The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

CHAPTER FOUR ‘The Entire Management of Me’

ISABELLA MAYSON AND SAMUEL BEETON had been in and out of each other’s lives from well before they were born, five years apart, in the early springs of 1831 and 1836. The Mayson-Dorling clan may not have been related to the Beetons by blood or marriage, but they did belong to that category of people, defined by personal history, geography, commerce, and affinity, that went by the name of ‘kith’. Both Samuel Powell Beeton and Benjamin Mayson had been Manchester warehousemen. Their wives had arrived in Milk Street at exactly the same time and both proceeded to give birth to a tribe of girls and the occasional boy. Eliza and Victoria Beeton were almost exactly the same ages as Isabella and Bessie Mayson and it was only natural for the little girls to troop across the road to play together among the barrels or the bales. This intimate daily contact stopped in 1843 when the Maysons were whisked away to begin a new life with the Dorlings in Epsom. However, the friendship between the two families must have remained strong, since a few years later all the girls – Maysons, Dorlings, and Beetons – were sent, in batches, to Miss Heidel’s in Heidelberg.

There are other reasons for thinking that contact between the two families continued even once they had ceased being neighbours. Samuel Powell Beeton was a keen racing man and had turned the Dolphin into something of a sporting pub. Raising a large prize purse was, as Henry Dorling was fast discovering in his job as Clerk of the Course at Epsom, a perpetual challenge. Beeton’s canny solution in 1846 was to post subscription lists in the Dolphin and other busy City pubs, with the result that the new Epsom 21/4-mile handicap was known from the outset as ‘The Publican’s Derby’ (part of the money raised went to the Licensed Victuallers’ School). Nor did Beeton’s connection with Dorling stop there. In the early 1850s he was regularly racing his own horses at various of the lesser Epsom meetings. One final point of contact: although William Dorling had set up as a printer in Bexhill all those years ago, he was actually an Ipswich man. For at least the last hundred years Dorlings and Beetons had lived and worked alongside each other in Suffolk.

So from the very moment they were old enough to register such things, Isabella and Sam would have been aware of each other’s existence through the networks of chat and mutual interest that bound their families together, the female members particularly. They may well have met as small children on those occasions when Sam came back to Milk Street from his grandmother’s house in Hadleigh to visit the Dolphin. They almost certainly encountered each other in the late 1840s and early 1850s when Samuel Powell Beeton was a regular fixture at the Epsom racetrack. In a world where you married the boy next door, or at least the boy in the next street, who also happened to be the son of your father’s business partner and a school friend of your brother, Sam was pretty much marked out for Isabella. It didn’t feel like that, of course. Arranged marriages were out of fashion, even for the aristocracy, and among young, middle-class people love matches were the order of the day. But while she probably believed that she was following her heart, Isabella was actually revealing herself as a creature of her time and place.

Since we will never know the moment they actually met, it is worth considering just what made Isabella Mary Mayson and Samuel Orchart Beeton give each other a second, third, and fourth glance. It is easy to imagine what she saw in him. He was sufficiently like her stepfather, whom she called ‘Father’, to feel familiar, part of the kith network that held her world together. Sam talked of deadlines and printing presses, proofs, boards and first copies just arrived, using a language that had been the background clatter of her childhood. But he was sufficiently different from Henry to seem exciting too. Even in twenty years’ time Sam Beeton was never going to be a mutton-chopped paterfamilias, rigid with respectability and self-regard. The excitement of the streets hung around him like the smoke from his habitual cigars. His particular pleasures included prize-fights, ratting contests, and, although Isabella probably didn’t know this, prostitutes. (Two thirds of the way through their courtship, according to Sam, she teased him about ‘what you are pleased to call my roving nature’, but it is impossible to know exactly what she meant by it.) He was both of her class and yet not quite. Although she had been at school with his sisters – one of the key indicators of a young man’s suitability as a husband – there was still a cockneyism about him that was thrilling, especially since she had been brought up by people keen to forget that sort of thing in their own backgrounds. He was that delicious thing, a familiar stranger, a buried subtext.

To Isabella, a girl who had learned to deal with her emotional needs by displacing them onto other people (all those infant tantrums and wet nappies to be calmly coped with), Sam offered thrilling access to her own occluded interior life. His intense emotionality, conveyed both in person and in the many letters he wrote to her at this time, unlocked an answering response in her. Over the length of the year’s courtship we can watch as Isabella evolves from a self-contained and defensive girl into an expansive and loving young woman. Thus while her first surviving letters to her fiancé are curt and cautious – ‘My dearest Sam … Yours most affectionately, Isabella Mayson’ – only six months later they are racing with spontaneous affection, ‘My own darling Sam, … Yours with all love’s devotion BELLA MAYSON’. A latish letter, written on 1 June just six weeks before the wedding, shows Bella taking flight into a candour and rapture that would have been impossible to predict only a few months earlier:

My dearly beloved Sam,

I take advantage of this after dinner opportunity to enjoy myself and have a small chat with you on paper although I have really nothing to say, and looking at it in a mercenary point of view my letter will not be worth the postage. I am so continually thinking of you that it seems to do me a vast amount of good even to do a little black and white business, knowing very well that a few lines of nonsense are always acceptable to a certain mutable gentleman be they ever so short or stupid …

You cannot imagine how I have missed you, and have been wishing all day that I were a bird that I might fly away and be at rest with you, my own precious one.

If Sam set Bella soaring, then she grounded him. Her phlegmatic caution and emotional steadiness provided the much needed anchor for his volatility and frighteningly labile moods. In a letter written towards the end of their engagement in which Sam starts off by reporting that he is ‘horribly blue’ he ends, four pages later, ‘I’m better now than when I began this letter – talking with you, even in this way and at this distance always makes me feel very jolly.’ At the beginning of June 1856, a few weeks before the wedding and worried to distraction by the sluggish launch of his new magazine, the Boy’s Own Journal, Sam explains beseechingly that ‘I can think and work and do so much better and so much more when I can see and feel that it is not for myself, (about whom I care nothing) I am labouring, but for her whom I so ardently prize, and so lovingly cherish in my inmost heart – my own Bella!’ Isabella was the isle of sanity that Sam created outside himself, his superego, his conscience, his place of safety.

And then there was the fact that Sam Beeton was that rare thing, a Victorian man who liked and respected women as much as he loved them. Brought up by his grandmother and surrounded by a clutch of younger half-sisters, he wanted a genuinely companionate marriage, one based on affinity rather than rigid role-play. In Isabella he had found his perfect match, although he could not yet know how profitable that match would become. If he had the flair and the imagination, she had the caution and dogged determination. If he had the manic energy of the possessed, she had the sticking power of an ambitious clerk. At the end of May 1856 and following a colossal row that nearly derailed their engagement altogether, Sam is genuinely disturbed by Isabella’s self-abnegating promise that very soon he would have the ‘entire management’ of her. Puzzled, offended even, he writes back: ‘I don’t desire, I assure you, to manage you – you can do that quite well yourself’, before proceeding to pay admiring tribute to her ‘most excellent abilities’. It was those abilities – including her capacity to ‘manage’ both herself and other people – that would be the making of them both.

Sam’s family was delighted by the news of the engagement, which was formally hatched around the time of the 1855 summer meeting. Eliza Beeton, who had always been extremely fond of her stepson, went out of her way to contrive occasions by which the young people could be alone together during the twelve bumpy months of their engagement. With the sudden loss of her husband just nine months earlier, this young love affair was a happy distraction. Sam’s sisters, too, were thrilled that the girl they had known as a classmate was now to become a member of their family. Eighteen months after the wedding Nelly Beeton, still languishing at school in Heidelberg, was tickled pink to be able to sign her letter ‘Your affectionate sister-in-law’.

Bella’s family, though, was not so sure. A contemporary painting by James Hayllar suggests how it should have been. The Only Daughter shows a beloved young woman announcing the news of her engagement to her elderly parents. With one hand she grasps her father’s in shocked delight while with the other she reaches out to her fiancé, a stolid young man who, with just the right degree of gentlemanly tact, averts his face from this sacred moment. This little scene is, in turn, watched by the girl’s grey-haired mother who puts down her sewing for a moment to contemplate the mood of solemn joy.

We do not know how things played out in the drawing room of Ormond House when Isabella announced that she was to marry Sam Beeton. In fact this scene probably never took place: since she was only 19, Sam would first have had to ask her stepfather for permission to propose. Quite why Henry agreed to his stepdaughter marrying a man he evidently disliked and soon came to loathe remains a mystery. Perhaps the fact that within nine months of her wedding Isabella would turn 21, made him think that there was little point in trying to delay the inevitable. Elizabeth Dorling, meanwhile, was in no position to warn against an early marriage: when she had walked up the aisle with Isabella’s father in 1835 she too had been barely 20.

However Sam’s formal relationship with the Dorlings actually began, it soon developed into a war of attrition that would end, ten years later, with a rupture between the two families that would take a hundred years and several generations to heal. Right from the start the older Dorling and Mayson girls lined up against Sam. Jane Dorling, just a year younger than Isabella, was edgy about the way that she was getting left behind in the marriage race. Her strenuous attempts to woo a certain Mr Wood by singing him German songs were coming to nothing just at the moment when Isabella and Sam were putting the final touches to their wedding plans. Jane responded by taking out her frustration on the happy couple. In a letter written in the middle of June Sam talks ruefully about Jane’s ‘little sharp ways’ and hopes that Mr Wood succumbs soon since ‘fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind’. (In fact it would be another five years before Jane would get married, and not to the resistant Mr Wood.)

Bessie and Esther, meanwhile, were jealous right from the start, resenting Sam for taking their eldest sister away so soon. The smaller girls Charlotte and Lucy were besotted with Sam at this point, but soon changed their minds once they were old enough to understand the hints and gossip that trickled down from their sisters. In fact, there was only one person in Epsom who was unambiguously thrilled by the news of the engagement and she didn’t count. Tucked away in the Grandstand, Granny Jerrom could not stop talking about the joys and wonders of ‘dear Sam’.

Put simply, Henry Dorling did not think that Samuel Orchart Beeton was good enough for his eldest stepdaughter, whom he regarded as his own flesh and blood. Beneath this judgement lay a fair degree of self-loathing. Sam, like Henry, was an energetic eldest son who had started out in printing before quickly spotting the potential in adjacent pursuits (racing in Henry’s case, book publishing in Sam’s). Both men were sharp, bright, keen self-publicists who knew how to make money. This meant they should have liked one another, were it not for the fact that the prime dynamic of the rising middle classes involved not looking back. Henry had not worked hard, improved his situation, and spent all that money on turning his eldest stepdaughter into a lady in order for her to marry a man who seemed and sounded like himself. His own two eldest girls, Isabella’s near contemporaries Jane and Mary, would eventually marry a lawyer and doctor respectively. A son-in-law belonging to one of the gentlemanly professions was the kind of return Henry expected on his investment, and it looked as though Bella was going to throw it – herself – away.

And then there was Sam’s rackety family. His sisters, who went to school with the Dorling girls in Heidelberg, were nice enough, but there was something raffish about the male members of the Beeton clan. Throughout the period various Beetons had a nasty habit of popping up in the Law Court reports. There is Thomas Beeton, Sam’s uncle and lodger at the Dolphin, who in 1834 is charged with making impertinent remarks to women in the street. In the next generation down things were no more promising. Sam’s younger half-brother Edward Albert would, while still in his teens, be charged with insurance fraud, go bankrupt, flee the country, and eventually serve eighteen months’ hard labour. A quick flick through The Times shows other members of the extended Beeton tribe regularly coming up on charges of arson, careless driving, and a clutch of other minor but unpleasant crimes. Significantly, one of the few times a Dorling is mentioned in the newspaper in a less than benign tone is in 1864 when Sam Beeton went into partnership with Isabella’s stepbrother Edward Dorling and managed to drag him into a bad-tempered property dispute that ended, typically, in court. Whichever way you looked at it, the Beetons were not the kind of people you would rush to call family.

So Henry and Sam embarked upon an uneasy Oedipal relationship in which the elder man could never resist a dig at the younger, and the younger could never quite throw off his need to impress and surpass the elder. During the end part of 1855 Sam, nearly always writing from his hectic office in Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street, had been sending his letters to Isabella in envelopes that were stamped with the logo of his newest venture, the Boy’s Own Journal, a companion weekly title to the well-established monthly Boy’s Own Magazine. Henry hated this vulgarism – he was already worried that the smarter part of Epsom did not consider him quite a gentleman – and insisted that it stop forthwith. In a letter of 3 January 1856 Isabella writes to Sam nervously: ‘I hope you will not be offended with me for sending you a few envelopes. Father said this morning he supposed your passion for advertising was such that you could not resist sending those stamped affairs.’ This, surely, was rather rich coming from a man who had worked hard to make sure that the name ‘Dorling’ appeared on every poster, pamphlet, and local newspaper circulating in Epsom.

Still, Sam continued to yearn for Dorling’s approval while pretending that he did not. In June 1856 he nonchalantly sends Isabella a copy of the brand-new Boy’s Own Journal hot off the press so that she could ‘show the guv’nor so that it may receive his approbation or thunders’. In the run-up to the spring races in 1856 he dutifully intones, ‘I hope your father will have a good meeting next week,’ before making sure that he isn’t available to watch Henry play the Great Man of Epsom. Sam is careful, too, to feign an unconvincing indifference to the whole horsey world. In a postscript to a letter of 10 April 1856, written a week later, Isabella explains, ‘I would have sent you a return List but I know you don’t care about racing.’

It was not even as if, by way of compensation for his rough edges, Sam was a wealthy man. Henry Dorling, whose fondness for money-making was beginning to attract jealous talk, would have noticed the way in which the small fortune Sam had made from the lucky strike of Uncle Tom had been frittered away in the debacle of The Key. And then there was the unfortunate fact that while Sam’s magazines, the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and the Boy’s Own Magazine, appeared to be selling well, this was partly because their publisher was giving away a huge number of loyalty prizes in the form of glitzy trinkets – watches, bracelets, penknives and even pianos. If Dorling was worried that he might be handing over his girl to a man with no money, then the events of February 1856 only confirmed his worst suspicions. For it was now that Sam got himself into some kind of muddle with his lottery arrangements, which meant that he forfeited a colossal £200 a year, about half his annual income. This must have led to some very heated discussions in the drawing room of Ormond House, for by the middle of the month Isabella is writing consolingly to her fiancé, ‘I am sorry to hear you are not likely to get out of your Lottery mess nicely … However, I don’t believe things will be so bad as many people try to make out; as long as you have a head on your shoulders I think you will manage to scrape a living together somehow,’ which hardly sounds like a vote of confidence.

The tensions between the Dorling and Beeton clans would deepen with each year of the nine-year marriage as Sam’s recklessness and cockneyism became more and more apparent. In the early summer of 1855, however, the full extent of these pains lay far in the future, as the newly engaged Isabella and Sam delightedly contemplated each other and the life they would make together. Two images from this time, one of each of them, have come down to us (none has ever been found of them together). The first of these is the iconic photograph of Isabella that now belongs to the National Portrait Gallery. Taken in the London studios of Maull and Polybank, probably at their Cheapside branch, it shows a solemn, solid girl weighed down by the visual signifiers of early Victorian ladyhood. First there is the poker-straight, heavy hair wound into a plaited coronet, so big and tight that it looks as if she is wearing a particularly unbecoming hat (minute inspection reveals that a sturdy chenille net is keeping the whole thing steady). Then there is the dress, made locally in Epsom out of a length of silk given to her by Ralph Sherwood, the Epsom trainer, in celebration of the fact that his horse Wild Dayrell had won the highly dramatic Derby of that year. Patterned with broad bands of colour, pinched into horizontal tucks, and decorated with fussy buttons, the whole thing looks as if it would be better suited to a sofa. The effect is finished with full lace sleeves and collar, a silk shawl edged with heraldic-looking velvet scutcheons, a faceted glass brooch and fancy wristwatch. As a final touch Isabella clutches at a voluminous handkerchief with one hand while with the other she points to her ample bust. She is 20 years old, trussed up like a fussy matron, entirely innocent of the flair that she would display in a few years’ time as fashion editor of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. A photograph taken of her when she was about 24 shows her from this later period, which was how her sisters always chose to remember her: slender, elegant, emphatically unpatterned, with just one striking row of jet beads and not a brooch or handkerchief in sight.

The surviving image of Sam from 1853, two years before the engagement, is a head and shoulders chalk drawing by Julian Portch, a well-known artist who had sketched many young men in Sam’s circle. In the sketch, Portch presents Sam as a romantic hero. His face is long, his eyes large and lingering, his mouth pronounced and sensuous (although we must beware of crude face-mapping – all the Beetons had that mouth and some of them, the women especially, lived blameless lives). The hair is wavy and longish, the necktie soft, large, and careless. This is a young man who likes to think of himself as a rebel, impatient with the ponderous respectability of his elders (significantly he has no beard). If Shelley had been reborn as a Cheapside publican’s son he might have looked a lot like Sam Beeton. A second photograph, taken when Sam was 29, shows little change. There is a light beard and moustache now (he had problems growing a full one), but the general effect is the same. The clothes are self-consciously ‘bohemian’ and the necktie appears to be identical to the one from his youth – casual and imprecise. While Isabella has matured, Sam has contrived to stand still.