The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton. Kathryn Hughes
enthusiastic paragraphs to a newly patented system for mass-producing aerated bread. During this process ‘the dough is mixed in a great iron ball, inside which is a system of paddles … then the common atmospheric air is pumped out, and the pure gas turned on.’ It was from these unappetizing beginnings that the Aerated Bread Company or ABC would emerge to become a commercial giant of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, providing white sliced loaf, as smooth and tasteless as sponge, to the nation.
None of this makes Mrs Beeton’s rusticism phoney, although her vision of agrarian Britain is quaintly out of date, lacking any mention of intensive farming methods, high seasonal unemployment, and endemic poverty among the rural working class. But what Beeton shared with some of the most persuasive voices of her age was the nagging feeling that all the good things about modern urban living – heat on demand, sauces that came out the same every time, a dripping pan furnished with its own stand – arrived at a cost. But what that cost was exactly, and whether it was too high a price to pay for convenience, safety, and comfort was something that she hardly had time to consider. Whirling not so much like a dervish as a cog in a particularly intricate machine, she pressed on in a blur of activity, determined to finish her 1,112 pages in record time. ‘The Free, Fair Homes of England’ remained a lovely, compensating dream.
CHAPTER TWO ‘Chablis to Oysters’
ALTHOUGH EPSOM LIES only 14 miles away from the City of London as the crow flies, it could not have been more different from the cluttered streets and close courts in which Isabella Mayson had spent most of the first seven years of her life. Positioned on a ridge in the North Downs, the town manages to be both flat and high at the same time. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it enjoyed an extended spell as a restorative spa, when its indigenous salts were said to work wonders on jaded digestions. Samuel Pepys took the waters there a couple of times, finding it funny to watch as his fellow sippers rushed for the bushes, caught short by the salts’ laxative effect. But by the opening of the nineteenth century, the fashionably liverish had moved on to Cheltenham and Bath, leaving Epsom to its devices as a quiet market town that turned, once a year, into Gomorrah. Dickens got the scale of the transformation best, writing in 1851 that for most days of the year Epsom was virtually dead but how ‘On the three hundred and sixty fifth, or Derby Day, a population surges and rolls, and scrambles through the place, that may be counted in millions.’
For a few short days during the summer race meeting, well-mannered Epsom became the destination of every swell, Guards officer, dwarf, clerk, tart, orange-seller, thimble rigger, prize-fighter, crook, and lady of fashion in the country. Ruskin called the Derby the ‘English carnival’ and from the breaking hours on the day itself – usually in June – a spirit of excitement and misrule began to bubble far away in London. In Clapham, Mitcham, and Tooting, not to mention Belgravia, Hyde Park, and Knightsbridge people commandeered every phaeton, gig, barouche, four-in-hand, brake, tilbury, and donkey cart for the short journey south. Alongside the shambling caravan of race-goers trundled dusty sellers of every kind of snack, novelty, and stimulant, all shouting and shoving in their attempt to turn a copper, honest or otherwise. Every public house along the route was packed with Derby-goers in various stages of tipsiness and with only a passing interest in the racing. Some indeed never got further than the Swan at Clapham or the Cock at Sutton, and Dickens reckoned that most people returned from the day unable to remember the name of the winning horse, let alone its jockey. As the chaotic column of humanity approached the Surrey Downs the sheer press of numbers meant that it started to stall. A 7- or 8-mile tailback was not unknown and it could take a whole hour to clear the final 3 miles. Local hawkers took advantage of this pooling throng to press upon it anything from a racing card to pigeon pie, lemonade to a second-hand umbrella. The mood could turn merry, but seldom sour. As the Illustrated London News advised Derby-goers briskly: ‘if things are thrown at you, just throw them back.’
From 1837, if you were modern-minded, you could make the journey from London by train. The London–Brighton line took you as far as the quaintly named Stoat’s Nest, from where it was a 7-mile tramp to the Downs. Next year came the welcome news that a rival line, the London and South-Western, was to run special Derby Day excursion trains on their Southampton line. But such was the press at Nine Elms in south London, the result of thousands of people trying to pile onto eight meagre trains, that the police were called in to disperse the increasingly desperate crowd. Even then, the train only went as far as Surbiton, which was still a good 5 miles from the course. It was not for nearly another decade that a line was built all the way to Epsom.
Once the crowds were disgorged – in 1843, the year that Isabella arrived in Epsom, it was reckoned that 127,500 extra souls poured into the town for the Derby – the party continued, helped along by liberal supplies from the temporary beer and spirit stalls. Up on the Hill, the large bank rising at the edge of the racetrack, there was a temporary funfair with swings, roundabouts, Italian hurdy-gurdy players, and acrobats who insisted on twisting themselves into impossible shapes. Winding among the crowd you could see jaunty perennial eccentrics like ‘Sir’ John Bennett, a prosperous jeweller from Cheapside who resembled a beery Father Christmas and would drink anyone’s health while ambling along on his cob. Others, who liked to think themselves fashionable, bought cheap German articulated wooden dolls and crammed them around the brims of their hats – an odd craze that no one could ever quite explain.
This gaggle of humanity was augmented by a fair number of gypsies, who had gathered the previous weekend on the racecourse for ‘Show Out Sunday’, their annual meeting of the clans. Fortunes were told, palms crossed with silver, and heather thrust under reluctant noses. The place was a petty criminal’s paradise: in the squawk and clatter it was child’s play to pick a pocket or sneak off with someone else’s lunch. Prostitutes worked swiftly and unobtrusively, card sharps blended back into the crowd at a moment’s notice. A temporary magistrates’ court was set up in the Grandstand to deal with all the extra business, and additional policing was, by tradition, partly paid for by the winner of that year’s Derby. During race week the manager of the Epsom branch of the London and County Bank kept a loaded rifle with a fixed bayonet close by his desk while Baron de Tessier, one of the local grandees and Steward to the Course, hired extra police protection for his family. Yet still it felt like a losing battle: right-minded burghers could only fume over the way their lives had been so rudely interrupted by the incomers. Unless, of course, they happened to be publicans, shopkeepers or pie makers, in which case they hiked their prices and pasted on a welcoming smile.
Artists loved the Derby, although not necessarily for its horses, which they tended to paint as little rocking creatures whose hooves never quite contacted the ground. It was the crowds they came to see. Over the next century, Millais, Degas, ‘Phiz’, Doré, and Géricault would all take their turn at trying to get the spirit of the place down on paper. George Cruikshank did a brilliant 6-foot cartoon strip called ‘The Road to the Derby’, showing every aspect of human and horsey life on the long trail down from London. But the most successful execution came from William Frith. His Derby Day of 1858 (the not very inspirational title was suggested by Henry Dorling) is a wide-screen panorama of the crowd on the Hill, consisting of ninety distinct figures. Carefully composed in his London studio in a series of artful triangles, you will find smocked countrymen, sinister gypsies, tipsy ladies, flushed punters, a sly thimble rigger, and a hungry child acrobat who watches in disbelief as a top-hatted footman unpacks a feast (the child model, hired from the circus, proved to be a menace in the studio – somersaulting into props and teasing the little Friths about their posh manners).
Derby Day was so hugely popular when it was shown at the Royal Academy that it had to be protected by a policeman and an iron railing in order to stop the admiring crowds pitching forward. On the stately world tour that followed, the painting attracted huge attention wherever it went. Since Frith was known to have been paid a whopping £1,500, Derby Day naturally spawned a whole host of flattering copy-cats. The best of these, the much engraved At Epsom Races, 1863 by Alfred Hunt, rearranges the tipsy ladies, adds an urchin and some shady tradesmen in an attempt to recreate that same sense of fluxy human life.
What pulled artists to Epsom was the fact that