I am best when alone. I was glad to hear that you and the little ones were well. Make my love to Isabella and Bessy. The other 2 do not know me. They are very well at Thursby. I have not seen them lately except Anne who was at our House yesterday. I have not had much of Anne’s Company lately. I want to know when Esther was born. I have forgot. Write soon.
With kind regards I subscribe myself,
Yours sincerely,
JOHN MAYSON
This letter is puzzling both in what it conceals and reveals. Mayson’s quavering voice, raised in complaint at a hostile world, suggests an old man, battered by grief at having recently lost both his wife, the original Isabella, and his only living son. Obligations – to his curate, to his widowed daughter-in-law, to his grandchildren – weigh like lead upon him, yet he feels unsupported by the people who should love him back, his daughter and teenage granddaughter at nearby Thursby. To Elizabeth, a crisp young woman who had grown up watching her parents run an expanding business, it must be galling to be told by an elderly clergyman that rent comes due every quarter. The reminder that carefulness will achieve much is likewise the last thing to say to a woman who has lain awake at night worrying about how to raise four children alone and on a dwindling income. Mayson’s fussiness over his post-mortem financial plans is odd, too, when you consider that, on his death three years later, it turned out that he had not got round to making a will. His substantial estate of £1,500 passed automatically to Esther Burtholme, his only living child, an already prosperous farmer’s wife. The little cockney grandchildren, about whom the Revd Mayson said he cared so much, got nothing.
Perhaps, though, by the time of his death Mayson felt that Elizabeth’s fortunes had shifted sufficiently for him not to have to bother. For it is now that the stalled courtship story reaches its happy ending. The bare facts are these: only eight months after writing that letter to her father-in-law, we find Elizabeth getting married again. Her husband is Henry Dorling, the young printer who had lodged in her mother’s boarding house all those years ago. This means that the two young families must have stayed in touch: godparenting in the nineteenth century was a serious business, and it is highly unlikely that Benjamin Mayson, a clergyman’s son, would have let his relationship with young Henry Mayson Dorling lapse. So Elizabeth would have been quite aware that Dorling’s wife had died giving birth to her fourth child, only a few months before she had lost her own Benjamin. The early biographers see in this symmetry – both Henry and Elizabeth recently widowed, both with four children apiece – a lovely coincidence, a lucky chance to make the fairy story come out right. But the fact is that this second marriage was as cool as a business deal. Elizabeth needed a husband to rescue her from life as a ‘warehouseman’, and Henry was looking for a mother for his children.
In the spring of 1843 Elizabeth and Henry headed north to Great Orton, so that John Mayson could meet the man who was going to replace his late son. On 24 March the couple headed over the border to Gretna where they were married by John Linton the hotel keeper who doubled as ‘priest’. The witness was Anne Burtholme, now 19 years old and doubtless delighted to play a key part in such a sweetly romantic business. The wedding party – which consisted of the couple, together with Anne and her father John Burtholme – had a hearty wedding breakfast washed down with ale, whisky, and gin.
Did John Mayson, a clergyman of the Church of England, approve of this, the nineteenth-century equivalent of getting married in a Las Vegas wedding chapel? Probably not. Perhaps, too, Elizabeth and Henry had surprised themselves by their skittishness, the last time in their lives that they displayed such impulsive behaviour. Or perhaps the fact that Elizabeth was already pregnant made them rush: baby Charlotte would be born only seven and a half months later. Whatever the reason, the very next day Henry Dorling returned to London and applied for a licence to marry ‘Elizabeth Mayson, widow’ in the old-fashioned way. On 27 March they did the whole thing all over again and walked up the aisle at St Mary’s Islington, the parish where Elizabeth was temporarily living. And then shortly afterwards, gathering up her four children and her mother, the newly minted Mrs Dorling headed off to her second husband’s family home in Epsom, to the place that would become the shape, the sight, and the sound of Mrs Beeton’s childhood.
‘The Free, Fair Homes of England’
Caption to the Frontispiece of the Book of Household Management
YOU DO NOT have to get very far into the Book of Household Management (BOHM) to realize that one of its main preoccupations is the loss of Eden. The Frontispiece is an exquisitely coloured plate that shows an extended family group from the early nineteenth century, clustered around the door of a tiled cottage at harvest time. The men are plump John Bulls, prosperous in gaiters. The principal female figure is serving them beer which, judging from the golden haze in the middle distance, she has brewed from her own grain. In the foreground ducks dabble, hens peck and cows drowse under a tree, while a bulldog keeps a beady watch on the men gathering hay on the horizon. The caption underneath explains that this scene represents ‘The Free, Fair Homes of England’, a line from the Romantic poet Felicia Hemans. In other words, here is a time before industrialization scarred the land, cut a generation of town dwellers from its gentle rhythms, and replaced convivial kin groups with edgy strangers.
You just know that Mrs Beeton would love to step into that picture. The Book of Household Management is saturated with a longing for an agrarian world that has already slipped into extinction but just might, by some enormous effort of will, be brought back into play. So, in her instructions for making a syllabub Mrs Beeton suggests mixing up some sugar and nutmeg and then simply squirting the milk from the cow’s udder straight into the bowl. (For those unlucky readers who do not have their own cow immediately to hand Beeton suggests substituting a milk-filled jug poured from a great height to produce the required froth.)
Throughout the BOHM animals destined for the table are described in their natural habitat with such lulling, lyrical grace that you seem to find yourself watching them from the corner of a hot, summer meadow. Here, for instance, is Beeton describing the eating habits of a sheep: ‘indolently and luxuriously [the sheep] chews his cud with closed eyes and blissful satisfaction, only rising when his delicious repast is ended to proceed silently and without emotion to repeat the pleasing process of laying in more provender, and then returning to his dreamy siesta to renew the delightful task of rumination’. Elsewhere Beeton’s text is scattered with drawings that reinforce the unforced bounty of nature. Pigs snuffle in well-kept sties (no nasty urban courtyard here), a landrail hares through the undergrowth, while deer bound through what looks like heather with the Scottish Highlands peaking in the background. The illustration heading up the chapter on vegetables is a cornucopia of cabbage, onions, and leeks, seeming for all the world like something that has just been plucked from the soil in time for the Harvest Festival supper.
Such soft-focus rural fantasy was only possible because Mrs Beeton, like most of her readers, was actually a sharp-edged daughter of the industrial age. Her guidelines for domestic bliss have less to do with the farmhouse than the factory. Briskly she divides the working day into segments and allots each household member from the mistress to the scullery maid a precise set of tasks that read like a time and motion study. (There is no point housemaids starting work until 7 a.m. in the winter, for instance, since rising any earlier will be a waste of candle.) The labour is specialized, repetitive, and, more often than not, mechanized. Kitchen equipment is described and illustrated as if it were industrial plant; the laundry maid’s duties make her sound like the head boilerman on a steamship.
So, too, for all that Mrs Beeton gestures dewy-eyed to the days of ‘auld lang syne’ when households produced their own butter, eggs, bread, and wine, she spends much of her time urging short cuts on her readers. Commercially bottled sauces and pickles get a cautious welcome (they’re probably not as good as home-made, she admits, but at least they don’t cost any more). And when it comes to baking Beeton is ambivalent about whether you should even bother to do it yourself. The illustration to ‘General Observations on Bread, Biscuits and Cakes’ may show an artful pyramid of rustic-looking loaves, with a windmill