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

There was, however, one context in which supper remained important. If your dining room was small and your budget tight, then inviting a large group to what Mrs Beeton calls a ‘standing supper’ started to look like an attractive alternative to a more formal dinner party. At a standing supper people helped themselves from dishes such as ‘sandwiches, lobster and oyster patties, sausage rolls, meat rolls, lobster salad, dishes of fowls, the latter all cut up ’, which certainly saved on servants. What’s more, the custom of displaying all the dishes at once made you look like a more generous host than if one course followed another as was usual with a more formal dinner.

Dinner’s slow shunt backwards inevitably ended up having an effect on the other end of the day too. With men now needing to be at their place of work across town for 9 a.m., the first meal of the day moved forwards to 8 a.m. And instead of the bread, tea, coffee, and possibly chocolate of the eighteenth century, what Mrs Beeton described as ‘that comfortable meal called breakfast’ was now turning into something more substantial. Despite her studied refusal to list ‘a long bill of cold fare’ for breakfast, Beeton does go on to suggest the following hot items: mackerel, herring, haddock, mutton chops, bacon and eggs, muffins, toast, marmalade and butter. Here are the origins of the meal that will become the Edwardian country house breakfast of popular fantasy.

With the two meals of the day now stretched nearly twelve hours apart, that left an awful lot of time to be got through on an emptying stomach. Lunch had made a sketchy appearance during the eighteenth century, but now started to become a permanent event in the timetable of the mid-Victorian household. It was still a scrappy business, though, and Mrs Beeton deigns to give it only one short paragraph and a brief description along the lines of ‘The remains of cold joints, nicely garnished, a few sweets, or a little hashed meat, poultry or game, are the usual articles placed on the table for luncheon.’ It was, after all, a lady’s meal, quite likely to be taken in the nursery where little stomachs could not be expected to last more than two hours or so without a snack. Middle-class men continued to work on heroically without a midday break, hating the way that lunch interrupted concentration and gobbled up time. Meanwhile, servants, like the rest of the working class, continued to take their main meal, their ‘dinner’, in the middle of the day, usually half an hour or so after their mistress had finished her ‘lunch’.

IN THE LAST FEVERISH WEEKS before the wedding, issues of chaperonage became more, rather than less, intense. Eliza Beeton, as moral guardian of a young man rather than a young woman, was naturally laxer, happy to find ways in which the couple could be alone together. In early May she suggested that Isabella should come up to London to view the fireworks staged to mark the end of the Crimean War. She would love to have asked all the Dorlings, Sam explained unconvincingly, but there were simply too many of them to parade around the streets. With Isabella’s parents sounding doubtful, Sam weighed in with every argument he could muster: ‘These fireworks you ought to see, not so much as a sight, but as an epoch to be remembered, and talked of afterwards, in years to come.’ Despite his offer to escort his fiancée back down to Epsom immediately the display was over, ‘if such be the rigid order’, the plan was firmly vetoed from Ormond House.

The Dorlings, as guardians of their eldest girl’s reputation, were naturally stricter about the circumstances under which the couple could meet. Six weeks before the wedding Isabella is thrilled to be able to tell Sam that she has obtained a major concession: ‘I have asked and obtained permission to spend a very happy evening with you on Thursday, although your dear Mother is not at home.’ In fact, the Dorlings had every reason to be watchful. As the wedding day drew nearer the young couple were allowing themselves an increasing degree of sexual intimacy. Following what must have been a particularly intense moment à deux , Sam writes wildly to Isabella: ‘I was traitor to my own notions through the exercise of a power: the intensity of which is almost fearful to contemplate. My only means of being saved is by keeping you in company – solus, I am powerless, vanquished, and in future I intend to surrender at discretion, (or indiscretion, possibly) without affecting a combat.’ In a later letter, after another of their rare meetings alone, he declares that he is still ‘in a state of electricity’, suggesting the afterglow of a delicious physical convulsion. During the last week of May Isabella and Sam slept for one night under the same roof, probably at the Dolphin. This physical proximity sent Sam into raptures. Writing probably on 27 May he declares:

I have been (and am) most happy since the morning of Friday last – the remembrance of your society for so many sweet hours on Thursday Eveng, and the charm of your company on Friday morng, still dwell with me most pleasantly, albeit I was so rude as to wake you so gently – I really am quite astonished at my temerity … I wish at this moment I could breathe into your ears, closely and caressingly, all the fond hopes I feel for your dear welfare …

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