Isabella Mary Beeton (née Mayson), universally known as Mrs
Beeton, was the author of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management and is the
most famous cookery writer in British history.
Her father Benjamin Mason died when she was young and her mother
Elizabeth Jerram remarried a Henry Dorling. Isabella was sent to school in
Heidelberg in Germany and afterward returned to her stepfather's home in Epsom.
As the oldest in a family of 21 children Isabella helped with managing the
household. This most likely contributed to the development her common-sense
attitude to life and her leaning towards efficiency and economy. These
attributes, coupled with a good education (unusual for woman in those times),
would later allow her to create the kind of book that she did and to become an
enthusiastic creator, experimenter, organizer and publisher of recipes.
On a visit to London, she was introduced to Samuel Orchard Beeton, a
publisher of books and popular magazines, whom she married on 10 July 1856. She
began to write articles on cooking and household management for her husband's
publications. In 1859–1861, she wrote a monthly supplement to The
Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine. In October 1861, the supplements were
published as a single volume, The Book of Household Management.
Popularly known as Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, it was
essentially a guide to running a Victorian household, with advice on fashion,
childcare, animal husbandry, poisons, the management of servants, science,
religion, and industrialism. Of the 1,112 pages, over 900 contained recipes,
such that another popular name for the volume is Mrs Beeton's Cookbook. Most of
the recipes were illustrated with coloured engravings, and it was the first
book to show recipes in a format that is still used today. It is said that many
of the recipes were actually plagiarised from earlier writers (including Eliza
Acton), but the Beetons never claimed that the book's contents were original.
It was intended as a guide of reliable information for the aspirant middle
classes. Mrs Beeton is perhaps described better as its compiler and editor than
as its author, many of the passages clearly being not her own words.
After giving birth to her fourth child in January 1865, Isabella
contracted puerperal fever and died a week later at the age of 28.
