the cocky upstart. Decades later, writing his puffily self-serving autobiography, Vizetelly was still gloating over the fact that ‘With a daring confidence, that staggered most sober-minded people, the deluded trio, Clarke, Beeton, and Salisbury, printed a first edition of fifty thousand copies, I think it was, the bulk of which eventually went to the trunk makers, while the mushroom firm was obliged to go into speedy liquidation.’

Vizetelly’s claim that Clarke, Beeton went into immediate liquidation looks like wishful thinking. Certainly there is no formal record of them being forced to close down. Nor is it true, as earlier Beeton biographers have maintained, that it was at this point that Beeton ditched Clarke and went into business on his own. Right up until 1855 Clarke and Beeton were printing some books and magazines under their joint names while also continuing to work separately. It was not until 1857 that the break finally came, with characteristic (for Sam) bad temper. In February of that year Beeton v. Clarke was heard before Lord Campbell. Both parties had hired QCs, which hardly came cheap, to argue over whether Clarke, who was now operating independently out of Paternoster Row, owed Beeton £181. The wrangle dated back to the mad days of summer 1852 when, during their scrappy coming to terms over the profits of Uncle Tom, the firm of Clarke, Beeton and Salisbury had bought from Henry Vizetelly his profitable imprint ‘Readable Books’. Now that the relationship between Clarke and Beeton had dramatically soured, they were bickering like estranged lovers over small sums of money. The jury found for Sam, one of the few occasions in his long litigious career when he would emerge vindicated.

Typically Sam made huge cultural capital from the Uncle Tom affair. Not only did he manage to win Mrs Stowe round by his charismatic presence for long enough to extract introductions to several American intellectuals, including her brother Revd H. W. Beecher of Brooklyn, Wendell Holmes, and Longfellow, he also talked up his relationship with the celebrity authoress thereafter, managing to imply that she was anxiously watching over the affairs of Clarke, Beeton from the other side of the Atlantic. The Preface to the sixth edition of Uncle Tom, published this time by ‘Clarke & Co, Foreign Booksellers’, shows just how far he was prepared to go:

In presenting this Edition to the British public the Publishers, equally on behalf of the Authoress and themselves, beg to render their acknowledgements of the sympathy and success the work has met with in England … Our Editions are the real ‘Author’s Editions’; we are in direct negotiation with Mrs Stowe; and we confidently hope that when accounts are made up we shall be in a position to award that talented lady a sum not inferior in amount to her receipts in America.

Thereafter Sam would tie his own name to Mrs Stowe’s in the public’s mind wherever possible. Thus years later, in Beeton’s Dictionary of Universal Information, he could not resist retelling the story of how he had crossed the Atlantic in the late summer of 1852 to present Mrs Stowe with a voluntary payment of £500. The fact that he had first tried to get away with giving her some printers’ plates that he no longer needed and she particularly disliked was, typically enough, never mentioned.

INTERLUDE

We are so sorry to say that the preserved meats are sometimes carelessly prepared, and, though the statement seems incredible, sometimes adulterated.

ISABELLA BEETON, Book of Household Management

MAKING SURE THAT the food that came to table was pure was something of an obsession with Mrs Beeton. Now that the average household was dependent not on the farmer but the greengrocer and baker for its provisions, the opportunities for contamination were legion. A series of investigations carried out by the Lancet between 1851 and 1854 had revealed to a horrified nation that a whole range of its staple foods were routinely watered down, bulked out, tinted up and, by a whole series of sleights of hand, turned into something that they were not. Every single one of forty-nine random samples of bread examined by the Lancet were found to contain alum; the milk turned out to have water added in amounts ranging from 10 to 50 per cent; and of twenty-nine tins of coffee examined, twenty-eight were adulterated with chicory, mangel-wurzel, and acorn, while a typical sample of tea contained up to half its own weight in iron filings.

The reasons for this terrible state of affairs are various, but mainly come down to the voracious conditions in which retailers were operating in Mrs Beeton’s day. Bread, for instance, was frequently sold below the cost of flour, which meant that the baker had to find some way of bulking out his loaves in order to avoid making a loss. Likewise, milk was bought wholesale for 3d a quart and retailed at 4d. So by adding just 10 per cent of water the tradesman reaped 40 per cent extra profit.

Popularized versions of the Lancet’s findings appeared throughout the press, creating a climate of fearful protest throughout the 1850s. Disappointingly, the resultant 1860 Adulteration of Foods Act turned out to be a toothless tiger, and responsibility for cleaning up Britain’s food was left in the hands of various voluntary groups, as well as to the manufacturers themselves. In 1855 Mr Thomas Blackwell of Crosse and Blackwell explained to a Select Committee that his firm had recently given up the habit of coppering pickles and fruits and artificially colouring sauces, despite consumers initially being disgruntled to discover that pickles were actually brown not green and that anchovies were not naturally a nice bright red. It was not until 1872 that Britain got an effective Adulteration of Food, Drinks and Drugs Act.