4th Estate £20 pp525

I possess a copy of The Book of Household Management by Mrs Isabella Beeton. It was a wedding present. I imagine the friend who gave it intended it as a kind of joke: marriage and housewifery, 20 years ago, both being things which were actually central to many of our lives, but which — as members of the generation that had first derided our elders’ materialism and subsequently embraced feminism — we pretended to be pretty offhand about, of which we were even a little ashamed.

The Book itself, as Kathryn Hughes demonstrates in this thoughtful, elegantly written study, was the product of another era when the whole business of being a woman and/or the person responsible for the running of a household was in the process of redefinition, and therefore the source of endless potential embarrassment. As a rule biographers who devote too much space to their subjects’ forebears bore their readers needlessly, but Hughes’s chronicling of the social ascent of the grandparents and parents of Isabella and her publisher husband Sam is germane to one of her chief arguments, that mid-Victorian prosperity (The Book first appeared in 1861) required women to play a brand-new role, one for which the previous generations provided them with no models. Isabella’s mother ran a fabric wholesale business and her mother- in-law was landlady of a public house: in both cases, the women had started out as their husbands’ partners, but once widowed had proved themselves competent managers in their own right. Ladylike Isabella was one of thousands of girls of “the middling sort” who, no longer expected to contribute financially to a marriage, had to find some other basis for their self-esteem. The Book, whose very title asserted that they were not helpless human ornaments but “managers” — professional, dominant, respected — showed them the way.

Hughes’s biographical chapters alternate with “interludes” in which she briskly deconstructs key passages from The Book. In Beeton’s instructions for carving a turkey Hughes finds a masterclass for empire-builders. Into Beeton’s wariness of the useful, edible but alarmingly fecund pig she reads a parable on the insubordination of servants. She warns that a literal-minded reading of Beeton makes for wildly inaccurate social history: those fantastically elaborate dinner settings tell us no more about the way people actually ate then than the fashion pages of Vogue tell us how people dress now. The Victorians read Beeton as we read Nigella, for recipes, yes, but also and much more eagerly for a vision of a life — however obviously unattainable — we’d like to share.

Lytton Strachey recognised the importance of Beeton’s vision in cultural history. He wanted to include her in his Eminent Victorians but gave up for lack of material. Hughes struggles with the same problem. The woman whose public image is that of the model materfamilias, serene, prosperous and — surely — drawing on years of experience, began writing her book after only six months of keeping house and died at the age of 28. And though Beeton’s short life was certainly busier than most, it is no better documented. Various piquant facts are known: that she lived through most of her adolescence in the grandstand at Epsom racecourse (her stepfather owned a share in it); that when she took the train up to Fleet Street with Sam, the other (male) commuters found her intrusion into the smoky, clubby atmosphere of their railway compartment annoying; that Sam, wretchedly, infected her with syphilis on their honeymoon. But the record of her life is sketchy. Letters between her and Sam during their year-long engagement survive, allowing Hughes to give us a well-rounded view of each of them and their relationship at that stage, but otherwise we have only a diary of a business trip to Paris, which divulges little more than that they drank bouillon every day for lunch.

No matter. As Hughes’s title implies, her subject is not a woman but a reputation. Isabella Beeton was a remarkable person, an energetic journalist whose husband — a flamboyant hustler who made a fortune on a pirated edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin — willingly addressed her as “my good master”. But she is dwarfed by “Mrs Beeton”, the imaginary domestic goddess who only achieved her full stature some 30 years after Isabella’s death.

That cult of the author is perverse in all manner of ways. Subsequent cookery writers, most notably Elizabeth David, have accused Isabella of plagiarism, something she would probably have blithely acknowledged. In the first editions she is credited, not as The Book’s author but as “editress” of a compendium unashamedly made up of hints and recipes cribbed from elsewhere. Hughes has hunted down her sources, but points out that to censure her for her purloinings is anachronistic and unfair. She may not have been an original creator, but she was a brilliant patch-worker, whose text is often superior to those she plundered.

So initially Isabella — Mrs Beeton — was not an author. Latterly “Mrs Beeton” — the author — was not Isabella. After her death, a Mrs Browne (probably Sam’s lover) produced a series of “revised” editions. In the next generation Isabella’s daughter-in-law wrote a regular column in Hearth and Home, signing herself “Mrs Beeton”. My copy of The Book, published in 1880, boasts of having “several hundred new recipes and Hints without number”. By the 1930s, asserts Hughes, new editions of “Mrs Beeton” contained “not a single word of Isabella’s original voice”.

Ten years ago, Ginsters, manufacturers of the kind of pies you might buy in a petrol station, paid £1m for the use of the “Mrs Beeton” name. Oddly enough, Isabella might have been pleased. Hughes refers to her approving chapter on tinned and prepackaged food, which she saw as probably safer from contamination than the kind of fresh “organic” stuff that nowadays epitomises purity in food. It’s one irony among many examined in this intelligent book.

HALE AND HEARTY FOOD

Fish, and meat in particular, were central components of Mrs Beeton’s meals. Hughes, in fact, calculates that anyone following her plan of “plain family dinners” would have consumed something like half a pound of beef, mutton or pork every day. Not that the recipes were unhealthy. Though she overcooked vegetables, in general “the Mrs Beeton diet was healthier than the food consumed in the average British family today”.

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