{"product_id":"the-short-life-and-long-times-of-mrs-beeton-isbn-9780307278661","title":"The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton","description":"In Victorian England there was only one fail-safe authority on matters ranging from fashion to puddings to scullery maids: \u003ci\u003eBeeton’s Book of Household Management\u003c\/i\u003e. In this delightful, superbly researched biography, award-winning historian Kathryn Hughes pulls back the lace curtains to reveal the woman behind the book--Mrs. Beeton, the first domestic diva of the modern age--and explores the life of the book itself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIsabella Beeton was a twenty-one-year-old newlywed with only six months’ experience running her own home when--coaxed by her husband, a struggling publisher--she began to compile her book of recipes and domestic advice. The aspiring mother hardly suspected that her name would become synonymous with housewifery for generations.  Nor would the women who turned to the book for guidance ever have guessed that its author lived in a simple house in the suburbs with a single maid-of-all-work instead of presiding over a well-run estate. Isabella would die at twenty-eight, shortly after the book's publication, never knowing the extent of her legacy. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs her survivors faced bankruptcy, sexual scandal and a bitter family feud that lasted more than a century, Mrs. Beeton’s book became an institution. For an exploding population of the newly affluent, it prescribed not only how to cook and clean but ways to cope with the social flux of the emerging consumer culture: how to plan a party for ten, whip up a hair pomade or calculate how much money was needed to permit the hiring of a footman. In the twentieth century, Mrs. Beeton would be accused of plagiarism, blamed for the dire state of British cookery and used to market everything from biscuits to meat pies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis elegant, revelatory portrait of a lady journalist, as she lived and as she existed in the minds of her readers, is also a vivid picture of Victorian home life and its attendant anxieties, nostalgia, and aspirations--not so different from those felt in America today.“Magnificent.”\u003cbr\u003e–\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A triumph . . . Hughes knows 19th-century England intimately . . . the result is a narrative that could have come straight from Trollope. Vicars and curates, tradesmen’s families edging up the social ladder, tangled marriage plots–for lovers of Barsetshire, it’s all here.”\u003cbr\u003e–Laura Shapiro, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Peppy . . . Smart . . . Tells vivid personal stories . . . The author’s intelligence never deserts her.”\u003cbr\u003e–Wendy Smith, \u003ci\u003eWashington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Enthralling . . . Having read Ms. Hughes, one wants immediately to read Beeton . . . [Beeton] speaks to the universal condition of female life.”\u003cbr\u003e–Barbara Amiel, \u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Absorbing . . . Excellent . . . Nostalgia for handmade items, worry over adulterated food, a healthy market for cookbooks . . . We have a lot in common with the early Victorian era, at least with regard to broad trends toward domesticity.”\u003cbr\u003e–Benjamin Lytal, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Sun\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Scrupulously researched, definitive . . . Mrs. Beeton emerges as a fascinating blend of Betty Crocker and Emily Post, with a little Martha Stewart or Nigella Lawson thrown in for good measure . . .  Hughes’s searching social eye does wonders with the small cache of letters between Isabella and Sam, written during their courtship . . . She constructs a detailed picture of fashions and social customs at the high-water mark of the Victorian age. For readers of Dickens and Trollope, this section of the book is pure gold.”\u003cbr\u003e–William Grimes, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A terrific book, filled with astute observation and telling detail about the growth of an idea, or fantasy, of domesticity . . . Later in life, [my mother] would sit around reading a facsimile edition of ‘Beeton’s Book of Household Management’ the way another sort of person might read pornography . . . My mind reels when I think of what she would have thought had she lived to read \u003ci\u003eThe Short Life and\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eLong Times of Mrs. Beeton\u003c\/i\u003e . . . Mrs. Beeton, a syphilitic plagiarist? Golly. But in case you think I have just given away the whole story, I assure you, I haven’t.”\u003cbr\u003e–Katherine A. Powers, \u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Lively and authoritative.”\u003cbr\u003e–\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly,\u003c\/i\u003e graded \u003cb\u003eA\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“One of my favourite biographies of the year . . . a lively and fascinating reconstruction of the ‘real’ Isabella Beeton, unpicking her extraordinary posthumous legend with great skill, opening a wide window on to Victorian domestic and publishing history, and wearing its excellent sleuthing with a light grace.”\u003cbr\u003e–Hermione Lee, \u003ci\u003eThe Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“There is seemingly no aspect of Victorian life that Kathryn Hughes cannot assimilate and understand from the inside. This is living history, in which massive research and impeccable scholarship is handled with invigorating panache . .  with verve and humor . . . This great gift of a book . . . makes us savour aspects of 19th-century life in order to sharpen our awareness of how we live now.”\u003cbr\u003e–Frances Spalding, \u003ci\u003eThe Independent\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Splendid . . . A brilliant biography, which tells the absorbing, strange and sad story with great aplomb . . . You know that Kathryn Hughes would write a wonderful novel.”\u003cbr\u003e–Philip Hensher, \u003ci\u003eThe Spectator\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Accomplished and hugely readable . . . Depicts the worlds of the Beetons with astonishing vividness and colour  . . . with subtlety and precision . . . Much more than a biography, it is like a version in prose of a magnificent Victorian narrative painting, packed full of the strange, swarming richness of life.”\u003cbr\u003e–Lucy Lethbridge, \u003ci\u003eLiterary Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A wonderful book, so masterful and scholarly, so detailed and wise, there will never need to be another. Hughes is an elegant writer and a capable digger; no stone, however small or inaccessible, is left unturned . . . She has done sterling work.”\u003cbr\u003e–Rachel Cooke, \u003ci\u003eThe Observer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Intelligent . . . Thoughtful . . . Elegantly written.”\u003cbr\u003e–Lucy Hughes-Hallet, \u003ci\u003eSunday Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Brilliant . . . Excellent . . . A fascinating reconstruction.”\u003cbr\u003e–Nicola Humble, \u003ci\u003eThe Saturday Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It is a testament to Hughes’s wry intelligence that she can make Mrs. Beeton’s sad and sometimes grotesque story so enjoyable to read.”\u003cbr\u003e–Bee Wilson, \u003ci\u003eNew Statesman\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Altogether fascinating . . . Leaves very few corners of the mid-Victorian domestic interior unswept. From one angle it is a kind of history of the early woman’s magazine; from another a re-imagined users’ guide to Crimea-era domestic service. The amateur student of venereology will find much in it to relish and the historian of the Victorian pub will not be disappointed. At its heart, though lie the two equally vivid figures of Isabella Mayson and the man she married.”\u003cbr\u003e–D.J. Taylor, \u003ci\u003eThe Independent on Sunday\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Illuminating . . . Kathryn Hughes deploys considerable gifts.”\u003cbr\u003e–Matthew Sturgis, \u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eKathryn Hughes\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of \u003ci\u003eGeorge Eliot: The Last Victorian\u003c\/i\u003e, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, and \u003ci\u003eThe Victorian Governess\u003c\/i\u003e, which remains the standard text on the subject. Educated at Oxford University, she holds a Ph.D. in Victorian studies and now teaches biographical studies at the University of East Anglia. She is a \u003ci\u003eGuardian \u003c\/i\u003ebook critic.HEAVY, COLD AND WET SOIL\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Mrs. Beeton may have come down to us as a shape-shifter, but her story   starts in a settled enough place, at a time when most people still   lived a minute from their parents, when men automatically followed   their father’s trade, when girls nearly always shared their Christian   name with an aunt or cousin, and when it was not unusual to die in the   bed in which you had been born. Thursby, in what was then called   Cumberland, is a large village wedged between the Lakes and the   Borders, flanked by the Pennines on one side and the Solway Firth on   the other. It is not on the way to anywhere now, nor was it in the late   eighteenth century, when the daily coaches between London and Carlisle   were a distant rumble five miles to the northwest.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Most of the 240 inhabitants of Thursby owed their living to the   “tolerably fertile” gravel and loam soil, which was parcelled up into a   series of small mixed farms, owned by “statesmen” or independent yeomen   who employed anything from two to twenty men. In 1786 Thursby got a new   curate, John Mayson, grandfather to the future Mrs. Beeton. The   curateship and the countryside taken together might suggest something   rather smart, a gentleman vicar perhaps, with a private income, an MA   from a minor Oxbridge college, and a passion for the flora of the Upper   Lakes, the kind of man you find pottering in the background of so many   of the people who made and changed the Victorian world. This,   certainly, is the impression that Mrs. Beeton’s family would conspire   to create in years to come. When Isabella Beeton’s marriage was   announced in The Times in 1856, the fact that she was the granddaughter   of the late Revd. John Mayson of Cumberland was shoe-horned into the   brief notice. Seventy years later when dealing with the National   Portrait Gallery, Mayson Beeton insisted on having his mother’s   background blurb rewritten to include the important fact that her   grandfather had been a man of the cloth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But if anyone had bothered to look more closely they would have   discovered that Revd. John Mayson was not quite the gentlemanly divine   that you might suppose. He had been born in 1761 just outside Penrith   to another John Mayson, a farmer who was obliged to rent his land from   another man. As his Christian name suggests, John Mayson had the luck   of being the oldest son, the one in whom the family’s slight resources   would be invested as a hedge against a chancy future (there were a   couple of younger sisters who would need, somehow, to be taken care   of). John would have gone to school locally and left around the age of   fourteen, a superior kind of village boy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The next clear sighting comes in 1785 when, at the age of twenty-four,   Mayson was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England. The following   year he became a fully fledged clergyman and was sent immediately as   curate to St. Andrew’s, Thursby. But this was hardly the beginning of a   steady rise through the Church’s hierarchy. Stuck for an extraordinary   forty years at Thursby, it looked as if the Revd. John Mayson was   destined to become the oldest curate in town. On two separate occasions   he was passed over for the post of vicar, quite possibly because of his   lack of formal education or social clout: St. Andrew’s was a large   parish with a fine church said to have been built by David I of   Scotland—it needed a gentleman to run it. In 1805 the job went to a   Joseph Pattison and then, on his death eight years later, to William   Tomkyns Briggs, whose dynastically inflected name was buttressed with a   Cambridge MA.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It wasn’t until 1825 that Mayson’s luck finally changed. At the age of   sixty-four—retirement was not an option, except for a man of means—he   was appointed vicar to the nearby parish of Great Orton, a substantial   living worth perhaps £250 which brought with it the care of two hundred   souls. Yet even this was not quite the opportunity that it might seem.   The living was in the gift of Sir Wastal Briscoe, the lord of the manor   who inhabited several hundred lush acres at nearby Crofton Hall. The   previous incumbent of St. Giles had been Briscoe’s brother and it was   his intention that the living should pass eventually to one of his   young grandsons who were being educated for the Church. Mayson, who   probably already owed his appointment as curate at Thursby to Briscoe   in the first place, was exactly the right candidate to caretake St.   Giles until his patron wanted it back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The life of a clergyman without polish, money or pull was not a   particularly easy one. It was geared to pleasing the big house, to   judging its moods and whims, and making sure you fitted its purpose. It   was, though, enough to get married on, as long as you were careful in   your choice of bride. Six years into the curateship at Thursby, John   Mayson married a young woman whose name suggests that she had some   ballast behind her. Isabella Trimble (or Tremel or Trumble—spelling was   still an infant business and names changed with each entry in the   parish register) was the daughter of a reasonably prosperous maltster,   that is brewer. On his death in 1785 George Trimble divided his estate   in the classic manner, with his eldest son inheriting the business   along with Trimble’s partner, while the younger brothers received   “movable goods” in the form of wheat and cash. Isabella, the only girl,   was a residual legatee, which gave her perhaps £80—not an enormous sum,   but combined with the £100 that John inherited from his own father,   just enough to marry on.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The first baby arrived in 1793, ten months after the wedding, as first   babies mostly did in the nineteenth century. She was called Esther   after John’s mother. Three years later she was joined by yet another   John Mayson and then, five years after that, by Benjamin, named   biblically for his mother’s youngest brother. The long spacing between   the children, combined with the early evidence of fertility, suggests   that there were probably other babies, born months too soon, some still   and grey, others little more than bloody clots. These are the first of   the many lost children that hover over the story of Mrs. Beeton,   Benjamin Mayson’s daughter, each one’s failure to spark into life   marking the moment when the future had to be imagined all over again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Of the three Mayson children living, neither of the boys would see   forty. John—perhaps originally destined for the Church, to be slipped   into a place where Briscoe needed a caretaker or a willing plodder—died   at the age of twenty-four “after a long and severe illness,” according   to a notice in the Carlisle Journal, and was buried at Thursby. The   death of the elder son, that frail container of a family’s best hopes,   is always hard, but twenty years later John was followed to the grave   by Benjamin, now living far away in London. It was time for another   entry in the Carlisle Journal: “Suddenly, Mr. B. Mayson, linen factor,   Milk Street, London, son of the Rev. John Mayson, aged 39 years.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In the early days, though, when the Mayson children were young and   bonny, there was an almost pastoral feel to life at Thursby. Although   he was only the curate, Mayson was able to live in the vicarage, a   handsome building that would shore up anyone’s sense of battered   dignity. The diary of his fellow cleric Thomas Rumney of Watermillock   tells of an Austenish existence of long tramps, impromptu tea parties   and lovesick letter writing. In August 1803 Rumney walked six and a   half hours to get to Thursby from his own parish, and then proceeded to   conduct an epistolary courtship with one of John Mayson’s sisters at   the thumping cost of 11d a letter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was a small life, and it was never going to be enough to hold an   energetic young man with neither property or business interests. While   John, the eldest Mayson child, was kept close to the family by failing   health, his brother Benjamin had other plans. Frustratingly, all record   of Benjamin’s early life has disappeared. Proving even more elusive   than his daughter Isabella, Benjamin refuses to show up in school   records, apprenticeship registers, or even, though we would hope not to   find a clergyman’s son here, in the local assizes. He may have received   his education at nearby Wigton Grammar School, where Briscoe had pull.   Or it is possible that he was sent to Green Row on the coast a few   miles away, a forward-looking place which imparted a “modern”   curriculum of maths and careful penmanship to young men who were   destined for the counting house and the clerks’ bench rather than an   ivy-covered quad. Benjamin’s grandsons, Isabella’s boys, will get a   gentleman’s education at Marlborough, followed by the royal military   academy at Sandhurst and Oxford. But those days are seventy years away.   Benjamin Mayson, the second son of a poor curate, needed a grounding   that would fit him to make his way in the brisk, new commercial world   that was even now impinging on rural Cumberland.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In 1780 cotton processing had been introduced into the nearby village   of Dalston from Manchester. The conditions were perfect: plenty of   water power from the River Cardew and good communication links back   down to Manchester, Liverpool, and beyond. By the time Benjamin was   thinking about his future, there were three cotton mills and a large   flax mill in Dalston, and the principal owners were, as luck would have   it, old friends of his mother’s family. All over the country   neighbouring households like the Cowens and the Trimbles did business   together, married one another’s daughters, and blended their hard-won   capital in carefully judged expansion plans. It is very likely that it   was to the Cowens’ Mill Ellers, on the edge of Dalston, that Benjamin   was sent to serve his apprenticeship.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This, though, is a guess. Not for another eighteen years does Benjamin   finally show up properly in the records. By 1831 he has moved to London   and set up as a “Manchester Warehouseman”—a linen wholesaler who   distributes cloth woven in the hot, damp sheds of the northwest to the   fashionable drapers’ shops of London. From the spring of 1834 he was   living in classy Upper Baker Street, Marylebone, paying a sizable rent   of £65 a year, and from 1831 he also had business premises across town   at Clement’s Court, in the shadow of St. Paul’s. If Benjamin Mayson’s   daily commute of four miles sounds unconvincingly modern, it is worth   bearing in mind that in 1829 a firm called Shillibeer’s started a   regular horsedrawn omnibus service between Paddington and the City.   Londoners were becoming as used as everyone else to widening horizons   and for Mayson, who had made the four-hundred-mile journey from   Cumberland, the daily journey to the City must have seemed as nothing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    So by the age of thirty Benjamin Mayson could be said to be doing   rather well for himself. He was a vicar’s son and, though not quite a   gentleman, was established in a gentlemanly line of business. Mayson,   it is important to understand, was not a draper who stood behind a   counter unrolling bolts of sprigged cotton for the approval of   sharp-eyed housewives. He was a wholesaler, a merchant, a man who   supplied the smarter kind of drapers with bulk orders and sealed deals   with a handshake rather than a few warm coins. It was a profitable   business. With the world getting dirtier and more polite at the same   time, there was a hunger for fresh linen. No one with any self-respect   wanted to be seen in a smutty shirt or streaky dress. The middle-class   wardrobe was expanding and becoming more particular, good news for   anyone who supplied the materials to make all those clean sleeves and   dainty collars. And, as if that weren’t enough bright fortune, Benjamin   Mayson had arranged his private life carefully too. At an age when most   men had already married, he was still a bachelor, having managed to   avoid being jostled by loneliness or lust into a hasty match. He was,   by anyone’s reckoning, quite a catch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Elizabeth Jerrom, the woman whom Benjamin Mayson would marry, was born   on 24 May 1815, three weeks before the great victory at Waterloo. Her   parents Isaac and Mary were domestic servants, working for one of the   big houses around Marylebone, part of that feverish development of   gracious squares that had been built towards the end of the last   century to house the newer aristocracy during the “London” part of   their wandering year. When the couple had married eleven months earlier   at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, they had signed the register clearly,   confident in themselves and their newly merged identity. The same,   though, cannot be said of their witnesses. William Standage, Mary’s   father, has done his\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    best but the sprawling scratch he makes in the register is indecipher-\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    able: underneath the parish clerk has been obliged—tactfully,   crossly?—to write out his name properly, for the record. Mrs. Beeton is   only twenty years away from people who would be happier signing   themselves with a cross.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Elizabeth’s mother, Mary Jerrom, the only one of Mrs. Beeton’s   grandparents who was to play a significant role in her life, had been   born Mary Standage in 1794 in the ancient village of Westhampnett. Her   father\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    was a groom on the Duke of Richmond’s estate at nearby Goodwood.   William Standage had himself been born nine miles away, at Petworth   where the huge Standage clan had for generations lived and worked with   horses. But it was William who was the star of the stables. In 1792 he   was headhunted by the horse-mad Duke of Richmond to work as a groom at   Goodwood. Given that Mrs. Beeton would be so exact about what you   should pay your groom, it is nice to be able to report that in 1792 her   great-grandfather was getting £18 a year which, by 1807, had risen to   £24, with extra allowances for clothing and travel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The horse was God at Goodwood. When the 3rd Duke of Richmond inherited   in 1756 his first thought was not to rebuild the unimpressive house but   to commission the architect William Chambers to build a magnificent   stable block as a kind of love song to the most important creatures in   his life. Complete with Doric columns and a triumphal arch, the block   was home to fifty-four lucky animals—hunters mainly, but from 1802   racers too. Family myth has it that it was William Standage who helped   the Duke plot the track that would become one of the most important   racecourses in the land.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Standage, who married a woman called Elizabeth, produced a string of   daughters: first Mary, next Sarah and then Harriet. All three girls   married men who worked with horses. This is not as odd as it might seem   today. You can only marry someone you’ve already met, and a groom’s   daughter in the early nineteenth century met an awful lot of grooms.   But none of the girls stayed in Sussex. Instead they followed the   classic migratory pattern of their generation and poured into London,   working first as servants in aristocratic mansions and then marrying   men from the stables, men who knew or were known to their fathers. In   time these men would set up as job masters or livery stable keepers,   hiring themselves and their carriage out for a fee, doing for several   families what they had formerly done for just one. By the end of the   nineteenth century, you could still find the grandsons of these people   working as omnibus and cab drivers, transporting restless crowds of   shopgirls, clerks and housewives around a teeming central London.","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304515653861,"sku":"NP9780307278661","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307278661.jpg?v=1767741503","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-short-life-and-long-times-of-mrs-beeton-isbn-9780307278661","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}