In 2006, the BBC broadcast a biographical drama, The Secret Life of Mrs Beeton. It had Anna Madeley in the title role. The drama gave viewers first-hand information on Beeton’s early life, her youth days, her books and her early death. [1]
Journalist and author of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, Isabella Beeton was born on 14 March 1836. She is arguably the most famous cookery writer in British history.
Isabella Mayson was the eldest of three daughters to Benjamin Mayson, a linen merchant, and his wife Elizabeth. Her father died when Isabella was four years old, and 3 years later her mother married Henry Dorling, a widower with four children. Over the next twenty years, Henry and Elizabeth had a further thirteen children.
After a brief education at an English boarding school, in 1851 Isabella was sent to school in Heidelberg, Germany, accompanied by her stepsister Jane Dorling. Isabella became proficient in the piano and excelled in French and German; she also gained knowledge and experience in making pastry. She returned to the family home at Epsom in summer 1854, and took further lessons in pastry-making from a local baker.
As the oldest in a family of 21 children, Isabella helped with managing the household and was instrumental in her siblings’ upbringing, collectively referring to them as a “living cargo of children”. This most likely contributed to the development of her common-sense attitude to life and her leaning towards efficiency and economy. These attributes, coupled with a good education (unusual for women in those times), would later allow her to create the kind of book that she did and to become an enthusiastic creator, experimenter, organizer, and publisher of recipes.
Isabella was 21 years old when she married Samuel Orchart Beeton, a publisher of books and popular magazines on 10 July 1856. Less than a year later she began writing for one of her husband’s publications, The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, writing the cookery column, although all the recipes were copied from other works or sent in by the magazine’s readers.
In October 1861, these supplements were published as a single volume, The Book of Household Management which was essentially a guide to running a Victorian household, with advice on fashion, childcare, animal husbandry, poisons, the management of servants, science, religion, and industrialism. It sold 60,000 copies in the first year. Of the 1,112 pages, over 900 contained recipes. The book is organized in an encyclopaedic fashion, with sections on breakfast dishes, soups, meats, vegetables, and sweets, providing detailed instructions on how to prepare and cook the food. Most of the recipes were illustrated with coloured engravings, and it was the first book to show recipes in a format that is still used today. Mrs Beeton didn’t claim that the recipes were original, so she can be better described as its compiler and editor rather than as its author.
After giving birth to her fourth child in January 1865, Beeton died a week later at the age of 28. Despite her early death, her cookbook continues to be widely read and has been reprinted numerous times, solidifying her place in culinary and cultural history.