The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton. Kathryn Hughes
of a Brighton rendezvous. Even after six months of Sam not turning up whenever her parents were present, she chose to hope that he might, which means that she chose to be permanently disappointed. By Monday, and back home in Epsom, Isabella sat down to write a letter to her elusive fiancé that is a model of wounded narcissism.
My very dear Sam,
I have just returned from Brighton and hasten to write you a few lines just to give you a short account of my trip to Brighton.
In the first place I was very much disappointed at your not coming on Saturday evening. I waited and looked out anxiously for you but no Sam did I see to gladden my eyes. Naughty and very cruel of you to serve me so … After dinner … I and Bessie walked about the Parade till long after the train was due expecting you every moment … We shall not be in Town till Thursday when I hope to see you. Could you not run down to-morrow evening to see me. I am quite sure you could if you liked. It seems such an age since I have spoken to you and I can assure you I quite long for a quiet little chat with my old man, my dear darling venerable. I want to ask so many things about I don’t know what. I shall expect to see you to-morrow evening, so goodbye till then. Accept my fondest love and believe me my dearest.
Yours ever lovingly
BELLA MAYSON
I was sorry to hear the journal had not answered your expectations, you have had scarcely time to judge yet. You must give it three or four weeks trial before you begin to despond.
Adieu
Isabella’s postscript – a hurried note to show that she is not entirely caught up in her own needs – refers to the fact that the Boy’s Own Journal which Sam had been busy launching over the past few weeks was not doing well and, indeed, would soon fail. Her blithe advice not to worry, to take the long view, betrays a lack of any real interest in Sam’s business affairs. From the minute amount of attention she gives the Boy’s Own Journal in her letters you would hardly guess that its genesis had run parallel to their engagement, nor that its aim – to provide cheap but original printed material for working-class boys – was one that lay particularly close to Sam’s heart. So in the circumstances Sam’s reply to his fiancée’s letter the very next day is extraordinarily generous. He starts by telling her something that he knows she will love to hear – that while spending the weekend in Pinner he has done nothing but think of her: ‘the moon is electro-typing at this moment with its beautiful silvery light all around, and I instinctively am walking with you on Brighton Pier.’ From here, though, he can’t resist launching a final sally at her parents, in the process betraying his real reason for failing to appear at Marine Parade. ‘Have Father and Mamma been using you to-day as of old monarchs used the man who stood behind their chair, ornamented with cap and bells – to wit – to trot him out, and then laugh at his stepping?’
But just at the point when Sam might be tipping over into giving offence – fiancés at mid century are not supposed to liken their future in-laws to medieval tyrants – he remembers the delightful fact that the wedding really is now drawing near: ‘3 Sundays more, and then the Holidays, as school-phrase has it.’ The ghastliness of the past six months is almost over. There will be no more dodging the Dorlings. Indeed, there will be no more seeing the Dorlings, since Pinner is a good thirty miles from Epsom. Sam’s letter ends with a swell of joy and thanksgiving that he is about to marry the girl whom, despite the terrible ‘wear and tear of the past few months’, he truly loves.
None can tell how grateful I feel and am to the ‘Great Good’, for having brought me thus near to a point of earthly felicity, which, twelve little months ago, I dared not have hoped for. May He bless and protect you, my own dearest one, and make us happy, and contented in each other’s true and ardent love. Je t’embrasse de tout mon Coeur.
Yours, in all things,
S. O. BEETON
Hot suppers are now very little in request, as people now generally dine at an hour which precludes the possibility of requiring supper; at all events, not one of a substantial kind.
ISABELLA BEETON, Book of Household Management
THROUGHOUT the Book of Household Management Mrs Beeton stays pointedly vague on every meal apart from dinner. Breakfast, lunch, and supper are all despatched in a couple of paragraphs, and afternoon tea never gets a mention. Nothing peculiar, though, should be read into Beeton’s haziness. During the nineteenth century the gastronomic shape of the day was changing so fast that it was almost impossible to be definite about who was eating what when.
Over the previous 150 years dinner had become a movable feast, leaving the lesser meals to be added and subtracted around this shifting main event. At the beginning of the eighteenth century you might sit down to dine as early as noon in Scotland and the north where daylight was at a premium, although in fashionable, that is artificial, London 2 p.m. was the more usual time. By the 1780s the quality were now eating as late as 5 p.m. although working people stuck to 1 p.m., opening the way for the class-marking difference of ‘lunch’ and ‘dinner’. But whether you took your main meal at noon or six or sometime in between, one thing was certain: by mid evening you were starting to feel hungry again. This was where supper came in: a light meal, often a cold collation (bread and dripping for the workers), which ensured you went to bed drowsily replete.
But by the time Mrs Beeton was writing in 1861 the shape of the day had once again been bent out of shape. Middle-class men now left the house for their place of work early in the morning, not arriving home until 6 p.m. Dinner was correspondingly shifted back to take account of the wanderers’ return. The result, as Mrs Beeton notes, was that there was no longer much call for supper at 9 p.m. since most people, except the neurotically greedy, were still perfectly full from dinner.
There was, however, one context in which supper remained important. If your dining room was small and your budget tight, then inviting a large group to what Mrs Beeton calls a ‘standing supper’ started to look like an attractive alternative to a more formal dinner party. At a standing supper people helped themselves from dishes such as ‘sandwiches, lobster and oyster patties, sausage rolls, meat rolls, lobster salad, dishes of fowls, the latter all cut up’, which certainly saved on servants. What’s more, the custom of displaying all the dishes at once made you look like a more generous host than if one course followed another as was usual with a more formal dinner.
Dinner’s slow shunt backwards inevitably ended up having an effect on the other end of the day too. With men now needing to be at their place of work across town for 9 a.m., the first meal of the day moved forwards to 8 a.m. And instead of the bread, tea, coffee, and possibly chocolate of the eighteenth century, what Mrs Beeton described as ‘that comfortable meal called breakfast’ was now turning into something more substantial. Despite her studied refusal to list ‘a long bill of cold fare’ for breakfast, Beeton does go on to suggest the following hot items: mackerel, herring, haddock, mutton chops, bacon and eggs, muffins, toast, marmalade and butter. Here are the origins of the meal that will become the Edwardian country house breakfast of popular fantasy.
With the two meals of the day now stretched nearly twelve hours apart, that left an awful lot of time to be got through on an emptying stomach. Lunch had made a sketchy appearance during the eighteenth century, but now started to become a permanent event in the timetable of the mid-Victorian household. It was still a scrappy business, though, and Mrs Beeton deigns to give it only one short paragraph and a brief description along the lines of ‘The remains of cold joints, nicely garnished, a few sweets, or a little hashed meat, poultry or game, are the usual articles placed on the table for luncheon.’ It was, after all, a lady’s meal, quite likely to be taken in the nursery where little stomachs could not be expected to last more than two hours or so without a snack. Middle-class men continued to work on heroically without a midday break, hating the way that lunch interrupted concentration and gobbled up time. Meanwhile, servants, like the rest of the working class, continued to take their main meal, their ‘dinner’, in the middle of the day, usually