It was with some astonishment that most of us learned during the week that never till the present year did the National Portrait Gallery possess a portrait of Mrs Beeton. Mrs Beeton, it will be generally agreed, is the most famous English authoress who ever lived. Her name is a household word in thousands of homes in which Jane Austen is as little known as Sappho. Other popular authoresses … appear and disappear; but Mrs Beeton has achieved the deathlessness of a classic as well as the circulation of a best-seller.
Other journalists followed this lead, waxing lyrical about a woman they had not bothered to think much about before, but were now happy to declare ‘the Confucius of the kitchen, the benefactress of a million homes’. The man from the Mirror made a careful distinction between Mrs Beeton as an exponent of proper ‘womanly’ ways as opposed to all the ‘“feminists” in the NPG, the suffragette, the actress and the long-distance flyer’. The Evening News, meanwhile, made the shrewd suggestion that part of this sudden interest in Mrs Beeton might be the fact that she spoke from a bygone world when ‘homes were homes, when cooks were cooks and above all when incomes were incomes and not illusory sums of money in uneasy transit from the pocket of trade and industry to that of the State’. For by 1932, and with Britain mired in economic depression, political uncertainty, and social unrest, it was easy to feel wistful for a time when middle-class homes could afford to keep a full complement of domestic staff, none of whom would think of answering back.
The point that all the commentators agreed upon was that the Mrs Beeton who stared down at them from the walls of the National Portrait Gallery was light years away from the Queen Victoria look-alike that they, along with Mr Strachey, had fondly imagined. The photograph was reproduced in countless newspaper articles, and even went on sale in August 1933 as a postcard in the National Portrait Gallery’s shop, where it quickly established itself as the third most popular portrait in the whole collection, after Rupert Brooke and Emma Hamilton. From being a virtually effaced person, ‘Mrs Beeton’ started to become one of the most widely recognized images circulating in British print culture.
There was something about the enigmatic young woman in the photograph that encouraged all kinds of speculations and projections. The critic from the Daily Express suggested that from Mrs Beeton’s body language it looked as if her cook had left the room a minute earlier (she didn’t have one), while another referred to her as effortlessly ‘patrician’, which she most certainly was not. The Express again mentioned ‘the firmness of the mouth’ while someone else talked about her ‘gentle’ face. The Guardian said it was reassuring to notice she was plump, while someone else talked about her elegant slenderness. The Mail, in the strangest flight of fancy, suggested that ‘it is perhaps fortunate that she lived in a pre-Hollywood age, otherwise her undoubted charm might have borne her away on the wings of a contract’. Margaret Mackail, who wrote a brief biographical sketch to appear on the back of the postcard, referred to Mrs Beeton as ‘lovely’, which seems generous, especially given that Mackail, the daughter and favourite model of the late Edward Burne-Jones, had herself been one of the iconic beauties of her day.
Four years later, and with the looming centenary of Mrs Beeton’s birth in 1836 provoking another wave of public interest, Mayson Beeton wrote an article entitled ‘How Mrs Beeton wrote her famous book’ for the Daily Mail, the paper for which he had worked as an administrator for so much of his career. The title was telling: Beeton’s driving concern was, as ever, to rescue his father’s professional reputation from the long shadow cast by his mother’s spectacular achievement. Hence, in Mayson Beeton’s retelling of the story to Daily Mail readers, ‘Samuel Orchart Beeton was the successful young publisher who at the age of 21 took Fleet Street by storm’, while Isabella was the ‘apt pupil’ who gradually learned how to produce articles for his array of publications. Most crucially, in the gospel according to Sir Mayson, the famous Book of Household Management was the outgrowth of the ‘weekly notes’ on cookery that his mother had contributed to his father’s Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. It says something about how little Beeton really knew about his parents’ lives that the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine had actually been a monthly publication.
Such misdirections and inaccuracies aside, a gratifyingly large number of letters arrived at High Lands, Beeton’s Surrey villa, in response to the piece in the Mail. One was from an Old Marlburian who had been at school with Beeton over fifty years previously, expressing his surprise that ‘Curiously enough I never connected the book with you’, voicing a common elision between the flesh and blood ‘Mrs Beeton’ and the one that was made out of 1,000 pages of closely printed paper, and handsome calf binding. An elderly gentleman wrote with fond memories of ‘messing’ with Mrs Beeton’s recipes during his childhood in the 1860s. One British woman wrote from Paris to say that her New Zealander husband had presented her as a young bride with a Mrs Beeton in recognition of the fact that his parents had relied on it during some tough years in a lonely sheep station. Other notes arrived from correspondents who had known various members of the extended Beeton and Dorling clans in days gone by and wanted Sir Mayson to verify various dimly remembered anecdotes. Had the famous book not been written in Greenhithe where Mrs Beeton lived for the last year of her life? Surely the great work had been completed while she was sitting on a bench in the garden of Ashley House, her stepsister’s large Epsom residence?
To all these correspondents Mayson Beeton dutifully responded. ‘Wrote a chatty letter’, ‘replied with thanks’ is regularly written in pencil across the top of incoming mail. To those who asked for it, he enclosed a copy of the National Portrait Gallery postcard. And, such being the good manners of the day, the recipients inevitably wrote back thanking him for his kindness and complimenting him on his mother’s ‘beautiful’, ‘charming’, ‘kind’, ‘sweet’, ‘romantic’ and, above all, ‘Victorian’ face. To those correspondents who wrote offering photographs and recollections of his parents’ families Beeton was especially warm, inviting them to ‘run down’ to High Lands for a visit. For by now Beeton had decided that the time was right for him to write a proper ‘memoir’ of his parents and he needed all the extra material he could scavenge if he was to produce something that would stretch to the length of at least a small book.
There was never any doubt in Beeton’s mind as to who was going to write the biography of his parents. Although the documentary evidence in his possession was, on his own admission, ‘scanty’, he knew there were still plenty of awkward stories and embarrassing rumours about his parents’ life at large that would need to be deftly despatched. These would need careful handling, and Beeton had no intention of letting an outsider clamber over the project, leaking secrets in the process. He had already had to deal with one particularly annoying young woman called Joan Adeney Easdale, who seemed determined to write a biography of Mrs Beeton, with or without his approval. In the many letters Beeton fired off to producers and editors in the mid 1930s urging them to have nothing to do with Miss Easdale’s work, he always returns to the fact that it is his parents’ ‘private family life’ (the underlining is his) that he is determined to protect from the impertinent and uncomprehending gaze of strangers.
With Miss Easdale’s cautionary example in mind, Mayson Beeton dealt particularly firmly with the steady stream of lady writers who contacted him in the wake of the 1936 Daily Mail article asking for his blessing on their intention to put together a biography of his mother. To correspondents such as Winifred Valentine (Mrs), Mrs Sheriff Holt, and Mary Stollard (Miss), Beeton wrote back stiffly, discouraging any hope that he might be about to turn his precious cache of material over to them. If they wished to publish a short biographical article on Mrs Beeton in the Woman’s Magazine or the Lady or the Nursing Times he would not stop them, but he asked that they submit a proof to him first. Quite sensibly they did not, which meant that Beeton was then able to work himself up into a delicious frenzy when their chatty, anodyne pieces finally appeared. ‘Full of Inaccuracies!’