Kathryn Hughes - The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton

After a few more limp courtesies Isabella signs off before adding what Sam would come to know and joke about as the crucial postscript, the one in which the real purpose of her letter was revealed: ‘Let me have a letter soon telling me how you have been amusing yourself, and bear in mind Tuesday, Jany 15th.’

Notwithstanding the peremptory postscript, Sam’s response was to send a note explaining that, alas, he was not coming home until Thursday evening and so would be obliged to miss the Dorlings’ dinner party. This made Isabella redouble her efforts. Determined to get Sam down to Epsom by hook or by crook, she contrived to get the dinner party set back a couple of days. What was the point of having a fiancé, if you never got to show him off?

My dear Sam,

You say you intend returning home on Thursday evening, but as our dinner party is put off till that day perhaps you will have the kindness to favour us with your company. One day I am sure cannot make much difference to you, and besides you have had such a nice long holiday you will be quite ready to come home by that time. Mama sends her kind regards and says she cannot hear of a refusal, and the girls say they are quite sure you would not think of refusing now you have been pressed so much.

I cannot tell you how disappointed I was in reading in your last letter that you were not coming home so soon as I expected. We do not dine till 6 o.c. so I beg once more that you will come, and if you do not I shall begin to think you are a little bit unkind … Hoping you will not refuse my first request, with love of the very best quality,

Believe me, dearest Sam,

Yours devotedly,

ISABELLA

I hope you will reach your journey’s end safely and that I shall see you on Thursday. I think I shall feel desperate if you refuse to come.

Whether or not Sam did finally make it to Epsom in time for dinner at six o’clock sharp on Thursday the 17th is unclear. Certainly the atmosphere between the young couple remained watchful for the next few weeks. Over the next five months Sam would contrive to have as little contact with the Dorlings as possible. Isabella must be enticed up to London, or possibly to Brighton, a town that she considered an ‘earthly paradise’ and which they both visited regularly. And wherever possible his easy-going stepmother rather than her hawk-eyed mama should be pressed into service as chaperone. It was now, too, that Sam made a decision about where they were to live once they were married. Two months after returning from Suffolk he took a lease on a house in Pinner, a village well to the north of London. A southerly suburb like Croydon or Beckenham would have been the obvious place for the young couple to settle: both were a short shift from Epsom yet also a mere half-hour from Fleet Street and the Dolphin. Instead Sam pointedly chose a place that was about as far away from the Dorlings as it was practically possible to be.

All this made perfect sense, but unfortunately Sam did not feel able to share his ponderings and strategies with Isabella. They were not yet on terms where they could giggle together over her ghastly parents and tribe of gossipy, jealous sisters. Instead Isabella was left floundering, trying to make sense of Sam’s sudden departures and constant evasions which, inevitably, she interpreted as insults to herself. No longer able to count on meeting at least once a week or even once a fortnight, the young couple now fell back on the mail to keep their relationship ticking over, if not exactly moving forward. Isabella addressed her letters to Sam at the Dolphin because, she said, she did not want people in the office, especially Sam’s brother Edward, opening them and knowing their business.

This arrangement allowed for plenty of delay, confusion, and resentment since Sam had neither the time nor, quite probably, the inclination, to bob and weave through half a mile of heavy traffic every hour or so to see whether any communication had arrived for him at home. As a result he habitually got Bella’s letters late and wrote fewer in reply than she thought he should. Thus on 8 May she writes pointedly: ‘I should have written to you before … but waited the arrival of the middle day post, expecting to see a note from you; but fate ordained that I should go without one of your much prized epistles, much to my annoyance.’ Equally suspicious is the way that Sam seems to be unreachable on those weekends when he is busy out of town getting their new house ready: ‘They do not seem to be particularly quick in postal arrangements at Pinner, for I did not receive your note till this morning. How do you account for it?’ A few weeks later, however, she is in a more forgiving mood about Sam’s failure to make the elbow-scraping dash from Bouverie Street to Milk Street: ‘Poor dear, I suppose you felt so poorly and not equal to climbing the great hill of Ludgate.’ All the same, the Victorian post was a marvel – communications sent from Ormond House in the morning arrived only a few hours later at the Dolphin.

What emerges from the letters that Sam and Isabella wrote to each other during these intense, miserable five months was just how different were the lives of a single man and single woman at mid century. Sam’s existence is busy, crammed with people, surprises, obligations, calamities, and sudden dashes here, there, and everywhere. It is a life lived in public spaces, on the streets, in parks. ‘I have been exceedingly busy all the week, – was at Covent Garden on Monday, Dalston on Tuesday, and Holloway on Wednesday, and to-night I go again to … Manor House.’ He works late on Saturday and now usually most of Sunday too. His letters to his fiancée have to be written in snatched moments during a bursting day.

Isabella is busy too, but with domestic duties and social obligations that leave her plenty of mental energy to dream and fret. There are the hated ‘formal feeds’ with middle-aged neighbours such as Mr White and Mr Sherwood, a notecase to make for Uncle Edward (Henry’s brother), fittings with the dressmaker and, of course, the tribe of ‘children on the hill’ to be supervised and soothed and periodically transported into Epsom or down to Brighton. Significantly, Isabella’s piano playing – always remembered sentimentally by her sisters as the bedrock of her life – was often shunted aside when pressing domestic duties intervened. During Christmas week of 1855 with the younger children struck down with heavy colds, Isabella is unable to find a moment to practise and so cancels her lesson with Benedict since ‘it would be useless to come up’. Indeed, references to trips to Benedict peter out over the course of the engagement, just at the point when mentions of new clothes, furniture and window blinds increase. Just what Julius Benedict – fast on his way to becoming Sir Julius for his services to music – thought about Miss Mayson’s growing disinclination to concentrate on her art in favour of her coming nuptials goes unrecorded. Intriguingly, five years later Isabella gave Benedict’s new opera The Lily of Killarney an uncharacteristically cool response in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine , which hints that she and the maestro may have parted company on less than genial terms.

Isabella’s life, then, may have been frenetic but it was small, mundane. In her letters to Sam she apologizes constantly for not having any news – ‘it is rather a scarce article in Epsom’, ‘you must put up with this news bare epistle’ – and worries that when Sam’s sisters Lizzie and Viccie come to stay in the country in late January there is nothing for them to do except take long, muddy walks and fiddle with embroidery. Isabella tries hard to empathize with Sam’s situation – the thousand letters a day spilling into his office, the crazy schedule of deadlines, and worries about spiralling costs – but it is quite apparent that she has no concept of the pressure he is under. When he fails to spend a Sunday with her she sulks, when he arrives late or leaves early she cannot resist a sly dig in her next letter. So in mid April she signs herself ‘Your loving and affectionate deserted one’, while on 3 May she grumbles, ‘It is needless to say how disappointed I am that you are not coming down this evening, rather hard lines …’. She wants his health to improve but only because it means that he will be able to spend more time with her. Without enough to think about, Isabella turns her searching intelligence onto her relationship with Sam. Letter after letter finds her mulling over their last encounter, looking for meaning in a throwaway phrase, worrying that he is angry with her when he is probably simply tired: ‘I imagine you are cross with me and don’t care so much about me.’ There are rows and reconciliations, accusations and apologies, most of them the result of the fact that this is, increasingly, a relationship that exists mainly on paper.