My mother, my mother's mother, and her mother had a copy of the revered "Mrs Beetons Book of Household Management". I think most of us might have conjured up a an image of the bustling middle-aged matron, Mrs Bridges, the cook from the UK 1970s TV drama "Upstairs Downstairs" and because of this, any sort of challenge to the original domestic goddess was unheard of. We were wrong. Isalella Beeton compiled this book between the ages of 21 and 25 and had died by the age of 28.For most of her short life she organised her time in a way that seems familiar to any contemporary woman juggling a job and a family. She didn't live in a grand townhouse or a bijou country cottage, but in a brand new semi on a brand new estate in Pinner, Middlesex. Rather than a fleet of servants, she employed one maid-of-all work and a jobbing gardener. As she became more involved in her husband Sam’s publishing business she accompanied him on the daily commute to his Fleet Street office. Her presence on the early morning commuter train (a free season ticket was given away with each new build on the Pinner estate) annoyed the other passengers, all men, because they couldn’t smoke and were obliged to watch their language in front of a lady.
It was virtually unheard of for a married middle-class woman to go out to work in such a public way, and her parents — the rigidly respectable nouveaux riches Dorlings of Epsom — were scandalised at the way in which their eldest daughter was carelessly signalling the fact that she was no longer living the life of a middle-class matron.
But there was a real reason why Mrs Beeton needed the distraction of a punishing daily routine. Her first baby, conceived on her honeymoon in 1856, had died at three months. There followed a string of distressing miscarriages before she again gave birth in 1859, this time losing the child at the age of 3 years. It was to numb the ache of the empty nursery in Pinner that Isabella threw herself into advising women on how to live a perfect life.
Just why Mrs Beeton’s babies died and why she was prone to miscarriages has always been shrouded in secrecy. It was precisely to avoid these awkward questions that throughout the 20th century the Beeton family remained cagey about giving anyone permission to see her papers or to write her biography. But by 1999 the papers had passed out of the family’s hands and, the last remaining Beeton descendant had died; and, in short, there no longer seems to be any good reason to keep a secret that has festered for far too long.
Mrs Beeton was almost certainly one of the thousands of young middle-class Victorian women who was infected on her honeymoon with syphilis. Sam seems to have slept occasionally with prostitutes in his youth subsequently — he died at the age of 47 — suggesting that he suffered from this cruel and, at the time, untreatable disease. Mrs Beeton didn’t die from syphilis; that other common-or-garden Victorian tragedy, childbed fever, claimed her in 1865, just shy of her 29th birthday. Ironically, both the diseases that wrecked her life, syphilis and puerperal fever, are these days easily cleared up with a short course of antibiotics.
The fact of her death was kept quiet, first by Sam and then by the publishing firm that acquired his copyrights a year later. For with Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management beginning to do terrific business — 60,000 copies had been sold in the first year – it would be foolish to let readers know that the woman they turned to for advice on everything from a chesty cough to a light sponge cake had failed to create a nurturing domestic environment for herself.
As more and more spin-offs from the big book appeared on the market – by the 1890s there was a “Mrs Beeton” for every kind of home, from cottage to villa — it made complete sense to let readers think that she was alive, well, and busy cooking up a storm in her increasingly iconic kitchen. It is for this reason that the image of Mrs Beeton as a bustling, authoritative 55-year-old began slowly to take root. Throughout the 20th century anonymous journalists were employed to bring the book up to date, introducing information about new gas ovens, rationing and, in time, microwaves while still retaining Mrs Beeton’s brisk and authoritative voice.
Like The Bechams, Coke, or any other superbrand, “Mrs Beeton” has been finessed over the years to ensure that she is always contemporary yet enduringly the same.
According to The Book...
