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