Kathryn Hughes digs into the story behind 'Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management,' an English perennial

Reviewed by Kathryn Shevelow
May 28, 2006

G. QUINN CRESCENT / illustration

Hear the name “Mrs. Beeton” and the image of a British domestic goddess might pop into your mind. Not sexy Nigella, but a sterner Victorian deity: a stolid, eminently respectable elderly lady dressed in black, who inevitably resembles Queen Victoria. She holds a ladle instead of a scepter, and rules the home instead of the empire. But, the beginning of her famous book makes clear, these are much the same thing:

“As with the Commander of an Army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house. Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path.”

“Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management” (abbreviated BOHM) was originally published in 1861, and has been continually revised, updated, expanded and spun off ever since. Imagine a real-life Betty Crocker concocted from a combination of Irma S. Rombauer and Fannie Farmer, with a pinch of Julia Child thrown in; add a large helping of Martha Stewart at her most frighteningly competent, and you'll get a sense of the kind of authority Mrs. Beeton exercised over generations of Englishwomen. Unlike Betty Crocker, Mrs. Beeton was a real person, but, Kathryn Hughes recounts in great, often fascinating detail, the Mrs. Beeton who became a household name was almost as fictional a creation as Ms. Crocker.

BOOK REVIEW The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. BeetonThe First Domestic Goddess Kathryn Hughes; Knopf, 480 pages, $29.95

Reading the BOHM, you imagine that you are in the capable hands of a middle-aged matron thoroughly experienced in managing the battery of servants it takes to run a large household, supervising with a deft hand the nursery, the sickroom, the kitchen and the gardens. In actual fact, Isabella Beeton was 25 years old when she published her book. She didn't much like to cook – or do housework, or manage the children or her two servants. What she liked to do was to accompany her husband Sam to the office of his publishing house every day, where she served as a columnist, editor, business manager and, ultimately, his most lucrative and enduring brand.

Rather than an Angel in the House, Isabella was the type of Victorian woman who participated avidly and competently in the entrepreneurial spirit of her age. She wrote a column for Sam's periodical, the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, and then, since it seemed like a marketable idea and they needed the money, she began to issue in serial form her book instructing middle-class women how to run their households, providing 2,000 recipes to help them do it. She approached the task of household management in the rational, systematizing way of the new industrial order: In the title of her book, the stress falls as much upon “management” as it does “household.”

Isabella came from an upwardly mobile family. Only two generations earlier they were servants and grooms, but Isabella's father Benjamin Mayson had worked his way up to become a successful linen wholesaler. After his death, her mother, Elizabeth, married a publisher, Henry Durling, and moved with him to the racetrack town of Epsom, where he established himself as a leading citizen. Elizabeth and Henry each had four children from their previous marriages; together, they produced 13 more. (One of Henry's teenage sons, in a rather desperate joke, sent his father a condom in the mail. The humor was not appreciated.) When the household became so crowded that the overflow of children was sent to live in the racetrack grandstand, on which Henry conveniently held the lease, 12-year-old Isabella decided that the role of mother's helper was the only one she could play. It was a role she would continue to play, and professionalize, as an adult.

Isabella married the publisher Sam Beeton, a somewhat rakish but determinedly upwardly mobile Victorian himself. Sam gave Isabella passionate love, genuine respect for her writing and business acumen, escape from the demands of her family, a life of financial insecurity but great ambition, and a profession that took her out of the home. On their honeymoon, he also gave her syphilis.

Excerpt from "The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton" The Beetons, just like the British middle classes to whose desires they so expertly catered, were feeling flush. By the early 1860s the domestic landscape was furnished with more goods than ever before. Different spaces, activities, and even times of the day now required a growing number of props and markers. The table that looked right in the kitchen was wrong in the parlour, the dress that carried you through a morning at home needed changing by the time it came to making afternoon calls. Eating fish called for fish knives, photographs needed frames. Everyday items – anything from collars to pie dishes – were replaced not because they had worn out but because something more fashionable had appeared on the market. And increasingly that market was not the local haberdasher's or the dressmaker in the next town, but nothing less than the world itself. London was no longer a distant dream that you might never realize in the course of a long lifetime. It was, instead, the place you looked to for news, gossip, inspiration for what to wear and how to be. Life had never been so good, so busy, or quite so baffling.

Hughes is the first biographer of Beeton to have gained extensive, unrestricted access to family documents. This allows her to cut through numerous family and corporate legends designed to protect the image of “Mrs. Beeton,” which she does in vigorous detail. She quotes extensively and revealingly from Sam and Isabella's courtship letters, for instance, bringing this ill-fated but companionate couple to life. She is the first biographer to identify syphilis as the reason for Isabella's succession of miscarriages before she gave birth to her two healthy babies. (Ironically, this period of syphilis-caused childlessness both freed and impelled her to throw herself into publishing.) Some other Beeton secrets were known to previous biographers, but Hughes offers the first full, unqualified account of them.

One is that Isabella Beeton never made it to the middle age we imagine when we hear her name. She died at 28, of puerperal fever following childbirth. Distraught as he was, Sam soon realized that it made business sense to keep the death quiet in order to protect the Mrs. Beeton label, because the book was catching on – a smashing success that Isabella never saw. As far as most of her readers knew, Mrs. Beeton remained alive and well for decades, writing those new editions and spinoffs of the BOHM, and thinking up new recipes – all of which, as she said, she tested in her own kitchen.

This brings up another secret, one that was exploded in 1961 by the great British food writer Elizabeth David: The BOHM was almost entirely plagiarized from earlier books. Copying was not unusual at the time, and compiling all that information itself was massive work, but Isabella's barely changed borrowings are not acknowledged, although the first edition did identify her as “editor” rather than author. Hughes adds that it is also highly unlikely that Isabella – never much of a cook herself – tested all those recipes before including them. At least, Hughes points out, this does exempt her from the accusation heard in recent times that it was Mrs. Beeton – “a woman whose name seemed synonymous with roast beef, overcooked vegetables, and foggy winter evenings” – who ruined English cooking. Those were not her recipes.

Hughes commands extensive knowledge of Victorian England, and her account is often rich and fascinating, though her love of detail can sometimes make chapters seem as overstuffed as a Victorian chair. Also, a family tree would have helped us keep track of all the names.

But these are minor flaws. Hughes is really writing a story of a book as well as the biography of a person. To that end, she adopts a useful structure, punctuating the story of Isabella's life with periodic “Interludes” that break from the narrative to offer a combination of literary criticism and cultural history concerning the BOHM itself. This nicely reinforces the sense of the split between the historical Isabella and the book's Mrs. Beeton. The BOHM, as Hughes' title indicates, has a life of its own that has long overshadowed Isabella's, and that fact is done full justice here.

The name Mrs. Beeton may not carry the same kind of associations for most U.S. readers that it does for British ones. But Hughes' biography is both interesting and relevant on this side of the Atlantic. Recently, The New York Times ran a front-page article on an emerging trend among U.S. households: The family dinner has returned – sort of. Overscheduled two-career families are apparently making efforts to sit down together for a meal at least once or twice a week. The story of Mrs. Beeton – who understood the relationship between professionalism and domesticity not only in her book, but also in her own, short life – has something to say to us, too.

Kathryn Shevelow teaches in the Literature Department at UCSD. Her “Charlotte: Being a True Account of an Actress's Flamboyant Adventures in Eighteenth-Century London's Wild and Wicked Theatrical World” is the winner of this year's George Freedley Memorial Award for the best book on live theater. It has recently been published in paperback by Picador.

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