CHAPTER ONE ‘Heavy, Cold and Wet Soil’
MRS BEETON MAY HAVE come down to us as a shape-shifter, but her story starts in a settled enough place, at a time when most people still lived a minute from their parents, when men automatically followed their father’s trade, when girls nearly always shared their Christian name with an aunt or cousin, and when it was not unusual to die in the bed in which you had been born. Thursby, in what was then called Cumberland, is a large village wedged between the Lakes and the Borders, flanked by the Pennines on one side and the Solway Firth on the other. It is not on the way to anywhere now, nor was it in the late eighteenth century, when the daily coaches between London and Carlisle were a distant rumble 5 miles to the northwest.
Most of the 240 inhabitants of Thursby owed their living to the ‘tolerably fertile’ gravel and loam soil, which was parcelled up into a series of small mixed farms, owned by ‘statesmen’ or independent yeomen who employed anything from two to twenty men. In 1786 Thursby got a new curate, John Mayson, grandfather to the future Mrs Beeton. The curateship and the countryside taken together might suggest something rather smart, a gentleman vicar perhaps, with a private income, an MA from a minor Oxbridge college, and a passion for the flora of the Upper Lakes, the kind of man you find pottering in the background of so many of the people who made and changed the Victorian world. This, certainly, is the impression that Mrs Beeton’s family would conspire to create in years to come. When Isabella Beeton’s marriage was announced in The Times in 1856, the fact that she was the granddaughter of the late Revd John Mayson of Cumberland was shoe-horned into the brief notice. Seventy years later when dealing with the National Portrait Gallery Mayson Beeton insisted on having his mother’s background blurb rewritten to include the important fact that her grandfather had been a man of the cloth.
But if anyone had bothered to look more closely they would have discovered that Revd John Mayson was not quite the gentlemanly divine that you might suppose. He had been born in 1761 just outside Penrith to another John Mayson, a farmer who was obliged to rent his land from another man. As his Christian name suggests, John Mayson had drawn the lucky ticket of being the oldest son, the one in whom the family’s slight resources would be invested as a hedge against a chancy future (there were a couple of younger sisters who would need, somehow, to be taken care of). John would have gone to school locally and left around the age of 14, a superior kind of village boy.
The next clear sighting comes in 1785 when, at the age of 24, Mayson was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England. The following year finds him becoming a fully fledged clergyman and sent immediately as curate to St Andrew’s, Thursby. This, though, was hardly the beginning of a steady rise through the Church’s hierarchy. Stuck for an extraordinary forty years at Thursby, it looked as if the Revd John Mayson was destined to become the oldest curate in town. On two separate occasions he was passed over for the post of vicar, quite possibly because of his lack of formal education or social clout: St Andrew’s was a large parish with a fine church said to have been built by David I of Scotland – it needed a gentleman to run it. In 1805 the job went to Joseph Pattison instead and then, on his death eight years later, to William Tomkyns Briggs, whose dynastically inflected name buttressed with a Cambridge MA suggests a background altogether more solid than that of plain ‘John Mayson’.
It wasn’t until 1825 that Mayson’s luck finally changed. At the age of 64 – retirement was not an option unless you were a man of means – he was appointed vicar to the nearby parish of Great Orton, a substantial living worth perhaps £250 which brought with it the care of 200 souls. Yet even this was not quite the opportunity that it might seem. The living was in the gift of Sir Wastal Briscoe, the lord of the manor who inhabited several hundred lush acres at nearby Crofton Hall. The previous incumbent of St Giles had been Briscoe’s brother and it was his intention that the living should pass eventually to one of his young grandsons who were being educated for the Church. Mayson, who probably already owed his appointment as curate at Thursby to Briscoe in the first place, was exactly the right candidate to caretake St Giles until his patron wanted it back.
The life of a clergyman without polish, money or pull was not a particularly easy one. It was an existence geared to pleasing the big house, to judging its moods and whims, and making sure you fitted its purpose. It was, though, enough to get married on, as long as you were careful in your choice of bride. Six years into the curateship at Thursby, John Mayson married a young woman whose name suggests that she had some ballast behind her. Isabella Trimble (or Tremel or Trumble – spelling was still an infant business and names changed with each entry in the parish register) was the daughter of a reasonably prosperous maltster, that is brewer. On his death in 1785 George Trimble divided his estate in the classic manner, with his eldest son inheriting the business along with Trimble’s partner, while the younger brothers received ‘movable goods’ in the form of wheat and cash. Isabella, the only girl, was a residual legatee, which gave her perhaps £80 – not an enormous sum, but combined with the £100 that John inherited from his own father, just enough to marry on. The wedding service in January 1793 was taken by the vicar John Brown, with two of Isabella’s brothers signing the register as witnesses: a small thing, but it suggests that Mayson was busy cementing his connection with his smart new relatives.
The first baby arrived ten months after the wedding, as first babies mostly did in the nineteenth century. She was called Esther after John’s mother. Three years later she was joined by yet another John Mayson and then, five years after that, by Benjamin, named biblically for his mother’s youngest brother. The long spacing between the children, combined with the early evidence of fertility, suggests that there were probably other babies, born months too soon, some still and grey, others little more than bloody clots. These are the first of the many lost children that hover over the story of Mrs Beeton, Benjamin Mayson’s daughter, each one’s failure to spark into life marking the moment when the future had to be imagined all over again.
Of the three Mayson children living, neither of the boys would see forty. John – perhaps originally destined for the Church, to be slipped into a place where Briscoe needed a caretaker or a willing plodder – died at the age of 24 ‘after a long and severe illness’, according to a notice in the Carlisle Journal, and was buried at Thursby. The death of the elder son, that frail container of a family’s best hopes, is always hard, but twenty years later John was followed to the grave by Benjamin, now living far away in London. It was time for another entry in the Carlisle Journal: ‘Suddenly, Mr B. Mayson, linen factor, Milk Street, London, son of the Rev. John Mayson, aged 39 years’.
In the early days, though, when the Mayson children were young and bonny, there was an almost pastoral feel to life at Thursby. Although he was only the curate, Mayson was able to live in the vicarage, a handsome building that would shore up anyone’s sense of battered dignity. The diary of his fellow cleric Thomas Rumney of Watermillock tells of an Austenish existence of long tramps, impromptu tea parties and lovesick letter writing. In August 1803 Rumney walked six and a half hours to get to Thursby from his own parish, and then proceeded to conduct an epistolary courtship with one of John Mayson’s sisters at the thumping cost of 11d a letter.
It was a small life, and it was never going to be enough to hold an energetic young man with neither property or business interests binding him to the place. While John, the eldest Mayson child, was kept close to the family by failing health, his brother Benjamin had other plans. Frustratingly, all record of Benjamin’s early life has disappeared. Proving even more elusive than his daughter Isabella, Benjamin refuses to show up in school records, apprenticeship registers, or even, though we would hope not to find a clergyman’s son here, in the local assizes. He may have received his education at nearby Wigton Grammar School, where Briscoe had pull. Or it is possible that he was sent to Green Row on the coast a few miles away, a forward-looking place which imparted a ‘modern’ curriculum of maths and careful penmanship to young men who were destined for the counting house and the clerks’ bench rather than an ivy-covered quad. Benjamin’s grandsons, Isabella’s
