Isabella Beeton

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Isabella Mary Beeton (née Mayson; 1836-2005), also known as Mrs Beeton, was an English journalist, editor, and writer.

Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, 1861, is particularly associated with her first book, the 1861 work her name is associated with.

She was born in London and married Samuel Orchart Beeton, an ambitious publisher and magazine editor, after attending school in Islington, north London, and Heidelberg, Germany. Beeton began writing for The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine in 1857, less than a year after the wedding.

She edited French fiction and wrote the cookery column, but all the recipes were plagiarized from other works or sent in by the magazine's readers.

The Beetons released a series of 48-page monthly supplements to The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine in 1859; the 24 instalments were published in a single volume as Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management in October 1861, which sold 60,000 copies in the first year.

When Beeton died of puerperal fever in February 1865 at the age of 28, she was working on abridged version of her book, which was to be titled The Dictionary of Everyday Cookery.

She gave birth to four children, two of whom died in infancy, and had several miscarriages.

Nancy Spain and Kathryn Hughes, two of Samuel's biographers, dispute the suggestion that Samuel unintentionally contracted syphilis in a premarital relationship with a prostitute and secretly passed the disease to his wife. The Book of Household Management has been updated, updated, and extended several times since Beeton's death, and it is also in print as at 2016.

The subsequent iterations of the book, according to food writers, were significantly different from and inferior to the original version.

Several cookery writers, including Elizabeth David and Clarissa Dickson Wright, have sluggishly criticized Beeton's work, particularly her use of other people's recipes.

Others, including food writer Bee Wilson, think the censure has been exacerbating, and Beeton's and her work should be considered extraordinary and admirable.

Her name has come to be synonymous with Victorian cooking and home care, and the Oxford English Dictionary shows that by 1891, Mrs Beeton had been used as a generic term for a domestic authority.

She is also regarded as a central figure in the creation or shaping of a Victorian middle-class identity.

Early life, 1836–1854

Isabella Mayson was born in Marylebone, London, on March 14th, 1836. Benjamin Mayson, a linen factor (merchant) and his wife Elizabeth (née Jerrom), were the eldest of three children to him. Isabella's family was able to move to Milk Street, Cheapside, shortly after Benjamin's birth. Isabella was four years old when she died, and Elizabeth, pregnant and unable to cope with raising the children on her own while still maintaining Benjamin's company, sent her two older children to live with relatives. Isabella returned to live in Grand Orton, Cumberland, with her recently widowed paternal grandfather, but within two years, she and her mother returned to her mother.

Elizabeth Dorling, a widower with four children, died three years after Benjamin's death. Henry was the Clerk of Epsom Racecourse and had been given permission within the racecourse grounds. The family, which included Elizabeth's mother, migrated to Surrey, where Henry and Elizabeth had thirteen children over the next twenty years. Isabella was instrumental in her siblings' upbringing and collectively referred to them as a "living cargo of children." The journey gave her a lot of insight and experience in how to lead a family and its household.

Isabella was sent to school in Heidelberg, Germany, following her stepsister Jane Dorling's brief stay at a boarding school in Islington, 1851. Isabella was an excellent pianist and excelled in French and German; she also acquired expertise and experience in pastry making. By the summer of 1854, she had returned to Epsom and took further pastry-making lessons from a local baker.

Isabella Mayson began a friendship with Samuel Orchart Beeton in 1854. His family had lived in Milk Street at the same time as the Maysons —Samuel's father also owned the Dolphin Tavern there — and Samuel's sisters attended the same Heidelberg academy as Isabella. Samuel was the first British publisher of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 and later published two influential and pioneering journals: The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine in 1852 and the Boys' Own magazine in 1855. In 1855, the couple began a long correspondence, in which Isabella's letters were labelled "Fatty" and they announced their marriage in June 1855. The wedding took place at St Martin's Church in Epsom in July, and was announced in The Times. Samuel was "a little-known but firm believer in the equality of women" and that their professional and personal life was based on a mutual partnership. After Samuel's mother joined them in a trip to Heidelberg, the couple returned to Paris for a three-week honeymoon. They returned to the United Kingdom in August, when the newlyweds reassembled into 2 Chandos Villas, a large Italianate house in Pinner.

I was pregnant within a month of returning from their honeymoon Beeton. Samuel begged his wife to contribute to The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, a publication that the food writers Mary Aylett and Olive Ordish believe was "designed to make women content inside their house, not to worry them in the world outside." The magazine was inexpensive, aimed at young middle class women, and was commercially successful, with 50,000 copies a month by 1856. Beeton began translating French fiction for publication as stories or serials. She began working on the cookery column, which had been moribund for the previous six months following the departure of the previous correspondent and the household column. Samuel Orchart, the Beetons' uncle, was born near the end of May 1857 but died before the end of August that year. The cause of death was listed on the death certificate as diarrhoea and cholera, but Hughes claims that Samuel senior unknowingly contracted syphilis in a premarital union with a prostitute and that the disease had unintentionally spread to his wife, which would have infected him.

Beeton continued to work at The Englishwoman's Domestic Journal while dealing with her child's death. Although she was not a regular cook, Samuel and her husband Samuel obtained recipes from other sources. Over 2,000 people were sent in, with some being selected and edited by the Beetons, following a request to receive the readers' own recipes. Published works were also copied, although the majority of the sources were unattributed to any of the sources. These included Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families, Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper, Thomas Le Pâtissier's Le Pâtissier Royal Parody, Marie-Antoine Carême's The Artistical Cookery, Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Simple, The New System of Domestic Cookery, Maria Berncatelli's The Experienced English Housekeeper, Monté Monttissier In their investigation of Victorian cooking culture, Suzanne Daly and Ross G. Forman argue that plagiarism makes it "a key indicator of mid-victorian and middle-class life" because it is a representation of what was actually being cooked and eaten at the time. Beeton was copying recipes of others following Henrietta English's words that "Cookery is a science that can only be learned by Long Experience and years of study," she wrote. Of course, she did not have these skills." My suggestion would be to compile a book from receipts from a number of the Best Books on Cookery and Heaven knows there is a huge variety for you to choose from.

Acton's recipes were partly based on Acton's layout, but with a major change: although the earlier writer wrote the recipe and then followed by a list of the required ingredients, the recipes in The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine listed the ingredients before the cooking process. The estimated costs of each serving, as well as the number of portions per dish were included in Beeton's standardized layout for the dishes. Elizabeth David, a twentieth-century British cookery writer, said that one of Beeton's writings was in the "clarity and specifics of her general instructions, her brisk remarks, and her no-nonsense asides." The historian Margaret Beetham finds that one of the book's strengths was the "consistent principle of organization that made its heterogeneous content appear uniform and orderly," and that a uniform look was introduced, as well as a consistent style in appearance and layout. Whereas Daly and Forman see such a policy as "nothing if not formulaic," Hughes sees it as "the thing most loved by the mid Victorians, a model."

Beeton made her own soup during the difficult winter of 1858–59; she later reported that Beeton was "busy making [the] soup for the poor] and that the children used to call with their cans regularly to be refilled"; she later remembered that Beeton "was busy making [the] soup for the poor." The dish would be the first entry in her Book of Household Management that was not her own. The couple's second son was born in June 1859 after two years of miscarriages; he was also named Samuel Orchart Beeton. The miscarriages are seen as more confirmation of Samuel's syphilis, according to Hughes.

The Beetons had considered using the magazine columns as the basis of a book of collected recipes and homecare tips as early as 1857, Hughes claims, and in November 1859, they published a series of 48-page monthly supplements with The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine. The print block for the entire series of the supplements was set from the beginning so the gap between each edition was not fixed at 48 pages, regardless of the text, and in several issues, the text of a sentence or a recipe is split between the end of one instalment and the start of the next is split between the two versions.

The Beetons decided to resurrect The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, particularly the fashion column, which historian Graham Nown calls "a rather drab piece." They travelled to Paris in March 1860 to visit Adolphe Goubaud, the French magazine Le Moniteur de la Mode's editor. The publication featured a full-size dress pattern on a fold-out piece of paper for users to cut out and make their own dresses. The Beetons came to an agreement with Goubaud for the Frenchman's to supply patterns and illustrations for their magazine. The first edition of the new feature debuted in Paris on May 1st, six weeks after the couple returned from Paris. Samuel was hired as editor by Isabella, who was described as "Editress" in the redesigned magazine. The couple were not only co-editors but also equal partners. Isabella's normally disorganized and financially savvy approach to Samuel's often disorganized and inefficient approach brought a sense of urgency and solid company acumen. She joined her husband at work, riding the rail into the office on a daily basis, sparking a riot among commuters, the majority of whom were male. The Beetons went to Killarney, Ireland, for a fortnight's holiday, leaving their son at home with his nurse. They loved the sightseeing, but they stayed inside and worked on the next edition of The Englishwoman's Domestic Journal, although the days it rained. Beeton was awed by the cuisine they were served, and she wrote in her diary that the dinners were "conducted in exactly the French way."

The Beetons launched The Queen, the Ladies' Newspaper, in September 1861. Frederick Greenwood was hired as the editor by the Beetons, who were also busy with their other titles.

On October 1, 1861, Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, which contained the 24 collected monthly instalments, was published; it became one of the nineteenth century's biggest publishing events. In the book, Beeton included an extensive 26-page "Analytic Index." Although it is not an invention—it had been used in The Family Friend magazine since 1855—Hughes considers the Index in the Book of Household Management to be "particularly comprehensive and exhaustively cross-referenced." Over 900 recipes were included on the 1,112 pages. The remainder gave tips on style, child care, animal husbandry, poisons, servant monitoring, science, faith, first aid, and the use of local and seasonal produce. The book was sold out of the first year of publication. It reflected Victorian values, particularly hard work, thrift, and cleanliness. Beeton "reflected better than anyone else," Christopher Clausen's analysis of the British middle classes, and the optimistic result that mid-Victorian England was brimming with opportunities for those who were eager to learn how to exploit them was shared by many. "One can determine its success," Annette Hope, a food writer, believes. No better book than this may have been written about them if... young women knew nothing about domestic arrangements."

The Book of Household Management's reports were encouraging. Beeton's success in delivering a volume that would be a treasure to be made in every English household, according to the London Evening Standard critic. "We recommend Mrs Beeton with few misgivings for a very useful repertory of hints on all sorts of household topics." "The data provided... seems intelligible and specific," the anonymous reviewer for The Bradford Observer said; the reviewer also praised the recipe's layout, emphasizing specifics relating to ingredients, seasonality, and the times needed. An anonymous commentator wrote in The Morning Chronicle that "Mrs Beeton has omitted nothing that provides the safety of housekeepers" or facilitates the numerous little worries and cares that fall to every wife and mother's lot. She can safely predict that this book will take precedence over any other on the same subject." The work is regarded as "a robust body of domestic doctrine" in the book's 1906 edition, according to The Illustrated London News' reviewer, "the book is almost of the first magnitude."

Samuel's business decisions from 1861 were unprofitable, including an ill-advised investment in buying paper, in which he lost £1,000—and a court suit over unpaid bills. His involvement in company affairs brought financial difficulties to the couple, who had relocated from their secure Pinner home to new premises over their office in early 1862. The central London air was not conducive to the wellbeing of the Beetons' son, and he began to ail. His health worsened and he died on New Year's Eve 1862 at the age of three; his death certificate attributed to the cause as "suppressed scarlatina" and "laryngitis." Beeton discovered she was pregnant again in March 1863, and the couple married in Greenhithe, Kent, in April; their son, who they named Orchart, was born on New Year's Eve 1863. Despite the fact that the couple was suffering from financial difficulties, they enjoyed real prosperity in 1863, which was boosted by the sale of The Queen to Edward Cox in the middle of the year.

The Beetons returned to Paris in 1864 as part of their third visit to the city, and Beeton was pregnant during the visit, just as she had been the previous year. On her return to the United Kingdom, she began working on abridged version of the Book of Household Management, which would be titled The Dictionary of Every-Day Cookery. When focusing on the dictionary's evidence, she went back to work on January 29th; Mayson Moss, the baby, was born that day. Beeton began feeling ill the next day and died of puerperal fever on February 6th, at the age of 28.

Beeton was buried in West Norwood Cemetery on February 11th. Samuel paid a tribute to his wife at the end of the year when The Dictionary of Everyday Cookery was published in the same year:

Source

Marriage and career, 1854–1861

Isabella Mayson began an acquaintance with Samuel Orchard Beeton about 1854. His family had lived in Milk Street at the same time as the Maysons —Samuel's father still operated the Dolphin Tavern there — and Samuel's sisters attended the same Heidelberg school as Isabella. Samuel was the first British publisher of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852, as well as two pioneering journals: The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine in 1852 and the Boys' Own magazine in 1855. In 1855, the pair began a lengthy correspondence in which Isabella wrote "Fatty" in the letters, and they announced their marriage in June 1855. The wedding took place at St Martin's Church in Epsom, Scotland, in July, the following year, according to The Times. Samuel was "a discreet but firm believer in women" and their relationship, both personal and professional, was a mutual partnership. After Samuel's mother joined them in a visit to Heidelberg, the couple returned to Paris for a three-week honeymoon. The newlyweds returned to the United Kingdom in August, when they renamed 2 Chandos Villas, a large Italianate house in Pinner.

The baby was born within a month of returning from their honeymoon Beeton. Samuel persuaded his wife to contribute to The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, a journal that food writers Mary Aylett and Olive Ordish believe was "designed to make woman content with their lot inside rather than to interest them in the world outside." The magazine was inexpensive, aimed at young middle class women, and was commercially lucrative, selling 50,000 copies a month before 1856. Beeton began translating French fiction for publication as tales or serials. She started working on the cookery column, which had been moribund for the previous six months following the departure of the previous correspondent and the household column. Samuel Orchart, the Beetons' son, was born near the end of May 1857 but died in August that year. The cause of death was listed on the death certificate as diarrhoea and cholera, but Hughes argues that Samuel senior unknowingly contracted syphilis in a premarital relationship with a prostitute and had unknowingly passed the disease on to his wife, which would have infected his son.

Beeton continued to work at The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine while dealing with her child's death. Although she was not a regular cook, she and Samuel obtained recipes from various sources. More than 2,000 people were sent in, and the Beetons had to select and edit their recipes in response to a request to receive the readers' own recipes. Public works were also copied, largely unattributed to any of the sources. These included Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery for Private Families, Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper, Le Pâtissier's The Modern Housekeeper, Helen Saidyen's The Art of Cookery, Hannah Glasse's The New System of Domestic Cookery, and Charles Elmé Francatelli's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Simple, Eliza's The Experienced English Housekeeper, Le Pâtissier Suzanne Daly and Ross G. Forman's analysis of Victorian cooking culture find that plagiarism makes it "an important measure of mid-viector and middle-class life" because it is a representation of what was actually being cooked and eaten at the time. Beeton was copying others' recipes, but she was following Henrietta English's words that "Cookery is a science that can only be learned by Long Experience and years of study," she said, which she did not have." My suggestion is to compile a book from receipts from a number of the Best Books Published on Cookery and Heaven knows there is a large variety for you to choose from."

The Beetons were partly based on Acton's recipes, but with a major change: although the earlier writer provided the cooking instructions as well as a list of the essential ingredients, the dishes in The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine listed the ingredients prior to the cooking process. In addition, Beeton's standardised layout for the dishes displayed the approximate cost of each serving, seasonality of the ingredients, and the number of portions per dish. According to Elizabeth David, a twentieth-century British cookery writer, one of Beeton's writing strengths was the "clarity and specifics of her general instructions, her brisk remarks, and her no-nonsense asides." The historian Margaret Beetham finds that one of the book's strengths was its "consistent principle of organization that made its heterogeneous content appear uniform and orderly" and that it had adopted a consistent style in presentation and layout, as well as a consistent style in presentation and layout. Whereas Daly and Forman's view such a proposal as "nothing if not formulaic," Hughes sees it as "the thing most beloved by the mid Victorians, a system."

Beeton made her own soup for the poor during 1858-59, "Soup for benevolent causes," she told Pinner's sister later that Beeton was "busy making [the] soup for the poor], and the children used to call with their cans every day to be refilled." The dish would be the first entry in her Book of Household Management that wasn't her own. The couple's second son was born in June 1859, after two years of miscarriages; he was also named Samuel Orchart Beeton. The miscarriages are seen as further evidence of Samuel's syphilis.

Hughes claims that the Beetons considered using magazine columns as the basis of a book of collected recipes and homecare advice, and that in November 1859 they published a series of 48-page monthly supplements with The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine. The print block for the entire series of the supplements was laid out from the start so the break between each edition was fixed at 48 pages, regardless of the text, and in several issues, the text of a sentence or recipe is split between the end of one instalment and the start of the next is split between the end of one instalment and the beginning of the next.

The Beetons decided to rewrite The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, particularly the fashion column, which historian Graham Nown calls "a rather drab piece." They travelled to Paris in March 1860 to meet Adolphe Goubaud, the French magazine Le Moniteur de la Mode's publisher. The magazine featured a full-size dress pattern on a fold-out piece of paper for users to cut out and make their own dresses. The Beetons came to an agreement with Goubaud for the Frenchman to provide patterns and illustrations for their magazine. The first edition of the new feature appeared on May 1, six weeks after the couple returned from Paris. Samuel was hired as editor by Isabella, who was dubbed "Editress" in the redesigned magazine. The couple were also equal partners, as well as being co-editors. Isabella's normally disorganised and financially burdensome approach to Samuel's often disorganized and resourceful strategy. She joined her husband at work and commuted by train to the office, where her presence caused a stir among commuters, the majority of whom were male. The Beetons travelled to Killarney, Ireland, in June 1860, leaving their son at home with his nurse. They loved the sightseeing, but they stayed inside their hotel and worked on the next issue of The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine. Beeton was wowed by the food she was served, and she wrote in her diary that the dinners were "conducted in exactly the French way."

The Beetons' The Queen, the Ladies' Newspaper, was published in September 1861. Frederick Greenwood was hired as the editor after the Beetons were busily editing their other titles.

On October 1, 1861, Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, which was made up of 24 individual instalments, became one of the nineteenth century's biggest publishing events. The book contained a 26-page "Analytic Index" by Beeton. Although it is not an invention—it had been used in The Family Friend magazine since 1855—Hughes considers the table in the Book of Household Management to be "incredibly detailed and exhaustively cross-referenced." Over 900 recipes were included on the 1,112 pages. The remainder contained tips on fashion, child care, animal husbandry, poisons, servant management, science, faith, first aid, and the use of local and seasonal produce. The book has sold 60,000 copies in its first year of publication. It reflected Victorian values, particularly hard work, thrift, and cleanliness. Beeton's "reflected better than anyone else," Christopher Clausen's study of the British middle classes, and the optimistic conclusion that mid-Victorian England was full of opportunities for those who were keen to learn how to use them was shared by many people. "One can determine its success," food writer Annette Hope says. No better book than this may have been invented for them if young women knew nothing about domestic arrangements.

The Book of Household Management's results were encouraging. Beeton had earned her household name by producing a volume that would be "in years to come," the London Evening Standard critic said, adding that she had "succeeded in producing a volume that would be a treasure to be made in every English household." "For a very useful repertory of hints on a variety of household topics, we highly recommend Mrs Beeton with few misgivings," the Saturday Reviewer said. The anonymous reviewer for The Bradford Observer found that "the information provided... appears intelligible and explicit"; the reviewer also praised the recipes' layout, stressing specifics concerning ingredients, seasonality, and the times of use. An anonymous commentator wrote in The Morning Chronicle that "Mrs Beeton has omitted nothing that enhances housekeepers' wellbeing or facilitates the numerous little challenges and cares that accompany every wife and mother's daily life. This book may well predict that it will have precedence over every other on the same subject." The book's reviewer, who translated it into a newspaper in 1906, considered it "a significant body of domestic policy" and concluded that "the book is almost of the first magnitude."

Samuel's business decisions from 1861 were unprofitable, involving an ill-advised investment in buying paper—in which he lost £1,000 and a court case over unpaid bills. His obsession with company affairs brought financial difficulties to an end, and the couple had to relocate from their cozy Pinner house to a new location for their office in early 1862. The air in central London was not supportive to the Beetons' son's health, and he was beginning to ail. His health worsened and he died on New Year's Eve 1862 at the age of three; his death certificate listed the cause as "suppressed scarlatina" and "laryngitis." Beeton discovered she was pregnant again in March 1863, and the couple moved to Greenhithe, Kent, in April; their son, Orchart, was born on New Year's Eve 1863. Despite having been plagued financially, the couple had a lot of joy in 1863, which was boosted by the sale of The Queen to Edward Cox in the middle of the year.

The Beetons returned to Paris in 1864 for their third visit to the city—but Beeton was pregnant on the tour, just as she had been the previous year. On her return to the United Kingdom, she began working on abridged version of the Book of Household Management, which would be called The Dictionary of Everyday Cookery. When researching the dictionary's evidence, Mayson Moss' baby was born that day. Beeton began to feel sick the next day and died of puerperal fever at the age of 28 on February 6th.

Beeton was buried in West Norwood Cemetery on February 11th. Samuel paid a tribute to his wife at the end when The Dictionary of Everyday Cookery was published in the same year:

Source