the new season’s materials. Her writing is terse and expert, shot through not with the approximating gush of a Lady of Fashion but with the understanding of someone who has grown up feeling fabric between her fingers. Here she advises her readers on the styles for July 1860:
SHAWLS, of any and every material, are worn; some are made of black Grenadine, square, and with a binding of black or violet glacé all round, two inches in width, and of crossway silk; others are of the same material as the dress (some barèges being made wide for this purpose), and bound in the same manner, or have a ribbon laid on with a narrow straw trimming on each edge. A great many muslins are also made to match the dresses, the border being the same as that on the flounces. Shawls of white muslin, with embroidered borders, are very dressy and stylish, also those of plain white muslin, bound with black velvet.
Two years later, and with civil war in America cutting Lancashire and Cumberland off from their vital cotton supplies, Isabella mounted a relief effort to sustain the textiles industries’ starving workers. Old clothes, boots, bedding but above all money were to be sent to Mrs Beeton care of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in readiness for their dispersal among the cottages of northwest England. Even now, sixty years after Benjamin Mayson had first struck out from the damp, close sheds along the River Ribble, his eldest daughter still understood the way that cotton worked – and what happened when it didn’t.
Mayson prospered in the City. By 1836 he has moved out of Clement’s Court and onto Milk Street itself, buying substantial premises at number 24, an investment that brings with it the right to vote. Legend has always had it that Isabella was born here, in Milk Street, which would have made her a cockney, since the Bow Bells ring out from a few hundred yards away on Cheapside. Indeed, Nancy Spain actually has Isabella christened at St Mary-le-Bow, the result of a common enough confusion with Mary-le-bone, in a glorious christening gown covered with a pattern of ears of wheat which Spain maintains was still doing service within her family seventy years later. The story cannot be confirmed although, even allowing for Spain’s mixture of exaggeration and elision, it makes a kind of sense. If Benjamin Mayson knew anything, it was how to pick a piece of cloth that would last.
While Isabella was neither a cockney nor a Victorian, her brother and sisters were. Just as she turned 2 she was joined by Elizabeth Anne, always known as Bessie. In September 1839 came yet another John Mayson, followed by Esther, named for her Cumberland aunt, in February 1841. All were christened in St Lawrence Jewry, which stands a couple of hundred yards away in the forecourt of the Guildhall. The first three Maysons were all said to be pretty. Esther less so, but this may be because a riding accident in her twenties left her with a blinded eye. Photographs of the Maysons are not much help when it comes to working out their colouring. The iconic National Portrait Gallery portrait shows Isabella with very dark, almost black hair. However, Marjorie Killby, Mayson Beeton’s eldest daughter and a keen photographer, always maintained that this was inaccurate, the fault of the rudimentary technology of the time. Drawing on family intelligence, Killby insisted instead that Isabella had ‘light reddish auburn hair’ and even set about making a new print of the photograph in order to show her grandmother in her true colours, as a strawberry blonde. By way of confirmation, a watercolour of the four Mayson children from 1848 shows them all as redheads but with Isabella a shade or two fairer than her siblings.
It is harder to work out how the Maysons sounded. A great-niece going to visit her maiden aunts Bessie and Esther in genteel Kensington in the 1920s remembered them with cockney accents that struck her, a colonel’s granddaughter, as decidedly comic. In this incident, recorded in Sarah Freeman’s biography in 1977, Rosemary Fellowes explains away her great-aunts’ dropped aitches and their use of ‘ain’t’ as a fashionable affectation from their youth. But the fact is that by the time Edwardians were using cockney to sound smart, the Misses Mayson were already in their eighth decade. The way they spoke had been picked up much earlier, during the 1840s and before English accents had become codified by class. From their father they might have got some flat vowels, and from their mother and neighbours they would have heard the kind of cockneyfied speech in which ‘w’s were still doing service for ‘v’s. Boarding school in Germany would have added another complicating layer. Whatever the exact sound eventually arrived at, we can be fairly safe in saying that Mrs Beeton and her sisters did not speak like ladies.
The birth of Esther, the youngest Mayson child, in February 1841 must have been bittersweet. Seven months earlier Benjamin had died at the age of only 39. The notice inserted by his father in the Carlisle Journal suggests that the death was sudden: certainly there is no suggestion that he was suffering from the kind of degenerative illness that had made his brother linger for so long. The death certificate, a recent innovation, part of the new Victorians’ desire to count, clarify, and mark their hectically expanding population, says ‘Apoplexy’. This sounds sudden and convulsive, until you realize that in the 1840s it stood for many things: alcoholism, syphilis, epilepsy as well as the more obvious heart attack or stroke. It is ‘apoplexy’ that will kill Benjamin’s son, the baby John, only thirty years later.
Death may have been everywhere in early Victorian England, but to find yourself pregnant with your fourth child and suddenly responsible for a highly capitalized business is unlucky by anyone’s standards. Although her widowed mother Mary Jerrom was helping with the domestic side of life at Milk Street, Elizabeth Mayson soon buckled under her burden. The only solution, a common enough one, was to farm out the two elder children to relatives. Isabella, still only 5 years old, was sent like a parcel to the other end of the country to lodge with her clergyman grandfather at Great Orton. The census entry for 1841 gives a bleak snapshot of what she found there. Apart from the 79-year-old John Mayson, himself recently widowed, the thatched vicarage was home to one 30-year-old servant, Sarah Robinson. For a little girl, 350 miles from home, Great Orton must have seemed the strangest place to be. Instead of the companionable man-made bustle of Cheapside, there were country noises: shivering trees, rumbling carts, and endless fields of cawing sheep. In place of scurrying clerks and warehousemen there was a single shoemaker, schoolmaster, and blacksmith. It got dark early, stayed colder longer, and the food, coaxed from the ‘heavy cold and wet soil’, tasted different. The bread was made of barley, black and sour (‘Everybody knows that it is wheat flour which yields the best bread,’ noted Isabella pointedly twenty years later in the Book of Household Management). Oatmeal, meanwhile, turned up at virtually every meal. There was porridge for breakfast, and maybe crowdy – oatmeal steeped in beef marrow – for midday dinner. Ginger, which came all the way from China, made cake and biscuits burn in your mouth.
As if that weren’t enough strangeness for 5-year-old Isabella, there were the voices too, speaking in a language that she would have had to strain to understand. Just why Bessie, two years younger, was not sent with her as a consoling companion in exile is a mystery. The obvious place for both girls would have been at nearby Thursby, where Benjamin’s surviving sibling Esther lived with her yeoman husband John Burtholme and daughter Anne who, at 17, was of an age to be helpful with baby visitors. As it is, Bessie’s whereabouts in 1841 remains unknown: along with Mrs Jerrom she has temporarily vanished from Milk Street and has yet to turn up anywhere else.
Even with two fewer people to worry about, life was not easy for Elizabeth Mayson. Still only 25, she now ran the business in her own name – the trade directories describe her as a ‘warehouseman’. In the 1840s it was not unusual for widows to take over their late husband’s business, and the directories show many women heading up pubs, livery stables, and every kind of shop from baker to jeweller. Elizabeth had grown up among the artisans and tradesmen of Marylebone, watching women like her mother working alongside husbands and brothers as book-keepers, shop assistants, and storeroom supervisors. The 1841 census shows her employing one young maidservant and an older man called Robert Mitchell who was originally from Sussex. Mitchell’s father had worked alongside various Standages in the stables at Petworth House and his presence in Milk Street is a reminder of how, in the first half of the nineteenth century, rural communities had a habit of reconstituting themselves at the very heart of commercial and industrial landscapes. Elizabeth Mayson may have been operating out of one of the busiest streets in
