a girl who has grown up with the stink and clatter of livery nags directly under her bedroom window. This class-shifting will be a theme in Elizabeth’s life over the next thirty years, as she moves from mews, to warehouse, to townhouse and, finally, to a suburban mansion with over a dozen servants and her own busy programme of balls and At Homes.
There are two anecdotes about Elizabeth that have been handed down through the family, and both hinge upon the idea of her as a social traveller. The first story comes from her great-granddaughter Nancy Spain who has Elizabeth visiting Hampton Court as a girl on two occasions, once when Adelaide, the consort of King William IV, was there to receive ‘a medallion’. There is no tag line to the anecdote, no point to it at all, apart from associating Elizabeth Jerrom, a girl born in a stable, with the dignity of queenship, her beauty implied as the link (the story comes straight after a eulogy to her good looks). In Spain’s story Elizabeth becomes both a proxy lady-in-waiting to the Queen and also the recipient by association of the oddly generic ‘medallion’.
Years later, in a book charting his family’s history, Elizabeth’s grandson Revd Edward Dorling remembered how as a young child in the 1860s he had fallen foul of her on account of some flowers that had been picked without permission from her garden. Little Edward found himself confronting a woman who regarded him with the controlled disapproval of ‘an angry queen’. No longer beautiful, and now swollen by seventeen confinements, Elizabeth’s ‘we are not amused’ expression made her, in the child’s mind, as frightful a prospect as the real Queen Victoria.
Girls who are as pretty as princesses attract all kinds of courtship stories, and Elizabeth Jerrom was no exception. Indeed, the tale that was handed down about her was so potent that it was still being rehashed in newspapers a hundred years later. The story goes that once upon a time, one of Mrs Jerrom’s lodgers was a young printer called Henry Dorling. It is impossible to confirm this, although it does make sense. Dorling’s father was a printer in Epsom who produced the running cards for the Derby. Mrs Jerrom’s father had been a key groom at Goodwood. The courses were only 30 miles from each other, and were connected by a network of owners and grooms who continuously passed between the two. Names, tips, gossip, information would have been exchanged along the way, so that when William Dorling was looking for respectable people with whom his son could lodge during his vulnerable bachelor years in London, he naturally thought of the Jerroms.
The story runs that Henry Dorling and Elizabeth Jerrom fell in love but her parents refused to countenance an engagement. Instead they favoured the suit of the gentlemanly wholesaler Mr Mayson. Mayson was an established businessman with a residence in Marylebone and a warehouse in the city. What is more, he was a vicar’s son, which to country people (which is what the Jerroms still were) meant a great deal.
The dates, however, do not work. The records show that a good nine months before Benjamin Mayson and Elizabeth Jerrom became man and wife Henry Dorling had already married a London girl called Emily Clarke. The fact that Dorling asked Benjamin Mayson to stand godson to his first child and named the boy ‘Henry Mayson Dorling’, also tends to argue against any kind of love triangle. If there was any rivalry and split loyalty at 1 Wyndham Mews it must have been of a very mild variety. As far as we know Elizabeth Jerrom never looked back on 2 May 1835 when she walked up the aisle with Benjamin Mayson.
The Maysons’ first child was born on 14 March 1836 at the fag end of the snowiest winter that anyone could remember. She was fifteen months too early to be a Victorian. The Maysons were shrewd with their naming strategies, careful to tie the child to the wealthier side of the family. The baby was named Isabella after her Mayson grandmother, the well-set-up brewer’s daughter, and Mary … after who exactly? Possibly after her other grandmother, Mrs Jerrom, the groom’s daughter, but also, perhaps, after her father’s grandmother. ‘Mary’ was one of those handily common names that provided cover for a multitude of dynastic ambitions.
Shortly after Isabella’s birth the little family of three moved from Marylebone to Benjamin’s business premises which were situated at the heart of the textile business in the City of London. In the early nineteenth century the short streets that run north from Cheapside towards Guildhall were packed with warehouses storing fabric of every kind. As well as ‘Manchester’ goods of linen and cotton, there were ‘Nottingham warehouses’ stocked with lace, as well as other businesses specializing in silk products from Coventry and Derbyshire or woollens from Yorkshire. Within a few hundred yards you could find all the new mass-produced fabrics of the industrial age, funnelled down from their place of production and disgorged into the chief marketplace of the country, indeed of the whole world.
The City of London was still a residential area in the 1830s. Warehousemen, in particular, liked to live close to their capital, setting up home on the top floor of their premises, which also provided lodgings for clerks and apprentices. Mayson’s first warehouse was in Clement’s Court, a narrow cul-de-sac which ran off the west side of Milk Street, where the fine houses had gradually been taken over by textiles. The lack of passing trade was not a problem; as a wholesaler Mayson was not supposed to sell to customers who came in off the street in search of a bargain, although plenty of smaller businesses did. Every corner of the warehouse would have been stacked high with bales of fabric: an eye-witness from twenty years later talks of the clerk in a large Cheapside warehouse ‘piling up innumerable packages in forms that would exhaust the devices of solid geometry’. During most of the year Mayson would have dealt in linen, ‘Scotch Derry’, and perhaps ‘linsey-woolsey’, but during the summer months there would have been lighter mousselines, georgettes, and silks. One corner of the warehouse might well have been set aside for crapes and ‘kindred vestments of woe’, styled and textured to denote every phase of mourning. Samples of the new season’s fabrics were sent out to valued customers in March and then again in September.
As baby Isabella crawled, then toddled, among the giant fabric pillars she would have absorbed the smells and textures of the textile trade, the sharp tang of Manchester cotton, the powdery feel of velvet, the flutter of muslin. In twenty-five years’ time, as editress of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, she will become expert at evaluating and describing the new season’s materials. Her writing is terse and expert, shot through not with the approximating gush of a Lady of Fashion but with the understanding of someone who has grown up feeling fabric between her fingers. Here she advises her readers on the styles for July 1860:
SHAWLS, of any and every material, are worn; some are made of black Grenadine, square, and with a binding of black or violet glacé all round, two inches in width, and of crossway silk; others are of the same material as the dress (some barèges being made wide for this purpose), and bound in the same manner, or have a ribbon laid on with a narrow straw trimming on each edge. A great many muslins are also made to match the dresses, the border being the same as that on the flounces. Shawls of white muslin, with embroidered borders, are very dressy and stylish, also those of plain white muslin, bound with black velvet.
Two years later, and with civil war in America cutting Lancashire and Cumberland off from their vital cotton supplies, Isabella mounted a relief effort to sustain the textiles industries’ starving workers. Old clothes, boots, bedding but above all money were to be sent to Mrs Beeton care of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in readiness for their dispersal among the cottages of northwest England. Even now, sixty years after Benjamin Mayson had first struck out from the damp, close sheds along the River Ribble, his eldest daughter still understood the way that cotton worked – and what happened when it didn’t.
Mayson prospered in the City. By 1836 he has moved out of Clement’s Court and onto Milk Street itself, buying substantial premises at number 24, an investment that brings with it the right to vote. Legend has always had it that Isabella was born here, in Milk Street, which would have made her a cockney, since the Bow Bells ring out from a few hundred yards away on Cheapside. Indeed, Nancy Spain actually has Isabella christened at St Mary-le-Bow, the result of a common enough confusion with Mary-le-bone, in a glorious christening gown covered with a pattern of ears of wheat which Spain maintains was still doing service within her family seventy years later. The story cannot be confirmed although, even allowing for Spain’s mixture of exaggeration and elision, it makes a kind of sense. If Benjamin Mayson knew anything, it was how to pick a piece of cloth that would last.
While