Biography: In an era dominated by domestic goddesses such as Nigella Lawson and Martha Stewart, it's time to consider the original of the species: Isabella Beeton. The name of Mrs Beeton is so familiar that she has assumed a mythic character.
Early in the 20th century, Lytton Strachey considered writing her biography, imagining Mrs Beeton as "a small tub-like lady in black - rather severe in aspect, strongly resembling Queen Victoria". Around the same time JB Priestley wrote speculatively of a Mr Beeton, "a little wistful man, with something of the visionary's look stamped upon his partially emaciated features", as he suffers neglect by his industrious wife. Recent market research discovered that consumers equate Mrs Beeton with "homeliness and economy" while in the mid-1990s a food company paid Mrs Beeton's publishers £1 million for the use of her name in perpetuity on a range of pasties and similar products.
All very droll, and all, as Kathryn Hughes points out, fantastically inaccurate. The real Isabella Beeton began compiling The Book of Household Management while still only 21 and within a year of her marriage to the enthusiastic but hopelessly feckless Samuel Beeton. Seven years later, in February 1865, she died and the legend of Mrs Beeton was born. Members of her family liked to suggest that their posthumously-famous relative was driven to an early grave by the excessive demands of her husband. It's plain that Mr Beeton depended more on Isabella than was usually the case among Victorian spouses. In a letter written during their engagement and in response to her promise that he was to have the "entire management" of his future wife, Samuel answered: "I don't desire, I assure you, to manage you - you can do that quite well yourself."
To adopt a contemporary analogy, Mr and Mrs Beeton were the Richard and Judy of their day: they worked as a team. Hence her involvement in his business, working first as a journalist and later editor of several Beeton magazines - both, by the way, without any prior training. While living in the countryside, she would take the business train to London with her husband every morning, something subsequently deemed "a quite unusual thing for any woman of those times to do, and really more or less resented by the other travellers".
That The Book of Household Management - originally published as a part-work from November 1859 onwards - was such a success should not come as a surprise. Isabella Beeton intuitively understood the market. Her grandparents had been domestic servants, her son would be knighted; her personal history perfectly encapsulated that of Britain's expanding middle-class.
There were myriad other young women like herself, newly-married, responsible for homes and staff, and without much idea how to accomplish the task successfully. No wonder the key word in her work's title is "management". As she observed in a much-quoted introduction, the mistress of a household was "the commander of an army". Mrs Beeton provided them with a manual on keeping the troops in order. This is why for generations a copy of The Book of Household Management was given to new brides.
Naturally, the youthful Isabella Beeton relied on sources other than her own limited experience. Call it plagiarism or judicious borrowing, but her book incorporates a great deal of material lifted from earlier publications. Some later cookery writers, in particular Elizabeth David, have huffed and puffed a great deal over this aspect of Mrs Beeton's professional behaviour. But it seems eminently sensible to hand on a good recipe or cleaning tip. After all, as even Delia Smith would acknowledge, there are only so many ways to boil an egg. Which is why, over a century and a half later, Mrs Beeton remains in print, albeit in such bastardised formats as Mrs Beeton's Caribbean Cookery and Microwaving with Mrs Beeton.
By dint of an enormous amount of research, Kathryn Hughes has uncovered all The Book of Household Management's sources. In addition, she is able to offer a great deal of new information about the life of both Isabella Beeton and her erratic husband. But this is much more than the biography of a book and its author. It's also a meditation on our constantly changing attitudes towards food, a study of the way women's roles have altered during the past 200 years, an examination of the Victorian media, a debate on what constitutes domesticity, an analysis of a myth's evolution. Furthermore, it's a wonderfully entertaining read. There are few books that can be recommended unequivocally. This is one of them.
Robert O'Byrne is a writer and journalist. His most recent book, Mind Your Manners: A Guide to Good Behaviour, is published by Sitric Press
The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton By Kathryn Hughes Fourth Estate, 525pp. £20