This is not to suggest that this latter phase of Sam’s education was confined to counting reams, hefting quires and sucking fingers made sore from paper cuts. Being a stationery seller took you into other people’s offices and it was here Sam made friends with a group of young men working in adjacent trades. There was Frederick Greenwood, a print setter who had probably been apprenticed to a firm in nearby New Fetter Lane but, after only a year, found himself engaged as a publisher’s reader. Greenwood would become Beeton’s right-hand man for nearly a decade, before striking out on a glittering career as an editor on his own account. He had an equally talented though more mercurial younger brother, James, who would go on to be one of the first investigative journalists of his day and who would publish much of his work under the imprint of S. O. Beeton. Then there was James Wade, who may have served an apprenticeship in the same firm as Frederick Greenwood and would print many of Beeton’s publications, especially the initial volumes of the ground-breaking Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine.
Whether your first job was in a paper merchant’s or a printing house, the work was hard, taking up to twelve hours a day and a good part of Saturday. But that did not stop these vigorous young men getting together in the evening. These were exciting times and it was impossible for them not to feel that they had been set upon the earth at just the right moment. In an interview towards the end of his life Greenwood maintained, ‘It was worth while being born in the early ’thirties’ in order ‘to feel every day a difference so much to the good’. Coming into the world around the time of the Great Reform Act, these boys had lived through the three big Chartist uprisings, witnessed the repeal of the Corn Laws and seen the beginnings of legislation that would go to create the modern state (hence Greenwood, who remembered from his early working days the sight of shoeless boys wandering around St Paul’s, maintaining that things really were getting better every day). Now as they came into manhood these young men insisted on seeing signs all around them that the world – or their world – was moving forward. After the rigours of the ‘hungry forties’ Britain was entering a golden age of prosperity, a sunny upland where it was possible to believe that hard work, material wellbeing and intellectual progress walked hand in hand.
More specifically, these young men had seen at first hand just how the social and political changes of the last few years had been lobbied, debated, modified, and publicized through the burgeoning culture of printed news. Greenwood paying to read a paper every morning from nine to ten, or Sam popping into the Dolphin for the latest edition of the Morning Advertiser were part of a new generation of people who expected to get their information quickly and accurately, rather than picking up third-hand gossip days later around the village pump. On top of this, these young men had seen their changing world refracted in the bold new fiction that was pouring off the presses. Mary Barton, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, all burst upon the world during the hectic decade that coincided with their apprenticeships. Nor was it just the content of these books – rough, even raw – that was new. The way they were produced, in cheap cardboard formats, sometimes serialized in magazines, or available in multiple volumes from Mr Mudie’s lending library in New Oxford Street or Mr Smith’s railway stands, announced a revolution in reading habits. No wonder that, years later, when writing to his elder son at prep school, a boy who had never known what it was not to have any text he wanted immediately to hand, Sam counselled sadly ‘you do not read books enough.’
There were other excitements, too, of a more immediate nature. It was now that Sam Beeton and Frederick Greenwood discovered sex and spent their lives dealing with its consequences. At the time Greenwood was living in lodgings off the Goswell Road, away from his parental home in west London. In June 1850, at the age of only 20, he married Catherine Darby. Although the marriage was not of the shotgun variety – the first baby wasn’t born until a decorous eighteen months later – it was miserable, ending in separation and a series of minders for the increasingly alcoholic and depressed Mrs Greenwood (when visitors came round for tea she promptly hid the cups under the cushions on the grounds that she didn’t want company). But in one way Greenwood was lucky. Early marriage did for him what a growing band of moralists maintained it would, providing him with a prophylactic against disease, drink, and restlessness. Marriage steadied a man and young Frederick Greenwood was nothing if not steady.
Greenwood’s friend Sam Beeton was not so fortunate. Just what happened during his crucial years of young adulthood has been obscured by embarrassment and smoothed over with awkward tact. Nancy Spain, no fan of Sam, quotes from a conversation he had in later life. Strolling through London, Sam was supposed to have pointed out ‘the window he used to climb out at night’ as a lad, adding wistfully that ‘he began life too soon’. Spain does not source the quotation and it would be easy to dismiss the whole anecdote were it not for the odd fact that H. Montgomery Hyde, who researched his biography independently of Spain, evidently had access to this same conversation. Hyde has the young man ‘confessing’ that he contrived to have ‘quite a gay time’ in his youth, before going on to point out the infamous window.
The language that both Spain and Hyde ascribe to Sam speaks volumes. Climbing out of a window immediately suggests something illicit, something which the boy did not wish his father, stepmother and gaggle of half-sisters and step-aunts to know about. ‘Beginning life too soon’ makes no sense, either, unless it refers to street life – drink, cards, whores (boys of Sam’s class were used to the idea that their working lives began at fourteen). Also telling is Hyde’s detail about Sam referring to having had a ‘gay time’ – ‘gay’ being the standard code word designating commercial heterosexual sex. (‘Fanny, how long have you been gay?’ asks one prostitute of another in a cartoon of the time.)
Once Sam had scrambled out of the Dolphin window it was only a ten-minute saunter to the Strand, that no-man’s-land between the City and the West End which had long been synonymous with prostitution. What was mostly a male space during the day – all those print shops, stationers and booksellers – turned at night into something altogether more assorted. From the nearby taverns and theatres poured groups of young men in varying states of cheeriness, while from the rabbit warren of courts and alleys came women who needed to make some money, quickly and without fuss. (Brothels were never a British thing, and most prostitutes worked the streets as freelance operators.) The young men who used the women’s services were not necessarily bad, certainly not the rakes or sadists or degenerates of our contemporary fantasies. In fact, if anything, they were probably the prudent ones, determined to delay marriage until they were 30 or so and had saved up a little nest egg. So when the coldness and loneliness of celibacy became too much, it was these careful creatures of capitalism who ‘spent’ – the polite term for male orgasm – 5 shillings on a dreary fumble which, if Sam is anything to go by, they shuddered to recall years later. In this early part of Victoria’s reign, before the social reformer Josephine Butler started to provide a woman’s perspective on the situation, there were plenty of sensible people who believed that prostitution was the price you paid for keeping young middle-class men focused, productive and mostly continent during their vital teens and twenties.
The man whom Sam accused of initiating him into the city’s night life was Charles Henry Clarke, a bookbinder ten years older than himself operating from offices at 148 Fleet Street and 251/2 Bouverie Street. Clarke was in partnership with a printer called Frederick Salisbury, a 40-year-old man originally from Suffolk, who also had premises in Bouverie Street. Recently Clarke and Salisbury had branched out from simply printing and binding books for other publishers to producing them themselves, mostly reissuing existing texts (British copyright at this point was a messy, floutable business). It was this expanding side of the business that particularly attracted Sam, who wanted to be a proper publisher rather than simply a paper man. Armed with some capital, possibly from his mother’s estate, and a burning sense of destiny, Sam joined Salisbury and Clarke as a partner around the time of his twenty-first birthday in the spring of 1852 with the intention of building a publishing empire to cater for the reading needs of the rising lower middle classes, the very people from whom he had sprung. Newly confident, flush with a little surplus