Humble Nicola - Mrs Beetons Book of Household Management:

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

MRS BEETONS BOOK OF HOUSEHOLD MANAGEMENT

ISABELLA BEETON was born Isabella Mayson in the City of London in 1836, the daughter of a dry-goods trader. She spent most of her childhood in Epsom, living first at the home of her step-father, and then in the Grandstand on Epsom racecourse with her older siblings. In 1855, having attended schools in Islington and Germany, she married a young publisher, Samuel Beeton. She wrote columns on cooking and fashion for his Englishwomans Domestic Magazine, and translated French novels for serialization. She began Household Management in 1857; it was published in parts between 1859 and 1861 and in volume form in 1861. She gave birth to four children, two of whom died in infancy. She died in 1865, at the age of 28, of an infection contracted during the delivery of her fourth child.

NICOLA HUMBLE is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Surrey, Roehampton. She is the co-author (with Kimberley Reynolds) of Victorian Heroines (Harvester, 1993), and has also published on Robert Browning, Jane Austen, childrens literature, and cookery books. She is currently working on a study of middle-brow women writers of the first half of the twentieth century and a cultural history of cookery books.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

MRS BEETON

ABRIDGED EDITION

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
NICOLA HUMBLE

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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Nicola Humble 2000

First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2000

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ISBN 0192833456

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Typeset in Ehrhardt
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd.
Reading, Berkshire

Mrs Beetons Book of Household Management is the most famous English cookery book ever published. It stands four-square in the nations imagination as a bastion of traditional English fare and solid Victorian values. It represents extravagance (take 12 dozen eggs), and a lost rural way of life (first catch your hare). We imagine Mrs Beeton as a sturdy matron (perhaps resembling Mrs Bridges of the 1970s television series Upstairs, Downstairs), ordering a well-regimented army of servants. Yet this popular perception of the book is false in every particular. Far from being traditional, Household Management was markedly innovative, introducing the newly expanded and self-consciously respectable Victorian middle class to the latest manufactured food products, to a wide range of foreign recipes, and to fashionably different modes of dining. Those famous lines about eggs and hares were never written by Beeton, but represent the persistent misinterpretation to which the book has been subject. Although it contains a smattering of extravagant recipes, if anything it errs on the side of frugality, with many pages devoted to plain family dinners and the use of left-overs (it was these which tended to be removed from later editions, encouraging the view of the book as extravagant). The rural economy in which most people produced their own food had long been lost by the time Beeton embarked on her book, and she is as nostalgic for that old connection to the land as we are today. Finally, Isabella Beeton was never the stately matron of our imaginings: she worked as a journalist throughout her married life, and died of an infection after giving birth to her fourth child, at the age of 28.

Household Management must rank as one of the great unread classics. Everyone has heard of it, a number of people own a copy (often an early twentieth-century edition, much expanded and bearing little relationship to Beetons original text), but it is rarely considered as anything other than a culinary curiosity. Yet it was one of the major publishing success stories of the nineteenth century, selling over 60,000 copies in its first year of publication in 1861, and nearly two million by 1868. For the next century the names Mrs Beeton and Household Management were to continue to make enormous profits for Ward, Lock & Co., to whom Isabellas publisher husband Sam sold the rights in a disastrous deal soon after her death. A considerable amount of the books success can be attributed to the assiduity and ingenuity with which its various publishers have exploited its title and its authors name as trademarks. Revised and abridged editions were issued constantly, both in Isabella Beetons lifetime, when she and Sam made use of the books phenomenal success to sell various spin-off projects, and ever since: even today we can buy books with titles as absurd as Mrs Beetons Caribbean Cooking