The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton
by Kathryn Hughes
Published by Anchor
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Reviewed by Barbara Broom
Who’d think reading about a woman who wrote a book over 150 years ago would be so fascinating? Was I wrong!
Isabella (nee Bella Mayson) married Sam Beeton—leaving behind her mother’s “blended” family of nearly 21 children. She was the oldest daughter and had done much work around the house and with the children.
Sam was a struggling magazine and book publisher. Isabella joined him, mostly out of necessity, and was listed as his editor. In her early 20s she started writing a advice and homemaking column in the The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. She also became very savvy about marketing.
As time went on, Sam and Bella had two surviving children, but also numerous stillbirths and miscarriages. Apparently Sam had contacted syphilis before they were married—and Isabelle was never told (common tact with doctors of that Victorian era). She died at age 28, as a result.
However, before her early death, she put her knowledge and that of anyone else she could adapt, and cobbled together a 900-page book, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management.”
Written to the middle class, a growing group, during this Victorian period, they were hungry for advice on the correct behavior. Her readers assumed Mrs. Beeton was a wizened and experienced woman who had experienced proper dinner parties, how to train servants and everything needed about running a home.
Author Hughes did a wonderful job of bringing all the facts of this amazing woman’s short life—giving us interesting details about a smart women whom she obviously respected,
We learn about the society then, religious attitudes, sexual mores, the rise of consumerism, advertising and marketing—and the people (and especially the woman’s role). Mrs. Beeton was household then—and still is in England. If you thought you knew abut the Victorian era and the people who populated it, Hughes work might prove you wrong.
A very impressive biography and peak that the England of the 1850s and beyond.
Armchair Interviews says: Mrs. Beeton lives on in Hughes’ book and in the mind of the English.