The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton. Kathryn Hughes
recently been Conservative Foreign Secretary. By way of political balance there was also a portrait of James Keir Hardie, the first leader of the Labour Party in the House of Commons, and a replica of Winterhalter’s magnificent portrait of the Duchess of Kent, Queen Victoria’s mother. Oddly out of place among the confident new arrivals, all oily swirls, ermine, and purposeful stares, was a small hand-tinted photograph of a young woman dressed in the fashion of nearly a hundred years ago. She had a heavy helmet of dark hair, a veritable fuss of brooch, handkerchief, neck chain, and shawl, and the fixed expression of someone who has been told they must not move for fear of ruining everything. The caption beneath her announced that here was ‘Isabella Mary Mayson, Mrs Beeton (1836–65)’, journalist and author of the famous Book of Household Management.
By the time the first members of the public filed past the photograph of Mrs Beeton on Boxing Day, her biographical details had already changed several times. Sir Mayson Beeton, who had presented the photograph of his mother to the nation nine months earlier, had insisted on an exhausting number of tweaks and fiddles to the outline of her life that would be held on record by the gallery. Even so, Beeton was still disappointed when he attended the exhibition’s private view a few days before Christmas. Particularly vexing was the way that the text beneath his mother’s photograph described her as ‘a journalist’. Beeton immediately fired off a letter to the curator, G. K. Adams, suggesting that the wording should be altered to ‘Wife of S. O. Beeton, editor-publisher, with whom she worked and with the help of whose editorial guidance and inspiration she wrote her famous BOOK OF HOUSEHOLD MANAGEMENT devoting to it “four years of incessant labour” 1857–1861’ – a huge amount of material to cram onto a little card. The reason Sir Mayson wanted this change, explained Adams wearily to his boss H. M. Hake, director of the gallery, was that ‘he said his father was an industrious publisher with a pioneer mind, who edited all his own publications, and but for him it is extremely unlikely that Mrs Beeton would have done any writing at all’.
Mayson Beeton was by now 67 and getting particular in his ways. Even so, he had every reason to fuss over exactly how his parents were posthumously presented to the nation. Over the six decades since their deaths Isabella and Samuel Beeton had all but disappeared from public consciousness. The Book of Household Management was in everyone’s kitchen, but most people, if they bothered to think about Mrs Beeton at all, assumed that she was a made-up person, a publisher’s ploy rather than an actual historical figure. Almost worse, from Mayson Beeton’s point of view, was that virtually no one realized that it was Mr, rather than Mrs, Beeton who had coaxed the famous book into being. Its original name, after all, had been Beeton’s Book of Household Management and there was no doubt about which Beeton was being referred to.
Getting the presentation of his parents just right had become an obsession with Mayson Beeton, whose birth in 1865 had been the occasion of his mother’s death. Only the previous year an article had appeared in the Manchester Guardian that managed to muddle up Mrs Beeton with Eliza Acton, a cookery writer from a slightly earlier period. Beeton’s inevitable letter pointing out the error was duly published, and from these small beginnings interest in the real identity and history of Mrs Beeton had begun to bubble. In February 1932 Florence White, an authority on British food, had written a gushy piece in The Times entitled ‘The Real Mrs Beeton’ which drew on information provided by Sir Mayson to paint a picture of a ‘lovely girl’ who enjoyed the advantages of ‘YOUTH, BEAUTY, AND BRAINS’. Mrs Beeton, it transpired, was a real person – albeit a rather two-dimensional one – after all.
H. M. Hake had happened to read White’s piece in The Times and was struck by her reference to the family owning ‘portraits’ of Mrs Beeton and wondered if there might be something suitable to hang in the National Portrait Gallery. The answer, when it came back, was disappointing. There was no portrait of Mrs Beeton, just a black and white albumen print, taken by one of the first generation of High Street photographers, probably in the early summer of 1855 when she was 19 years old. It had subsequently been hand-tinted by one of Sir Mayson’s daughters, giving it a cheap, chalky finish. This was not the kind of flotsam that the National Portrait Gallery usually bothered itself with. Still, the times were changing and it was important to change with them. After a consultative meeting on 7 April 1932 the trustees decided that they were prepared to accept, for the first time in their history, a photographic portrait to hang among their splendid oils and marble busts.
That the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery decided to hang Mrs Beeton on their walls at all says something about changing attitudes to the recent past. During the twenty-five years following the old Queen’s death, the Victorians had seemed like the sort of people to keep your distance from. Indeed, White’s article in The Times had begun: ‘Mrs Beeton lived in the Victorian era, which, as everyone under 30 knows, was dismally frumpish.’ It was lovely to be free of that mutton-chopped certainty, hideous building, starchy protocol, and, of course, endless suet pudding. But as the years went by, what had once seemed oppressively close now became intriguingly quaint and people began to wonder about the names and faces that had formed the background chatter to their childhood. When Hake had written to the assistant editor of The Times asking to be put in contact with the Beeton family, he explained why he thought the time might be right for the National Portrait Gallery to acquire a portrait of Mrs Beeton: ‘Recently we were bequeathed a portrait of Bradshaw, the originator of the Railway Guide, and I think that Mrs Beeton is at least a parallel case.’
Mayson Beeton would not have been pleased to hear Hake casually lumping his mother into a category of kitsch, brand-name Victorians. But then, he had never quite realized how lucky it was that some years previously Lytton Strachey, that arch pricker of Victorian pomposity, had abandoned his attempt to write a biography of Mrs Beeton. Strachey had been apt to tell friends that he imagined Mrs Beeton as ‘a small tub-like lady in black – rather severe of aspect, strongly resembling Queen Victoria’, which sounds as if he was lining her up for the kind of robust debunking delivered to Florence Nightingale and others in his Eminent Victorians of 1918. In the end Strachey had given up on his plans to write about Mrs Beeton because he could not find enough material, a continuing lack that explains why there have been so few biographies in total, and none at all since 1977.
Part of this absence is the result of the way that details about Mrs Beeton’s death – and hence her life – were suppressed almost from the moment she drew her last breath in 1865. In order to protect their investment in the growing ‘Mrs Beeton’ brand it made sense first for her widower Sam and then for Ward, Lock, the publishers who acquired his copyrights in 1866, to let readers think that the lady herself was alive, well, and busy testing recipes to go into the endless editions of her monumental work that were proliferating in the marketplace. For by 1880, with bestselling titles such as Mrs Beeton’s Shilling Cookery, Mrs Beeton’s Every Day Cookery and Mrs Beeton’s Cottage Cookery doing terrific business, Mrs Beeton had become the kind of goose whose eggs were solid gold. The emphasis now was on keeping her alive for as long as possible.
On top of this intentional censorship, the circumstances of Mrs Beeton’s life had managed to keep her hidden from history. She was only 28 when she died, which meant fewer letters written, fewer diaries kept and fewer photographs taken (the National Portrait Gallery picture is one of only two surviving adult portraits). After her death in 1865 the simmering tensions between her family, the Dorlings, and her widower flared into open warfare, and Sam broke off contact with her enormous brood of siblings. This naturally stalled the flow of anecdotes, ephemera, and memories about Isabella around her vast clan, and simultaneously created the conditions for rumour and innuendo to flourish, especially about what had actually happened during the nine years of her marriage. Sam’s own early death only twelve years later again acted as a kind of break in the transmission of accurate information about Mrs Beeton, while providing a further space for speculation and fantasy to grow. Brought up after Sam’s death by people who had never known Isabella, the two surviving children of the marriage, Mayson and his slightly elder brother Orchart, were left with only a small heap of fragments from which to reconstruct a mother they had never really met. There were forty or so love letters written between Sam and Isabella during their engagement in 1856, a couple of holiday diaries kept by Isabella from the 1860s, the increasingly famous photograph now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, and that was about it. In