The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton. Kathryn Hughes
sisters were. Just as she turned 2 she was joined by Elizabeth Anne, always known as Bessie. In September 1839 came yet another John Mayson, followed by Esther, named for her Cumberland aunt, in February 1841. All were christened in St Lawrence Jewry, which stands a couple of hundred yards away in the forecourt of the Guildhall. The first three Maysons were all said to be pretty. Esther less so, but this may be because a riding accident in her twenties left her with a blinded eye. Photographs of the Maysons are not much help when it comes to working out their colouring. The iconic National Portrait Gallery portrait shows Isabella with very dark, almost black hair. However, Marjorie Killby, Mayson Beeton’s eldest daughter and a keen photographer, always maintained that this was inaccurate, the fault of the rudimentary technology of the time. Drawing on family intelligence, Killby insisted instead that Isabella had ‘light reddish auburn hair’ and even set about making a new print of the photograph in order to show her grandmother in her true colours, as a strawberry blonde. By way of confirmation, a watercolour of the four Mayson children from 1848 shows them all as redheads but with Isabella a shade or two fairer than her siblings.
It is harder to work out how the Maysons sounded. A great-niece going to visit her maiden aunts Bessie and Esther in genteel Kensington in the 1920s remembered them with cockney accents that struck her, a colonel’s granddaughter, as decidedly comic. In this incident, recorded in Sarah Freeman’s biography in 1977, Rosemary Fellowes explains away her great-aunts’ dropped aitches and their use of ‘ain’t’ as a fashionable affectation from their youth. But the fact is that by the time Edwardians were using cockney to sound smart, the Misses Mayson were already in their eighth decade. The way they spoke had been picked up much earlier, during the 1840s and before English accents had become codified by class. From their father they might have got some flat vowels, and from their mother and neighbours they would have heard the kind of cockneyfied speech in which ‘w’s were still doing service for ‘v’s. Boarding school in Germany would have added another complicating layer. Whatever the exact sound eventually arrived at, we can be fairly safe in saying that Mrs Beeton and her sisters did not speak like ladies.
The birth of Esther, the youngest Mayson child, in February 1841 must have been bittersweet. Seven months earlier Benjamin had died at the age of only 39. The notice inserted by his father in the Carlisle Journal suggests that the death was sudden: certainly there is no suggestion that he was suffering from the kind of degenerative illness that had made his brother linger for so long. The death certificate, a recent innovation, part of the new Victorians’ desire to count, clarify, and mark their hectically expanding population, says ‘Apoplexy’. This sounds sudden and convulsive, until you realize that in the 1840s it stood for many things: alcoholism, syphilis, epilepsy as well as the more obvious heart attack or stroke. It is ‘apoplexy’ that will kill Benjamin’s son, the baby John, only thirty years later.
Death may have been everywhere in early Victorian England, but to find yourself pregnant with your fourth child and suddenly responsible for a highly capitalized business is unlucky by anyone’s standards. Although her widowed mother Mary Jerrom was helping with the domestic side of life at Milk Street, Elizabeth Mayson soon buckled under her burden. The only solution, a common enough one, was to farm out the two elder children to relatives. Isabella, still only 5 years old, was sent like a parcel to the other end of the country to lodge with her clergyman grandfather at Great Orton. The census entry for 1841 gives a bleak snapshot of what she found there. Apart from the 79-year-old John Mayson, himself recently widowed, the thatched vicarage was home to one 30-year-old servant, Sarah Robinson. For a little girl, 350 miles from home, Great Orton must have seemed the strangest place to be. Instead of the companionable man-made bustle of Cheapside, there were country noises: shivering trees, rumbling carts, and endless fields of cawing sheep. In place of scurrying clerks and warehousemen there was a single shoemaker, schoolmaster, and blacksmith. It got dark early, stayed colder longer, and the food, coaxed from the ‘heavy cold and wet soil’, tasted different. The bread was made of barley, black and sour (‘Everybody knows that it is wheat flour which yields the best bread,’ noted Isabella pointedly twenty years later in the Book of Household Management). Oatmeal, meanwhile, turned up at virtually every meal. There was porridge for breakfast, and maybe crowdy – oatmeal steeped in beef marrow – for midday dinner. Ginger, which came all the way from China, made cake and biscuits burn in your mouth.
As if that weren’t enough strangeness for 5-year-old Isabella, there were the voices too, speaking in a language that she would have had to strain to understand. Just why Bessie, two years younger, was not sent with her as a consoling companion in exile is a mystery. The obvious place for both girls would have been at nearby Thursby, where Benjamin’s surviving sibling Esther lived with her yeoman husband John Burtholme and daughter Anne who, at 17, was of an age to be helpful with baby visitors. As it is, Bessie’s whereabouts in 1841 remains unknown: along with Mrs Jerrom she has temporarily vanished from Milk Street and has yet to turn up anywhere else.
Even with two fewer people to worry about, life was not easy for Elizabeth Mayson. Still only 25, she now ran the business in her own name – the trade directories describe her as a ‘warehouseman’. In the 1840s it was not unusual for widows to take over their late husband’s business, and the directories show many women heading up pubs, livery stables, and every kind of shop from baker to jeweller. Elizabeth had grown up among the artisans and tradesmen of Marylebone, watching women like her mother working alongside husbands and brothers as book-keepers, shop assistants, and storeroom supervisors. The 1841 census shows her employing one young maidservant and an older man called Robert Mitchell who was originally from Sussex. Mitchell’s father had worked alongside various Standages in the stables at Petworth House and his presence in Milk Street is a reminder of how, in the first half of the nineteenth century, rural communities had a habit of reconstituting themselves at the very heart of commercial and industrial landscapes. Elizabeth Mayson may have been operating out of one of the busiest streets in London, but when it came to investing her precious trust she relied on a network that had been forged sixty years earlier and in a different place entirely.
There remains some mystery about Elizabeth’s finances during her widowhood. Benjamin had not left a will, and ten days after his death she was granted administration as his ‘relict’. His estate amounted to £8,000, a small fortune. However, much of this must have been tied up in stock and Benjamin doubtless left a fair number of outstanding debts to his suppliers that needed to be paid before it was possible to get any sense of the real value of his legacy. For how else can one explain the fact that only two years later Elizabeth, now reunited with Isabella and Bessie, is writing a begging letter to her father-in-law in Great Orton? From John Mayson’s reply it transpires that warehousing has not been kind to Elizabeth: quite possibly the drapers to whom she tried to sell her cloth were not happy dealing with a young woman. Certainly it looks as if she was thinking of switching to another trade, perhaps lodging house keeping like her mother. We will never know the precise nature of Elizabeth’s problems, since the letter to her father-in-law has been lost. Here, though, is the Revd Mayson’s reply:
My dear Bessie
I am sorry the business you entered upon did not answer your expectations. Of the one you are going to begin I can form no opinion, as I am totally ignorant about it. You say you have seen a House which might answer your purpose. You do not mention the Rent, but I understand the first Quarter’s Rent is to be paid in advance, and if the rent be high you will observe another Quarter’s Rent will soon be due. Do you suppose you will be able to meet it at the time, as he requires a Qr. in advance? I am afraid he will be a sharp landlord.
You say you want a little money. I think I can advance you 50£, if that will do. Since last Christmas I have had a great deal to do. As I was not able to do any Duty, I was obliged to engage a curate. I think I shall never be able to attend the Church again to do Duty. If 50£ will be of any service to you, after you receive it you must send me a Note, as I wish at my Decease to have something made up for your children, and the above 50£ was part of it. I intended to make you an allowance yearly. But if I do too much there will be less afterwards. I assure you I am anxious to save something for my little grandchildren. I have my curate to pay quarterly. I do not wish you to sell your house, and also not to lay out your money extravagantly. I hope to hear that you are doing well. Carefulness will do a great deal.
I