The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton. Kathryn Hughes
In a world where you married the boy next door, or at least the boy in the next street, who also happened to be the son of your father’s business partner and a school friend of your brother, Sam was pretty much marked out for Isabella. It didn’t feel like that, of course. Arranged marriages were out of fashion, even for the aristocracy, and among young, middle-class people love matches were the order of the day. But while she probably believed that she was following her heart, Isabella was actually revealing herself as a creature of her time and place.
Since we will never know the moment they actually met, it is worth considering just what made Isabella Mary Mayson and Samuel Orchart Beeton give each other a second, third, and fourth glance. It is easy to imagine what she saw in him. He was sufficiently like her stepfather, whom she called ‘Father’, to feel familiar, part of the kith network that held her world together. Sam talked of deadlines and printing presses, proofs, boards and first copies just arrived, using a language that had been the background clatter of her childhood. But he was sufficiently different from Henry to seem exciting too. Even in twenty years’ time Sam Beeton was never going to be a mutton-chopped paterfamilias, rigid with respectability and self-regard. The excitement of the streets hung around him like the smoke from his habitual cigars. His particular pleasures included prize-fights, ratting contests, and, although Isabella probably didn’t know this, prostitutes. (Two thirds of the way through their courtship, according to Sam, she teased him about ‘what you are pleased to call my roving nature’, but it is impossible to know exactly what she meant by it.) He was both of her class and yet not quite. Although she had been at school with his sisters – one of the key indicators of a young man’s suitability as a husband – there was still a cockneyism about him that was thrilling, especially since she had been brought up by people keen to forget that sort of thing in their own backgrounds. He was that delicious thing, a familiar stranger, a buried subtext.
To Isabella, a girl who had learned to deal with her emotional needs by displacing them onto other people (all those infant tantrums and wet nappies to be calmly coped with), Sam offered thrilling access to her own occluded interior life. His intense emotionality, conveyed both in person and in the many letters he wrote to her at this time, unlocked an answering response in her. Over the length of the year’s courtship we can watch as Isabella evolves from a self-contained and defensive girl into an expansive and loving young woman. Thus while her first surviving letters to her fiancé are curt and cautious – ‘My dearest Sam … Yours most affectionately, Isabella Mayson’ – only six months later they are racing with spontaneous affection, ‘My own darling Sam, … Yours with all love’s devotion BELLA MAYSON’. A latish letter, written on 1 June just six weeks before the wedding, shows Bella taking flight into a candour and rapture that would have been impossible to predict only a few months earlier:
My dearly beloved Sam,
I take advantage of this after dinner opportunity to enjoy myself and have a small chat with you on paper although I have really nothing to say, and looking at it in a mercenary point of view my letter will not be worth the postage. I am so continually thinking of you that it seems to do me a vast amount of good even to do a little black and white business, knowing very well that a few lines of nonsense are always acceptable to a certain mutable gentleman be they ever so short or stupid …
You cannot imagine how I have missed you, and have been wishing all day that I were a bird that I might fly away and be at rest with you, my own precious one.
If Sam set Bella soaring, then she grounded him. Her phlegmatic caution and emotional steadiness provided the much needed anchor for his volatility and frighteningly labile moods. In a letter written towards the end of their engagement in which Sam starts off by reporting that he is ‘horribly blue’ he ends, four pages later, ‘I’m better now than when I began this letter – talking with you, even in this way and at this distance always makes me feel very jolly.’ At the beginning of June 1856, a few weeks before the wedding and worried to distraction by the sluggish launch of his new magazine, the Boy’s Own Journal, Sam explains beseechingly that ‘I can think and work and do so much better and so much more when I can see and feel that it is not for myself, (about whom I care nothing) I am labouring, but for her whom I so ardently prize, and so lovingly cherish in my inmost heart – my own Bella!’ Isabella was the isle of sanity that Sam created outside himself, his superego, his conscience, his place of safety.
And then there was the fact that Sam Beeton was that rare thing, a Victorian man who liked and respected women as much as he loved them. Brought up by his grandmother and surrounded by a clutch of younger half-sisters, he wanted a genuinely companionate marriage, one based on affinity rather than rigid role-play. In Isabella he had found his perfect match, although he could not yet know how profitable that match would become. If he had the flair and the imagination, she had the caution and dogged determination. If he had the manic energy of the possessed, she had the sticking power of an ambitious clerk. At the end of May 1856 and following a colossal row that nearly derailed their engagement altogether, Sam is genuinely disturbed by Isabella’s self-abnegating promise that very soon he would have the ‘entire management’ of her. Puzzled, offended even, he writes back: ‘I don’t desire, I assure you, to manage you – you can do that quite well yourself’, before proceeding to pay admiring tribute to her ‘most excellent abilities’. It was those abilities – including her capacity to ‘manage’ both herself and other people – that would be the making of them both.
Sam’s family was delighted by the news of the engagement, which was formally hatched around the time of the 1855 summer meeting. Eliza Beeton, who had always been extremely fond of her stepson, went out of her way to contrive occasions by which the young people could be alone together during the twelve bumpy months of their engagement. With the sudden loss of her husband just nine months earlier, this young love affair was a happy distraction. Sam’s sisters, too, were thrilled that the girl they had known as a classmate was now to become a member of their family. Eighteen months after the wedding Nelly Beeton, still languishing at school in Heidelberg, was tickled pink to be able to sign her letter ‘Your affectionate sister-in-law’.
Bella’s family, though, was not so sure. A contemporary painting by James Hayllar suggests how it should have been. The Only Daughter shows a beloved young woman announcing the news of her engagement to her elderly parents. With one hand she grasps her father’s in shocked delight while with the other she reaches out to her fiancé, a stolid young man who, with just the right degree of gentlemanly tact, averts his face from this sacred moment. This little scene is, in turn, watched by the girl’s grey-haired mother who puts down her sewing for a moment to contemplate the mood of solemn joy.
We do not know how things played out in the drawing room of Ormond House when Isabella announced that she was to marry Sam Beeton. In fact this scene probably never took place: since she was only 19, Sam would first have had to ask her stepfather for permission to propose. Quite why Henry agreed to his stepdaughter marrying a man he evidently disliked and soon came to loathe remains a mystery. Perhaps the fact that within nine months of her wedding Isabella would turn 21, made him think that there was little point in trying to delay the inevitable. Elizabeth Dorling, meanwhile, was in no position to warn against an early marriage: when she had walked up the aisle with Isabella’s father in 1835 she too had been barely 20.
However Sam’s formal relationship with the Dorlings actually began, it soon developed into a war of attrition that would end, ten years later, with a rupture between the two families that would take a hundred years and several generations to heal. Right from the start the older Dorling and Mayson girls lined up against Sam. Jane Dorling, just a year younger than Isabella, was edgy about the way that she was getting left behind in the marriage race. Her strenuous attempts to woo a certain Mr Wood by singing him German songs were coming to nothing just at the moment when Isabella and Sam were putting the final touches to their wedding plans. Jane responded by taking out her frustration on the happy couple. In a letter written in the middle of June Sam talks ruefully about Jane’s ‘little sharp ways’ and hopes that Mr Wood succumbs soon since ‘fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind’. (In fact it would be another five years before Jane would get married, and not to the resistant Mr Wood.)
Bessie and Esther, meanwhile, were jealous right from the start, resenting Sam for taking