The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

"Well, to tell you the truth, I’m not a fan of Mrs Beeton at all. I find Mrs Beeton in some ways, from the point of view of a historian, a bit of a distraction, because she was a publishing phenomenon rather than an original cookery writer. Well, she never knew that she was going to become a celebrity because she died before her book got any kind of recognition. It would probably be forgotten if it were not for one thing – the very enterprising publishers Ward Lock who bought the rights of the book from her husband, Sam Beeton, its original publisher. They realised that her book would become dated very quickly because in the second half of the 19th century things were changing enormously, with new equipment coming out and new recipes. So every time they brought out a new edition, they basically rewrote it, and included new images of the latest kitchen equipment. She became a brand. Kathryn Hughes very skilfully looks at this phenomenon. Mrs Beeton probably never cooked very much – she was not someone who had time in her life to learn to cook. In my words, she cruised on the Victorian internet and copied other people’s material, and she did it in a very skilful way. The reason for that was that she was a journalist; her early work was fashion writing for her husband’s magazine and she could get copy together very quickly. She based her books on much better ones that were written earlier in the century. There’s an encyclopedia of domestic economy by a man called Thomas Webster, which was published in the 1840s, which was getting a little bit old-fashioned by Mrs Beeton’s time. Her book was very much modelled on that – it doesn’t just tell you how to cook of course; it tells you how to manage a large household. It was aimed as a wedding present for a young bride. Ward Lock who published it in the late 1890s identified that market. People were getting better off and moving upwards, and more and more people were able to afford servants. These 19-year-old virgins who were marrying merchant bankers and moving into new villas in Islington…the poor things didn’t have a clue how to run a household. And Isabella Beeton’s book, like Thomas Webster’s before her, gave them those secrets. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Kathryn’s book is a very well researched biography, and it’s full of a lot of surprising things. It’s not known for instance, that Mrs Beeton probably died of syphilis, because her husband Sam was a philanderer and messed around with prostitutes – he was a real bounder. She was only 27 when she died. It’s curious because the whole nation has this picture of Mrs Beeton as being a rather portly lady with a pinny and flour on her hands, when in fact she was a young woman in her mid-20s when she started that book, with no real practical experience of cookery that we know of. She produced a book which is in no way original – there are much better cookery writers in the 19th century than Mrs Beeton. Kathryn’s book is a very good read, it’s very entertaining, and it’s been put together by a scholar who really knows her subject."