The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

INTERLUDE

‘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 grinding in the background, yet a few pages later Mrs Beeton dedicates several enthusiastic paragraphs to a newly patented system for mass-producing aerated bread. During this process ‘the dough is mixed in a great iron ball, inside which is a system of paddles … then the common atmospheric air is pumped out, and the pure gas turned on.’ It was from these unappetizing beginnings that the Aerated Bread Company or ABC would emerge to become a commercial giant of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, providing white sliced loaf, as smooth and tasteless as sponge, to the nation.

None of this makes Mrs Beeton’s rusticism phoney, although her vision of agrarian Britain is quaintly out of date, lacking any mention of intensive farming methods, high seasonal unemployment, and endemic poverty among the rural working class. But what Beeton shared with some of the most persuasive voices of her age was the nagging feeling that all the good things about modern urban living – heat on demand, sauces that came out the same every time, a dripping pan furnished with its own stand – arrived at a cost. But what that cost was exactly, and whether it was too high a price to pay for convenience, safety, and comfort was something that she hardly had time to consider. Whirling not so much like a dervish as a cog in a particularly intricate machine, she pressed on in a blur of activity, determined to finish her 1,112 pages in record time. ‘The Free, Fair Homes of England’ remained a lovely, compensating dream.

CHAPTER TWO ‘Chablis to Oysters’

ALTHOUGH EPSOM LIES only 14 miles away from the City of London as the crow flies, it could not have been more different from the cluttered streets and close courts in which Isabella Mayson had spent most of the first seven years of her life. Positioned on a ridge in the North Downs, the town manages to be both flat and high at the same time. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it enjoyed an extended spell as a restorative spa, when its indigenous salts were said to work wonders on jaded digestions. Samuel Pepys took the waters there a couple of times, finding it funny to watch as his fellow sippers rushed for the bushes, caught short by the salts’ laxative effect. But by the opening of the nineteenth century, the fashionably liverish had moved on to Cheltenham and Bath, leaving Epsom to its devices as a quiet market town that turned, once a year, into Gomorrah. Dickens got the scale of the transformation best, writing in 1851 that for most days of the year Epsom was virtually dead but how ‘On the three hundred and sixty fifth, or Derby Day, a population surges and rolls, and scrambles through the place, that may be counted in millions.’

For a few short days during the summer race meeting, well-mannered Epsom became the destination of every swell, Guards officer, dwarf, clerk, tart, orange-seller, thimble rigger, prize-fighter, crook, and lady of fashion in the country. Ruskin called the Derby the ‘English carnival’ and from the breaking hours on the day itself – usually in June – a spirit of excitement and misrule began to bubble far away in London. In Clapham, Mitcham, and Tooting, not to mention Belgravia, Hyde Park, and Knightsbridge people commandeered every phaeton, gig, barouche, four-in-hand, brake, tilbury, and donkey cart for the short journey south. Alongside the shambling caravan of race-goers trundled dusty sellers of every kind of snack, novelty, and stimulant, all shouting and shoving in their attempt to turn a copper, honest or otherwise. Every public house along the route was packed with Derby-goers in various stages of tipsiness and with only a passing interest in the racing. Some indeed never got further than the Swan at Clapham or the Cock at Sutton, and Dickens reckoned that most people returned from the day unable to remember the name of the winning horse, let alone its jockey. As the chaotic column of humanity approached the Surrey Downs the sheer press of numbers meant that it started to stall. A 7- or 8-mile tailback was not unknown and it could take a whole hour to clear the final 3 miles. Local hawkers took advantage of this pooling throng to press upon it anything from a racing card to pigeon pie, lemonade to a second-hand umbrella. The mood could turn merry, but seldom sour. As the Illustrated London News advised Derby-goers briskly: ‘if things are thrown at you, just throw them back.’

From 1837, if you were modern-minded, you could make the journey from London by train. The London–Brighton line took you as far as the quaintly named Stoat’s Nest, from where it was a 7-mile tramp to the Downs. Next year came the welcome news that a rival line, the London and South-Western, was to run special Derby Day excursion trains on their Southampton line. But such was the press at Nine Elms in south London, the result of thousands of people trying to pile onto eight meagre trains, that the police were called in to disperse the increasingly desperate crowd. Even then, the train only went as far as Surbiton, which was still a good 5 miles from the course. It was not for nearly another decade that a line was built all the way to Epsom.

Once the crowds were disgorged – in 1843, the year that Isabella arrived in Epsom, it was reckoned that 127,500 extra souls poured into the town for the Derby – the party continued, helped along by liberal supplies from the temporary beer and spirit stalls. Up on the Hill, the large bank rising at the edge of the racetrack, there was a temporary funfair with swings, roundabouts, Italian hurdy-gurdy players, and acrobats who insisted on twisting themselves into impossible shapes. Winding among the crowd you could see jaunty perennial eccentrics like ‘Sir’ John Bennett, a prosperous jeweller from Cheapside who resembled a beery Father Christmas and would drink anyone’s health while ambling along on his cob. Others, who liked to think themselves fashionable, bought cheap German articulated wooden dolls and crammed them around the brims of their hats – an odd craze that no one could ever quite explain.

This gaggle of humanity was augmented by a fair number of gypsies, who had gathered the previous weekend on the racecourse for ‘Show Out Sunday’, their annual meeting of the clans. Fortunes were told, palms crossed with silver, and heather thrust under reluctant noses. The place was a petty criminal’s paradise: in the squawk and clatter it was child’s play to pick a pocket or sneak off with someone else’s lunch. Prostitutes worked swiftly and unobtrusively, card sharps blended back into the crowd at a moment’s notice. A temporary magistrates’ court was set up in the Grandstand to deal with all the extra business, and additional policing was, by tradition, partly paid for by the winner of that year’s Derby. During race week the manager of the Epsom branch of the London and County Bank kept a loaded rifle with a fixed bayonet close by his desk while Baron de Tessier, one of the local grandees and Steward to the Course, hired extra police protection for his family. Yet still it felt like a losing battle: right-minded burghers could only fume over the way their lives had been so rudely interrupted by the incomers. Unless, of course, they happened to be publicans, shopkeepers or pie makers, in which case they hiked their prices and pasted on a welcoming smile.

Artists loved the Derby, although not necessarily for its horses, which they tended to paint as little rocking creatures whose hooves never quite contacted the ground. It was the crowds they came to see. Over the next century, Millais, Degas, ‘Phiz’, Doré, and Géricault would all take their turn at trying to get the spirit of the place down on paper. George Cruikshank did a brilliant 6-foot cartoon strip called ‘The Road to the Derby’, showing every aspect of human and horsey life on the long trail down from London. But the most successful execution came from William Frith. His Derby Day of 1858 (the not very inspirational title was suggested by Henry Dorling) is a wide-screen panorama of the crowd on the Hill, consisting of ninety distinct figures. Carefully composed in his London studio in a series of artful triangles, you will find smocked countrymen, sinister gypsies, tipsy ladies, flushed punters, a sly thimble rigger, and a hungry child acrobat who watches in disbelief as a top-hatted footman unpacks a feast (the child model, hired from the circus, proved to be a menace in the studio – somersaulting into props and teasing the little Friths about their posh manners).

Derby Day was so hugely popular when it was shown at the Royal Academy that it had to be protected by a policeman and an iron railing in order to stop the admiring crowds pitching forward. On the stately world tour that followed, the painting attracted huge attention wherever it went. Since Frith was known to have been paid a whopping £1,500, Derby Day naturally spawned a whole host of flattering copy-cats. The best of these, the much engraved At Epsom Races, 1863 by Alfred Hunt, rearranges the tipsy ladies, adds an urchin and some shady tradesmen in an attempt to recreate that same sense of fluxy human life.

What pulled artists to Epsom was the fact that the racetrack was a place where the lowest and the highest met, a space outside the normal social order. Or as the Illustrated London News put it: ‘there is a sort of magic in the words Epsom Races, which arouses the hopes, recollections, anticipations, and sympathies of hundreds and thousands of people of all classes of society.’ Essentially a rich man’s hobby, the track had been dominated for decades by aristocrats who travelled around the country from course to course. They were shadowed by their grooms who, in the days before horseboxes and trains, were responsible for riding the precious beasts from Goodwood to Ascot to Doncaster in preparation for the next meeting. Behind the grooms trailed a job-lot of racing ‘types’ – bookies, gypsies, hucksters of every kind. Periodically this odd caravan trundled into well-regulated market towns, took over the taverns and local manors, tumbled the servant girls, cheeked the policemen and made an almighty mess, departing before anyone could be quite sure exactly what they had seen and heard.

Corruption was part of the weft of the sport of kings, which only added to its seedy glamour. Horses were nobbled, trainers coshed, jockeys squared, fortunes won and lost, all under the shadiest of circumstances. Epsom in the 1840s was especially rich in this kind of rottenness. In 1844 the Derby was won by a horse called Running Rein, who turned out to be a 4-year-old named Maccabeus (the Derby was strictly for 3-year-olds). The concealment had been managed by painting the animal’s legs with hair dye bought from Rossi’s, a smart barber’s shop in Regent Street. There was nothing new about the trick. With record-keeping so hit-and-miss, it was simple to lie about a horse’s age or even do a straight swap. The case of Running Rein, however, was referred to the Jockey Club. The publicity surrounding the sorry business only served to show half-delighted middle-class newspaper readers what they had always suspected: that racing was run by decadent toffs and their rackety hangers-on whose glory days could not be gone too soon.

The, by now, infamous hair dye had been traced to Rossi’s by Lord George Bentinck, the ‘Napoleon of the Turf’, and the whole incident investigated initially by his protégé Henry Dorling, the Clerk of the Course at Epsom, who swiftly declared that Orlando, the horse second past the finishing post, was this year’s official Derby winner. Over his lengthy tenure it was Dorling’s great achievement to bring to Epsom his own bourgeois brand of probity, order and storming profit. His Sporting Life obituary recalled admiringly how ‘promptitude and regularity were the order of the day in all … [his] business arrangements’, although the fact that newspaper had once been managed by his son may account for some of the fulsome tone. Even so there could be no denying that by the 1850s Dorling had managed to make a substantial change in the racecourse’s culture, turning it from a discredited and slightly sleazy club for aristocrats and chancers into virtually a family business, complete with programmes, ledgers, and a tidy moral climate. The sort of thing that Queen Victoria, had she deigned to return after her damp squib of a visit in 1840, might actually quite have liked.

This process of cleaning up and sorting out had been started by Henry Dorling’s father, William, who had arrived in the town in 1821. Family legend has him riding over the Downs from Bexhill, where he worked as a printer, and seeing Epsom spread beneath him as if it were the Promised Land. Deciding that his destiny lay there, Dorling returned to Bexhill, scooped up his wife, six children, and printing press and retraced his steps over the county border into Surrey. More practically – and the Dorlings were nothing if not practical – William had spotted that Epsom, a town full of business and bustle, did not have a resident press. Moving there would assure him brisk custom from every auctioneer, estate agent, parish officer, butcher, baker, and candlestick maker in the place. In addition, he would continue as he had in Bexhill to combine his printing business with a circulating library and general store. For as well as lending you the latest novel, William Dorling could sell you a shaving cake, a set of Reeves paints or a packet of Epsom Salts, hire you a piano, supply you with fine-quality tea from the London Tea Company or a copy of Watts’s Psalms and Hymns and insure your property through the Kent Fire Office. And then, when you did eventually die, it was Dorling’s job as registrar to record the fact, along with the happier news of any births and marriages that occurred within the town. In fact there was not much you could do in Epsom without running into William Dorling.

If Epsom was basically a one-horse town for most of the year, for one week every summer it was inundated with the very finest examples of the species. For a man as canny as William Dorling, the obvious next step was to insinuate himself into the racing culture. In 1826 he started printing ‘Dorling’s Genuine Card List’, colloquially known as ‘Dorling’s Correct Card’ – a list of the runners and riders for each race. It sounds a simple thing, hardly a product on which you could found a fortune and a business dynasty, but in a world as chaotic and cliquey as racing, accurate information was at a premium. The Correct Card, put together from knowledge Dorling gleaned as he walked the Heath early every morning chatting to trainers, grooms and jockeys, was a way of communicating intelligence that would otherwise lie scattered and obscured to the ordinary race-goer. Indeed, as the Illustrated London News reported during Derby week of 1859: ‘half of the myriad who flock to the Downs on the Derby Day would know nothing of the names of the horses, the weights and colours of the riders, were it not for Dorling’s card, printed feverishly through the night in the printing shed next to the family house and sold the next morning by hoarse vendors posted at every likely point.’