Desultory review: Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton

An insatiable reading appetite combined with dilettante-ism means coming across information in odd ways. Thanks to a note in a review for Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, I found out about Mrs. Beeton's book(s) of household management and cooking. What the Joy of Cooking used to be for young American brides faced with the unenviable task of cooking a bear paw, raw porcupine, or sponge cake, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management was for young Victorian women starting out in married life. Everything but sex seems to have found its way into the thousand-plus page tome (sex is quite literally covered in the NOC, however, apparently because the publishers objected to having books burst into flames). Despite the temporal incongruity, Mrs. B seems to have continued without a break for over 100 years, advising modern readers on the wonders of the microwave, Caribbean cooking, and how to pick a blender. Quite an accomplishment.

And, according to Kathryn Hughes's slightly uneven but engaging book, she did it with almost no experience of her own. Isabella Beeton was only 21, married less than two years, when she started to help her husband in his publishing ventures, first by writing up fashion and then by lifting enormous chunks of other extant household manuals and compiling them into a monster book. She died only eight years later, probably of puerperal fever, leaving behind two boys. Two other sons died before the age of three, likely infected with syphilis passed from their father to their mother; the same disease is suspected in her multiple miscarriages. (In the age of penicillin, most of us are cheerfully ignorant of the mechanics and side effects of chronic syphilis infection, and long may we remain so. Parts of the book are very grim.) Hughes has done extensive research to show which parts of BOHM are lifted from various sources, showing clips side by side, and she teases out the code used to refer to unpleasant events in Victorian life. Some of her conclusions could probably be argued by someone with more knowledge of the period than I have, but the overall picture of social change, women's roles in the economy and the home, and how one relatively inexperienced young woman became the voice of household authority, bring a period we often think of as dour to vivid life. Good stuff.