The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton. Kathryn Hughes
grandmother. This is fine in principle, except that by 1841 he had been joined by his younger half-sister Eliza whose lungs, as far as we know, were clear as a bell.
The other reason why it is unlikely that Sam was sent to stay with his grandmother for the sake of his health was that life in Hadleigh was hardly a pastoral idyll. Stuck in a dip between two hills, drainage was always a problem (after a storm it was possible to sail down the High Street), and the brewery near Lucy’s house discharged its effluent into the open gutter. What’s more, the town was a byword for viciousness and street crime: arson, sheep stealing, horse theft, house breaking and ‘malicious slaying and cutting and wounding’ were all everyday hazards to be avoided by right-minded citizens, who were constantly agitating for extra policing. And yet, there can be no doubt that little Sam and his half-sister Eliza lived well in Hadleigh. Their grandmother had been left with a comfortable annuity of £140, her house in the High Street was substantial and her brother, Isaac, a wealthy maltster, had pull. And then, there was 18-year-old Aunt Carrie who acted as nursemaid, at least when she was not busy courting a local gentleman farmer called Robert Kersey. All the same, it was ten hours by coach back to the Dolphin.
We know as little about Samuel Beeton’s childhood as we do about Isabella Mayson’s. Sometime before the age of 10 he was sent to a boarding school just outside Brentwood in Essex, midway between Hadleigh and London. Part of its appeal must have been geographical convenience, since Brentwood is only half an hour’s journey by rail into the terminus at Shoreditch, which in turn is only a short cab ride away from Milk Street. Pilgrim’s Hall Academy – also known as Brentwood Academy – had been set up in 1839 to educate the sons of the very middling classes. These kinds of boys’ small private schools, very different from the ancient foundations such as Eton or Winchester, were as ephemeral as their female equivalents. Indeed, Pilgrim’s Hall managed to last only thirteen years as a school, before reverting once again to a private residence. Although the advertisement that appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1843 promises prospective parents that pupils would be prepared for the universities as well as ‘the Naval and Military Colleges’, it seems unlikely that any of them really did continue on to Oxford or Cambridge or make it into the Guards. Instead, most of the fifty-three pupils were, like young Samuel, destined for apprenticeships or posts in their fathers’ businesses: tellingly, the 1841 census shows no boy at the school over the age of 15. Rather than ivy-covered quads and ancient towers, Pilgrim’s Hall was a higgledy-piggledy domestic house from the Regency period which had been chopped and changed to make it a suitable place to house and school sixty or so boys as cheaply as possible (the house still stands but these days it caters for, on average, seven residents).
The fact that Pilgrim’s Hall Academy was started by one Cornelius Zurhort who employed Jules Doucerain as an assistant master suggests that the school concentrated on a modern syllabus of living rather than dead languages. And even once the school passed to a young Englishman, Alexander Watson from St Pancras, in 1843, the stress on modern languages remained, with the employment of another Frenchman, Louis Morell. Clearly, though, the school prided itself on developing the whole boy, rather than merely helping him to slot into a world where he might be called upon to stammer a few words of business French. The Illustrated London News advertisement promises that the pupils’ ‘religious, moral, and social habits and gentlemanly demeanour are watched with parental solicitude’ and, indeed, as early as 1839 a gallery had been built in the local church for the very purpose of accommodating the shuffling, coughing Pilgrim’s Hall boys as they trooped in every Sunday morning.
Samuel Orchart was quick and knowing, bright rather than scholarly. Like his future bride he had a flair for languages, winning a copy of Une Histoire de Napoléon le Grand for his work in French. Extrapolating from his adult personality we can assume that he was boisterous, involved, fun as a friend, cheeky with the teachers. Working back from the letters that he wrote to his own sons when they were at prep school in the mid 1870s we can guess that the young Sam was always bursting with enthusiasm for ‘the last new thing’, whether it was comets, cricket scores, spring swimming, close-run class positions, or clever chess games. Clearly keen on literature – his father gave him a complete Shakespeare when he was 12, and Samuel Powell was not the kind of man to waste his money on an empty gesture – there was, nonetheless, no question of the boy going on to university.
But a career as a publican was not quite right either, despite the fact that as the eldest son Samuel Orchart stood to inherit a thriving business. In the end none of Samuel Powell’s three sons chose to run the Dolphin. That was the problem with social mobility, you left yourself behind. There was, though, a kind of possible compromise, one that allowed Sam to follow his literary bent without taking him too far from his social or geographic roots. He had grown up a few hundred yards from Fleet Street and its continuation, the Strand, which had for two centuries been the centre of the publishing trade. Now, in the 1840s, as the demand for printed material of all kinds exploded, it seemed as if everyone who set foot in the area was in some way connected with print. Inky-fingered apprentices hurried through the streets at all hours and from the open doors of taverns around Temple Bar you could see solitary young men poring over late-night proofs while gulping down a chop. Up and down Fleet Street new-fangled rotary presses were clanking through the night, producing newspapers, magazines, and books, books, books. In Paternoster Row – an alley off St Paul’s, a hop, skip, and a jump from Milk Street – booksellers and publishers so dominated the landscape that, among those in the know, ‘the Row’ had become shorthand for the whole Republic of English Letters.
In any case, as the son and grandson of a publican Sam was already part of the newspaper trade. Pubs were frequently the only house in the street to take a daily paper, and many did a brisk trade in hiring it out at 1d an hour. In addition, the Society of Licensed Victuallers produced the Morning Advertiser, which, at that time, was the nation’s only daily newspaper apart from The Times. It was to the Advertiser’s offices at 27 Fleet Street that the original Samuel Beeton had headed every Monday afternoon during the early years of the century for the Victuallers’ committee meetings. Even more importantly, the publicans’ paper delivered a healthy profit to the society, which was regularly divvied up among the members. So as far as the Beetons were concerned, a man who went into print would never go hungry.
Sam does not seem to have served a formal apprenticeship, the kind where you were bound at 14 to a single master and graduated as a journeyman in the appropriate livery company seven years later. That system, based on a medieval way of doing things, had long been winding down. The printing industry, exploding in the 1840s, appeared so modern that it seemed increasingly irrelevant to enter your lad’s name on the rolls at Stationers’ Hall, and pay for the privilege. The vested interests, of course, were worried at this new chaotic way of doing things, in which boys learned their trade with one firm for a few years before hiring themselves out as adult workers, well before their twenty-first birthdays.
It was, in any case, not to a printer that Sam was set to learn his trade, but to a paper merchant. The main cluster of London’s paper merchants was on Lower Thames Street, situated handily on the river to receive supplies from the paper mills in estuarine Kent. New technologies meant that paper could now be made out of cheap wood pulp rather than expensive rags, with the result that barges bearing bales of paper were starting to appear almost daily in the bowels of the City. Since Lower Thames Street was only a few hundred yards from Milk Street, Sam almost certainly came back from Suffolk to live at the Dolphin in 1845, the year he turned 14. That Sam’s was not a formal apprenticeship is confirmed by the fact that in 1851, one year short of the twenty-first birthday that would have ended any contractual arrangement, he gives his employment to the census enumerator as a ‘Traveller’ in a wholesale stationery firm. Always in a hurry, it would be hard to imagine Sam Beeton serving out his time as a ‘lad’ when he knew himself to be a man, and one with places to go.
Working in a paper office may sound peripheral to the explosion in the knowledge industry, but actually it was one of the best groundings for life as a magazine editor and book publisher. Young men higher up the social scale – not university graduates, but the sons of men with more cash and clout – went into junior jobs on the staff of publishers or newspapers. Here they may have learned about the editorial side of things, but they were often left ignorant of the pounds, shillings, and pence of the business.