In 1858, Isabella Beeton opened a soup kitchen in her home for the poor children of the area. In her small way, she helped fight the hard winter conditions by helping the children gulp down deliciously hot soups. [1]
Journalist and author of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, Isabella Beeton, died on 6 February 1865 at the age of 28. She is arguably the most famous cookery writer in British history.
Isabella Mayson 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 contracted puerperal fever (also known as childbed fever) and died a week later at the age of 28. Her widower lived for another twelve years and died of tuberculosis in June 1877 at the age of 46. Isabella is buried at West Norwood Cemetery in south London. The original memorial became dilapidated and her children replaced it with a simple memorial stone in the 1930s. Their home at Hatch End was destroyed by a German bomb during an air raid in 1940 and the site is now shops.
Despite her early death, Isabella’s cookbook continues to be widely read and has been reprinted numerous times, solidifying her place in literary and cultural history.