The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton. Kathryn Hughes
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