Читать книгу The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton - Kathryn Hughes - Страница 11

AT 39 MILK STREET, on the opposite side of the road and a little further up from Benjamin Mayson’s warehouse, stood the Dolphin public house. It was on the corner with, in fact virtually part of, Honey Lane Market. In its original, medieval incarnation, the market had been at the centre of the brewing industry, the place where local beer makers, the forerunners of the Victorian giants Charrington and Whitbread, went to get their mead. At some point Honey Lane had turned into a general food market with a hundred stalls, and then, in 1787, it had been developed into a parade of thirty-six lock-up shops. Now, in 1835, two years before Benjamin Mayson brought his new bride Elizabeth and baby Isabella to live in Milk Street, the market had been knocked down to make way for the new City of London Boys’ School, which promised to provide a modern, liberal education for the sons of commercial or trading men to fit them for the brisk new world that everyone agreed was on its way.

The evolution of Honey Lane Market is a timely reminder that until well into the nineteenth century the City of London was as much a place of manufacture, retail and residence as it was the hub of the nation’s finances. To the outsider who happened to stray too far along its narrow, crooked streets it was as closed and as inscrutable as any village. Everywhere you looked in the square mile around St Paul’s you could see ordinary, everyday needs pressing on the landscape. Long before Lancashire cotton had taken over Milk Street, it was the place where you went for your dairy produce. Wood Street, which ran parallel and was now the epicentre of the textile trade, had once been thick with trees and the source of cheap and easy kindling. Just over the road, on the other side of Cheapside, were the self-explanatory Bread Street and Friday, that is Fish, Street. All these were now given over to the ubiquitous ‘Manchester warehouses’, wholesaling operations that functioned as a funnel between the textile factories of the northwest, bulked out by cheaper imports from India, and the luxury drapery stores of the West End. A hundred yards to the east was Grocers’ Hall Court and just beyond that was Old Jewry where the Jews who had come over with Norman William had settled to live and trade. Now, in a pale copy of its original self, it was the place you went if you wanted to pawn your jewellery, get a valuation, or simply have your watch set to rights.

From the beginning of the eighteenth century the pace of change picked up as men and women from the countryside poured into the City, bringing their skills as carpenters, printers, carriage builders, sign painters, butchers, glue boilers, farriers, nail makers – everything, in short, that a community needed to thrive in a pre-industrial age. On top of this, the large financial institutions that had settled in the area a hundred years earlier were beginning to expand as Britain became the money capital of the world. Threadneedle Street, home of the Bank of England, was both the heart of the financial district and the place where prostitutes queued patiently, like cabs. From there it was a short walk to the Stock Exchange, Royal Exchange, the Baltic and Lloyd’s coffee houses, not to mention the offices of bill brokers, merchant bankers, and private bankers. Yet even in the middle of the nineteenth century many of these smaller ‘houses’ were still family businesses, handed down from father to son with occasional injections of capital from a lucky marriage. Right up to the middle of Victoria’s reign the City of London continued to be a place where the public and private, professional and personal sides of life were pursued from the same streets, often, indeed, from the same set of rooms.

At the heart of these overlapping worlds stood the public house. The ‘pub’ was built as a house, looked like a house, and in this early period was indistinguishable from the family homes on either side of it. Yet it was public, in the sense that anyone might enter from the streets and use its domestic facilities – food, chairs, fire, silent companionship or lively conversation – for the price of a drink. It stank, of course, as all public places did, from a mixture of its clients’ private smells and a few extra of its own: old food, flat beer, dead mice, linen that never quite got dry. The Dolphin, just like an ordinary domestic house, had its own aura that you would recognize as instantly as that of your child’s or lover’s. The plans for the pub do not survive, but this kind of place usually had five separate rooms on the ground floor, including a public parlour, taproom, kitchen, and the publican’s private parlour. There was no bar as such; beer (not spirits, which needed a separate licence) was brought to the customers by waitresses and potboys. The effect was simply as if you had popped into someone else’s sitting room to be offered refreshment by the mistress of the house, or her maid. Often these people felt as familiar as your own.

The Dolphin, like all pubs in the first half of the nineteenth century, doubled as a community hall, council chambers, coroner’s court, labour exchange, betting shop, canteen, and park bench. It would not be until the 1840s that the temperance do-gooders would manage to forge the link in people’s minds between social respectability and total abstinence from drink. In fact until that time, which coincided with the first steps in public sanitary reform, drinking alcohol was a great deal safer than risking the local water. It was for that reason that when Milk Street tradesmen like Mr Chamberlain at number 36, a lone leather worker in a sea of cotton, came to take their lunch at the Dolphin every day, they washed it down with several glasses of port before tottering back for the afternoon’s work. And in a world before town halls and committee rooms – the very setting in which Mr Chamberlain’s own son, the Liberal politician Joseph, would eventually make his mark in faraway Birmingham – many political organizations, charities, chapters, friendly societies and trades associations including, oddly, the fledgling temperance societies, would choose to hold their meetings in the snug surroundings of a public house rather than trying to pile into someone’s inadequate lodgings.

From 1808 the Dolphin was run by Samuel Beeton, a Stowmarket man who was part of his generation’s tramp from the Suffolk countryside into the capital. Born in 1774 into a family of builders, Beeton had broken with tradition by becoming a tailor. Arriving in London in the closing years of the century he settled at a number of addresses around Smithfield Market, the centre of the skinning, cobbling and clothing trades. The market at the time was a smoking, bloody tangle of streets where life was nasty, brutal and short, at least for the livestock. Cattle and sheep were herded up from the country before being slaughtered, dismantled, and sold on in bits. The best meat went to the butchers, the bones to the glue makers, the hides to the cobblers and tailors who had settled in surrounding Clerkenwell.

It might seem lazy to use Dickens to describe the streets that Beeton knew, but there is no one else who does London – stinking, noisy, elemental London – quite so well. Here, then, is the master’s description from Oliver Twist, as Bill Sikes drags Oliver through Smithfield on their way to commit a burglary:

It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep. Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs, the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides; the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and yelling; the hideous and discordant din that resounded from every corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite confounded the senses.

Samuel Beeton lived right at the heart of all this driving, beating, whooping chaos. By 1803 he was keeping a pub, the Globe, in the aptly named Cow Lane which led straight off the marketplace and most likely catered mainly for his former colleagues, the tailors. His first daughter – by now he was married to Lucy Elsden, a Suffolk girl – was christened at nearby St Sepulchre, the church from where ‘the bells of Old Bailey’ rang out twelve times on the eve of an execution at adjoining Newgate. Perhaps the child, Ann Thomason (Thomasin had been Samuel’s mother’s name), found this doomy world too hard to bear: born in May 1807, she left it soon afterwards. Her siblings, by contrast, were patterned on what would soon emerge as the Beeton template: robust, canny, pragmatic. All seven survived into thriving middle age.

Beeton’s shift from tailoring to the hospitality business played straight to his natural strengths. He was outgoing, clubbable, the sort of man who joined organizations and rose through them by being pleasant, useful, good to have around. In October 1803, and already working as a ‘victualler’, he paid to become a member of the Pattenmakers’ Guild. Pattens, those strap-on platforms that raised the wearer’s everyday shoes above the dead cats, horse shit and other debris of the metropolitan streets, might seem exactly the right thing for filthy Smithfield. But, in fact, pattens and their makers had been in decline for some time. The guild clung to existence by exploiting the fact that it was one of the cheapest to join, and so provided an economical way into City of London politics for those who might otherwise find it too rich for their pockets. You did not need to know how to make wooden clogs in order to belong, although plenty of its members, like Beeton himself, had once belonged to the allied tailoring trade.

By 1808, and with the arrival of their second daughter Lucy, the Beetons had moved to the Dolphin in Milk Street. Samuel may not have been born to the life of a City worthy, but he lost no time in catching up. In 1813 he was elected to the Common Council for the ward of Cripplegate Within (you had to be a guild member to qualify – the Pattenmakers had come in useful) and proved both popular and effective. Fifteen years on and he was still getting the highest number of votes for re-election. The Common Council, part of the arcane City of London government, was a mixture of the powerful and the picturesque. Seen from the outside the 234 council men were pompous and reactionary, clinging to ancient rights of administration in a way that blocked London from getting the city-wide police force or sewerage system it so desperately needed. The council men, however, saw themselves as defenders against creeping bureaucracy and standardization, proud advocates of an ancient and honourable independence. The minutes for Cripplegate Ward during the period Beeton served show the council men setting the rates, choosing the beadle, worrying about street security, congratulating the alderman on his recent baronetcy and, in the manner of ponderous uncles, sending their thoughts on various topics to His Majesty. The Beetons clearly felt themselves intimately implicated in the life of the royal family: two of Samuel’s grandchildren would be christened ‘Victoria’ and ‘Edward Albert’.

Beeton was also active within his adopted trade. He served on the Committee of the Society of Licensed Victuallers, becoming their chairman in 1821. This meant attending the meetings every week on Monday at 5 p.m., either in the Fleet Street office of the publicans’ daily paper, the Morning Advertiser, or at Kennington Lane at the Licensed Victuallers’ School which, despite its name, was more orphanage than academy. The minutes from those first decades of the century show Beeton making grants from the bereavement fund: Mary Cadwallader wants £4 to bury her husband, James Pearce is given 6s a week for some unspecified purpose. In 1821, the year of his presidency, Beeton is busy investigating whether a certain Mrs Michlin really should be allowed places for her two children at the school since it looks as though she may have inherited property from her late husband (Mrs Michlin, it turns out, is in the clear). At the end of his presidency, Beeton was presented with a snuffbox, the early-nineteenth-century equivalent of the carriage clock, in recognition of his ‘exemplary conduct, strict integrity and unceasing perseverance’.

As the nineteenth century, with its new opportunities for personal advancement, got under way Beeton’s steady climb up the twin ladders of respectability and wealth provided a model for the rest of his extended family. The first of his generation to leave the countryside for London, he became a beacon, pattern, and support for those who followed in his wake. There was Benjamin, his much younger brother, who arrived in London around 1809 and set up in Marylebone as a farrier, and may well have been an acquaintance of the jobmaster Isaac Jerrom. Samuel’s nephew Robert, meanwhile, made the journey from Suffolk ten years later and also went into the pub-keeping business, initially in Spitalfields and then in St Pancras, borrowing money from his uncle to buy the substantial Yorkshire Grey. By the time he died in 1836 Samuel Beeton had built up a tidy estate, consisting not only of the Dolphin itself, but property carefully husbanded both in London and back home in Suffolk. For a man who had started out as a tramping tailor, it was a glorious finish.

The child who matters to this story is, fittingly, the eldest son of Samuel’s eldest son. First, the son. Samuel Powell Beeton – named after a fellow member of the Society of Licensed Victuallers – was born in 1804, Samuel and Lucy’s first child. He was not christened until July 1812, when he was taken to St Lawrence Jewry with his new baby brother, Robert Francis. The intervening girls – the frail Ann Thomason and Lucy – had been baptized in the usual way, as babies. This suggests two things. First, that Samuel Powell was obviously robust, so there was no need to whisk him off to the church in case he died before being formally accepted as one of God’s own. Second, that the Beetons were not religious people. They christened a child because it seemed frail, or because a nagging vicar told them they should, not out of any urgent personal need. To be a Beeton was to live squarely on the earth, planted in the here and now.

Samuel Powell did what first sons should and modelled himself on his father. In 1827 he joined the Pattenmakers, this time by patrimony rather than purchase, and from 1838 he was a member of the Common Council for Cripplegate Ward. He was prominent in City politics, to the point where he felt it necessary in January 1835 to write to The Times to explain that he was emphatically not the Beeton who had signed the Conservative address to His Majesty (his affiliation was Liberal). It was assumed that Samuel Powell would eventually take over from his father at the Dolphin. But until that moment came in 1834, he filled the years as a Manchester warehouseman, trading out of Watling Street, a stone’s throw away from Milk Street on the other side of Cheapside. In 1830 Samuel Powell married Helen Orchart, the daughter of a well-to-do baker from adjacent Wood Street. The Beetons’ first child, Samuel Orchart, was born on 2 March 1831 at 81 Watling Street and christened at All Hallows Bread Street, a church traditionally connected with the brewing trade.

As early as the 1830s Londoners were dreaming of getting out and getting away, partially retracing the journey that their fathers had made from the countryside a generation earlier. The City was getting used up, stale, filthy. In 1800 you could swim in the Thames on a hot summer’s day. By 1830 a gulp of river water would make you very ill indeed. The graveyards were so overstocked that a heavy downpour regularly uncovered the dead who were supposed to be sleeping peacefully. The streets were hung around with a greasy fug that followed you wherever you went, sticking to your clothes and working its way deep into your skin. In the circumstances, Samuel Powell and his wife, being modern kind of people, decamped to Camberwell, a short walk over London Bridge, to an area that still passed for country. It was there, south of the river, that the Beetons had a second son, a child who until now has slipped through the records, perhaps because the parish clerk at Camberwell was particularly careless, or hard of hearing. For William Beeton, born September 1832, is recorded as the son of ‘Samuel Power Beeton’ and his wife ‘Eleanor’. William must have died, because no other mention is made of him. He probably took his mother with him, for Helen Beeton – this time going by her correct name – was buried only eight weeks later. Family tradition always had it that Helen died of TB, which she bequeathed to her firstborn, Samuel Orchart. In the days before death certificates it is impossible to be certain, but it looks as if Helen Orchart was a victim of that other nineteenth-century common-or-garden tragedy, the woman who died as a result of childbirth.

Samuel Powell lost no time in doing what all sensible widowers with young children were advised to do and went looking for a new wife. Eliza Douse, the daughter of a local warehouseman, was working for people out in Romford when she and Samuel got married in 1834. On becoming mistress of the Dolphin two years later, Eliza quickly ensured that her sisters Mary and Sophia were provided for by getting them jobs and lodgings in the pub. If Helen, the first Mrs Beeton, had been a delicate merchant’s daughter, too weak for a world of bad fogs and babies, her successor Eliza proved to be a sturdy workhorse. She produced seven children, all of whom survived into adulthood and, following Samuel Powell’s early death in 1854, continued to run the pub on her own before making a second marriage three years later.

Life as a Beeton was typical of the way that the families of the trading classes organized themselves in the early nineteenth century. Every member of the family, including the women, was expected to contribute something to the family enterprise whether it was a dowry (in the case of Helen Orchart) or labour, as in the case of her successor Eliza. If an extra pair of hands was needed at the Dolphin they were supplied from the extended family, as was the case with the Douse sisters. If there was no one immediately available, then a cousin might be imported from the home county. Thus Maria Brown, a cousin from Suffolk, was brought in to help in various Beeton enterprises. She shuttled between Marylebone and Milk Street until, in an equally likely move, she married Thomas Beeton, Samuel Powell’s youngest brother who lodged at the Dolphin.

Marriage alliances were used to strengthen business connections in a way that seems cold to modern eyes. Thus Thomas Orchart, the baker from Wood Street, had a financial stake in the Dolphin before marrying his only daughter to his business partner’s eldest son. Samuel Powell, in the years before taking over the pub from his father, worked as a warehouseman in partnership with Henry Minchener who was married to his younger sister Lucy. In the next generation down, their children – first cousins Jessie Beeton and Alfred Minchener – married. Samuel Powell’s best friend, a warehouseman called George Perkes, had a son called Fred who married his second daughter Victoria. Meanwhile Samuel Powell’s second son Sidney was given the middle name of ‘Perkes’ as a token of respect and friendship. The man you did business with was the man whose name your son bore and whose daughter married your younger brother.

Old women were not exempt from responsibility to the family enterprise. Just as Mary Jerrom spent her long years of widowhood running a nursery on the Epsom Downs for the overspill of children from Ormond House, so Lucy Beeton looked after the eldest Dolphin children. In this case, though, her satellite nursery was far away in Suffolk. In 1836 the newly widowed Lucy returned to her native Hadleigh, where her elder brother Isaac was one of the chief tradesmen. Along with Lucy came her 5-year-old grandson, Samuel Orchart. With the boy’s mother dead and his stepmother busy creating a new family with his father, the Dolphin was overflowing. Family tradition puts a more benign spin upon it, saying that it was for the benefit of little Sam’s precarious lungs (the ones he was supposed, for reasons that seem increasingly unlikely, to have inherited from his mother) that he was shuffled off to the country to live with his grandmother. This is fine in principle, except that by 1841 he had been joined by his younger half-sister Eliza whose lungs, as far as we know, were clear as a bell.

The other reason why it is unlikely that Sam was sent to stay with his grandmother for the sake of his health was that life in Hadleigh was hardly a pastoral idyll. Stuck in a dip between two hills, drainage was always a problem (after a storm it was possible to sail down the High Street), and the brewery near Lucy’s house discharged its effluent into the open gutter. What’s more, the town was a byword for viciousness and street crime: arson, sheep stealing, horse theft, house breaking and ‘malicious slaying and cutting and wounding’ were all everyday hazards to be avoided by right-minded citizens, who were constantly agitating for extra policing. And yet, there can be no doubt that little Sam and his half-sister Eliza lived well in Hadleigh. Their grandmother had been left with a comfortable annuity of £140, her house in the High Street was substantial and her brother, Isaac, a wealthy maltster, had pull. And then, there was 18-year-old Aunt Carrie who acted as nursemaid, at least when she was not busy courting a local gentleman farmer called Robert Kersey. All the same, it was ten hours by coach back to the Dolphin.

We know as little about Samuel Beeton’s childhood as we do about Isabella Mayson’s. Sometime before the age of 10 he was sent to a boarding school just outside Brentwood in Essex, midway between Hadleigh and London. Part of its appeal must have been geographical convenience, since Brentwood is only half an hour’s journey by rail into the terminus at Shoreditch, which in turn is only a short cab ride away from Milk Street. Pilgrim’s Hall Academy – also known as Brentwood Academy – had been set up in 1839 to educate the sons of the very middling classes. These kinds of boys’ small private schools, very different from the ancient foundations such as Eton or Winchester, were as ephemeral as their female equivalents. Indeed, Pilgrim’s Hall managed to last only thirteen years as a school, before reverting once again to a private residence. Although the advertisement that appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1843 promises prospective parents that pupils would be prepared for the universities as well as ‘the Naval and Military Colleges’, it seems unlikely that any of them really did continue on to Oxford or Cambridge or make it into the Guards. Instead, most of the fifty-three pupils were, like young Samuel, destined for apprenticeships or posts in their fathers’ businesses: tellingly, the 1841 census shows no boy at the school over the age of 15. Rather than ivy-covered quads and ancient towers, Pilgrim’s Hall was a higgledy-piggledy domestic house from the Regency period which had been chopped and changed to make it a suitable place to house and school sixty or so boys as cheaply as possible (the house still stands but these days it caters for, on average, seven residents).

The fact that Pilgrim’s Hall Academy was started by one Cornelius Zurhort who employed Jules Doucerain as an assistant master suggests that the school concentrated on a modern syllabus of living rather than dead languages. And even once the school passed to a young Englishman, Alexander Watson from St Pancras, in 1843, the stress on modern languages remained, with the employment of another Frenchman, Louis Morell. Clearly, though, the school prided itself on developing the whole boy, rather than merely helping him to slot into a world where he might be called upon to stammer a few words of business French. The Illustrated London News advertisement promises that the pupils’ ‘religious, moral, and social habits and gentlemanly demeanour are watched with parental solicitude’ and, indeed, as early as 1839 a gallery had been built in the local church for the very purpose of accommodating the shuffling, coughing Pilgrim’s Hall boys as they trooped in every Sunday morning.

Samuel Orchart was quick and knowing, bright rather than scholarly. Like his future bride he had a flair for languages, winning a copy of Une Histoire de Napoléon le Grand for his work in French. Extrapolating from his adult personality we can assume that he was boisterous, involved, fun as a friend, cheeky with the teachers. Working back from the letters that he wrote to his own sons when they were at prep school in the mid 1870s we can guess that the young Sam was always bursting with enthusiasm for ‘the last new thing’, whether it was comets, cricket scores, spring swimming, close-run class positions, or clever chess games. Clearly keen on literature – his father gave him a complete Shakespeare when he was 12, and Samuel Powell was not the kind of man to waste his money on an empty gesture – there was, nonetheless, no question of the boy going on to university.

But a career as a publican was not quite right either, despite the fact that as the eldest son Samuel Orchart stood to inherit a thriving business. In the end none of Samuel Powell’s three sons chose to run the Dolphin. That was the problem with social mobility, you left yourself behind. There was, though, a kind of possible compromise, one that allowed Sam to follow his literary bent without taking him too far from his social or geographic roots. He had grown up a few hundred yards from Fleet Street and its continuation, the Strand, which had for two centuries been the centre of the publishing trade. Now, in the 1840s, as the demand for printed material of all kinds exploded, it seemed as if everyone who set foot in the area was in some way connected with print. Inky-fingered apprentices hurried through the streets at all hours and from the open doors of taverns around Temple Bar you could see solitary young men poring over late-night proofs while gulping down a chop. Up and down Fleet Street new-fangled rotary presses were clanking through the night, producing newspapers, magazines, and books, books, books. In Paternoster Row – an alley off St Paul’s, a hop, skip, and a jump from Milk Street – booksellers and publishers so dominated the landscape that, among those in the know, ‘the Row’ had become shorthand for the whole Republic of English Letters.

In any case, as the son and grandson of a publican Sam was already part of the newspaper trade. Pubs were frequently the only house in the street to take a daily paper, and many did a brisk trade in hiring it out at 1d an hour. In addition, the Society of Licensed Victuallers produced the Morning Advertiser, which, at that time, was the nation’s only daily newspaper apart from The Times. It was to the Advertiser’s offices at 27 Fleet Street that the original Samuel Beeton had headed every Monday afternoon during the early years of the century for the Victuallers’ committee meetings. Even more importantly, the publicans’ paper delivered a healthy profit to the society, which was regularly divvied up among the members. So as far as the Beetons were concerned, a man who went into print would never go hungry.

Sam does not seem to have served a formal apprenticeship, the kind where you were bound at 14 to a single master and graduated as a journeyman in the appropriate livery company seven years later. That system, based on a medieval way of doing things, had long been winding down. The printing industry, exploding in the 1840s, appeared so modern that it seemed increasingly irrelevant to enter your lad’s name on the rolls at Stationers’ Hall, and pay for the privilege. The vested interests, of course, were worried at this new chaotic way of doing things, in which boys learned their trade with one firm for a few years before hiring themselves out as adult workers, well before their twenty-first birthdays.

It was, in any case, not to a printer that Sam was set to learn his trade, but to a paper merchant. The main cluster of London’s paper merchants was on Lower Thames Street, situated handily on the river to receive supplies from the paper mills in estuarine Kent. New technologies meant that paper could now be made out of cheap wood pulp rather than expensive rags, with the result that barges bearing bales of paper were starting to appear almost daily in the bowels of the City. Since Lower Thames Street was only a few hundred yards from Milk Street, Sam almost certainly came back from Suffolk to live at the Dolphin in 1845, the year he turned 14. That Sam’s was not a formal apprenticeship is confirmed by the fact that in 1851, one year short of the twenty-first birthday that would have ended any contractual arrangement, he gives his employment to the census enumerator as a ‘Traveller’ in a wholesale stationery firm. Always in a hurry, it would be hard to imagine Sam Beeton serving out his time as a ‘lad’ when he knew himself to be a man, and one with places to go.

Working in a paper office may sound peripheral to the explosion in the knowledge industry, but actually it was one of the best groundings for life as a magazine editor and book publisher. Young men higher up the social scale – not university graduates, but the sons of men with more cash and clout – went into junior jobs on the staff of publishers or newspapers. Here they may have learned about the editorial side of things, but they were often left ignorant of the pounds, shillings, and pence of the business. Sam, by contrast, with his less gentlemanly training, got to grips with how the product worked from the bottom up. Whether you were publishing high literature or low farce, ladies’ fashions or children’s Bible stories, elevating texts or smutty jokes, you needed what Sam, in a letter written fifteen years later when he was a fully fledged publisher, would describe triumphantly as ‘paper without end’.

This is not to suggest that this latter phase of Sam’s education was confined to counting reams, hefting quires and sucking fingers made sore from paper cuts. Being a stationery seller took you into other people’s offices and it was here Sam made friends with a group of young men working in adjacent trades. There was Frederick Greenwood, a print setter who had probably been apprenticed to a firm in nearby New Fetter Lane but, after only a year, found himself engaged as a publisher’s reader. Greenwood would become Beeton’s right-hand man for nearly a decade, before striking out on a glittering career as an editor on his own account. He had an equally talented though more mercurial younger brother, James, who would go on to be one of the first investigative journalists of his day and who would publish much of his work under the imprint of S. O. Beeton. Then there was James Wade, who may have served an apprenticeship in the same firm as Frederick Greenwood and would print many of Beeton’s publications, especially the initial volumes of the ground-breaking Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine.

Whether your first job was in a paper merchant’s or a printing house, the work was hard, taking up to twelve hours a day and a good part of Saturday. But that did not stop these vigorous young men getting together in the evening. These were exciting times and it was impossible for them not to feel that they had been set upon the earth at just the right moment. In an interview towards the end of his life Greenwood maintained, ‘It was worth while being born in the early ’thirties’ in order ‘to feel every day a difference so much to the good’. Coming into the world around the time of the Great Reform Act, these boys had lived through the three big Chartist uprisings, witnessed the repeal of the Corn Laws and seen the beginnings of legislation that would go to create the modern state (hence Greenwood, who remembered from his early working days the sight of shoeless boys wandering around St Paul’s, maintaining that things really were getting better every day). Now as they came into manhood these young men insisted on seeing signs all around them that the world – or their world – was moving forward. After the rigours of the ‘hungry forties’ Britain was entering a golden age of prosperity, a sunny upland where it was possible to believe that hard work, material wellbeing and intellectual progress walked hand in hand.

More specifically, these young men had seen at first hand just how the social and political changes of the last few years had been lobbied, debated, modified, and publicized through the burgeoning culture of printed news. Greenwood paying to read a paper every morning from nine to ten, or Sam popping into the Dolphin for the latest edition of the Morning Advertiser were part of a new generation of people who expected to get their information quickly and accurately, rather than picking up third-hand gossip days later around the village pump. On top of this, these young men had seen their changing world refracted in the bold new fiction that was pouring off the presses. Mary Barton, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, all burst upon the world during the hectic decade that coincided with their apprenticeships. Nor was it just the content of these books – rough, even raw – that was new. The way they were produced, in cheap cardboard formats, sometimes serialized in magazines, or available in multiple volumes from Mr Mudie’s lending library in New Oxford Street or Mr Smith’s railway stands, announced a revolution in reading habits. No wonder that, years later, when writing to his elder son at prep school, a boy who had never known what it was not to have any text he wanted immediately to hand, Sam counselled sadly ‘you do not read books enough.’

There were other excitements, too, of a more immediate nature. It was now that Sam Beeton and Frederick Greenwood discovered sex and spent their lives dealing with its consequences. At the time Greenwood was living in lodgings off the Goswell Road, away from his parental home in west London. In June 1850, at the age of only 20, he married Catherine Darby. Although the marriage was not of the shotgun variety – the first baby wasn’t born until a decorous eighteen months later – it was miserable, ending in separation and a series of minders for the increasingly alcoholic and depressed Mrs Greenwood (when visitors came round for tea she promptly hid the cups under the cushions on the grounds that she didn’t want company). But in one way Greenwood was lucky. Early marriage did for him what a growing band of moralists maintained it would, providing him with a prophylactic against disease, drink, and restlessness. Marriage steadied a man and young Frederick Greenwood was nothing if not steady.

Greenwood’s friend Sam Beeton was not so fortunate. Just what happened during his crucial years of young adulthood has been obscured by embarrassment and smoothed over with awkward tact. Nancy Spain, no fan of Sam, quotes from a conversation he had in later life. Strolling through London, Sam was supposed to have pointed out ‘the window he used to climb out at night’ as a lad, adding wistfully that ‘he began life too soon’. Spain does not source the quotation and it would be easy to dismiss the whole anecdote were it not for the odd fact that H. Montgomery Hyde, who researched his biography independently of Spain, evidently had access to this same conversation. Hyde has the young man ‘confessing’ that he contrived to have ‘quite a gay time’ in his youth, before going on to point out the infamous window.

The language that both Spain and Hyde ascribe to Sam speaks volumes. Climbing out of a window immediately suggests something illicit, something which the boy did not wish his father, stepmother and gaggle of half-sisters and step-aunts to know about. ‘Beginning life too soon’ makes no sense, either, unless it refers to street life – drink, cards, whores (boys of Sam’s class were used to the idea that their working lives began at fourteen). Also telling is Hyde’s detail about Sam referring to having had a ‘gay time’ – ‘gay’ being the standard code word designating commercial heterosexual sex. (‘Fanny, how long have you been gay?’ asks one prostitute of another in a cartoon of the time.)

Once Sam had scrambled out of the Dolphin window it was only a ten-minute saunter to the Strand, that no-man’s-land between the City and the West End which had long been synonymous with prostitution. What was mostly a male space during the day – all those print shops, stationers and booksellers – turned at night into something altogether more assorted. From the nearby taverns and theatres poured groups of young men in varying states of cheeriness, while from the rabbit warren of courts and alleys came women who needed to make some money, quickly and without fuss. (Brothels were never a British thing, and most prostitutes worked the streets as freelance operators.) The young men who used the women’s services were not necessarily bad, certainly not the rakes or sadists or degenerates of our contemporary fantasies. In fact, if anything, they were probably the prudent ones, determined to delay marriage until they were 30 or so and had saved up a little nest egg. So when the coldness and loneliness of celibacy became too much, it was these careful creatures of capitalism who ‘spent’ – the polite term for male orgasm – 5 shillings on a dreary fumble which, if Sam is anything to go by, they shuddered to recall years later. In this early part of Victoria’s reign, before the social reformer Josephine Butler started to provide a woman’s perspective on the situation, there were plenty of sensible people who believed that prostitution was the price you paid for keeping young middle-class men focused, productive and mostly continent during their vital teens and twenties.

The man whom Sam accused of initiating him into the city’s night life was Charles Henry Clarke, a bookbinder ten years older than himself operating from offices at 148 Fleet Street and 25¹/₂ Bouverie Street. Clarke was in partnership with a printer called Frederick Salisbury, a 40-year-old man originally from Suffolk, who also had premises in Bouverie Street. Recently Clarke and Salisbury had branched out from simply printing and binding books for other publishers to producing them themselves, mostly reissuing existing texts (British copyright at this point was a messy, floutable business). It was this expanding side of the business that particularly attracted Sam, who wanted to be a proper publisher rather than simply a paper man. Armed with some capital, possibly from his mother’s estate, and a burning sense of destiny, Sam joined Salisbury and Clarke as a partner around the time of his twenty-first birthday in the spring of 1852 with the intention of building a publishing empire to cater for the reading needs of the rising lower middle classes, the very people from whom he had sprung. Newly confident, flush with a little surplus cash, literate but not literary, comprising everyone from elderly women who had come up from the country, through their bustling tradesmen sons to their sharp, knowing granddaughters, these were the people whom Samuel was gearing up to supply with every kind of reading material imaginable, as well as some that had yet to be thought of.

And, for a while, he was flukishly successful. During those last few months of Sam’s informal apprenticeship, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been doing huge and surprising business in her native America. Since there was no copyright agreement with the States – in fact there would be none until 1891 – a whole slew of British publishers immediately scented the possibility of making a profit simply by reprinting the book and adding their own title page and cover. One of these was Henry Vizetelly, a brilliant but permanently under-capitalized publisher and engraver who made an arrangement with Clarke and Salisbury to split the costs of publishing 2,500 copies of the book to sell at 2s 6d. Initially Uncle Tom’s Cabin made little impact in Britain, but a swift decision to bring out a 1s edition paid speedy dividends. By July 1852 it was selling at the rate of 1,000 copies a week.

Using the extra capital that Sam had brought into the firm, he and Clarke now set about exploiting this sensational demand for Mrs Stowe’s sentimental novel about life among black slaves in the southern states of America. Seventeen printing presses and four hundred people were pulled into service in order to bring out as many new editions of Uncle Tom as anyone could think of – anything from a weekly 1d serial, through a 1s railway edition to a luxury version with ‘forty superb illustrations’ for 7s 6d. This was a new way of thinking about books. Instead of a stable entity, fixed between a standard set of covers, Beeton’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a spectacularly malleable artefact, one that could be repackaged and re-presented to different markets an almost infinite number of times.

Inevitably this feeding frenzy attracted other British publishers – seventeen in fact – who lost no time in producing their own editions of Mrs Stowe’s unlikely hit, often simply reprinting Clarke and Beeton’s text and adding their own title page. What many of them had missed, though, was the fact that some of these Clarke, Beeton editions contained significant additions to the original American text, comprising a new Introduction and explanatory chapter headings written by Frederick Greenwood. By unwittingly reproducing these, publishers such as Frederick Warne were infringing Clarke and Beeton’s British copyright. As a result of this greedy mistake, Clarke and Beeton were in an extraordinarily strong position, able to insist that the pirated stock was handed over to them, whereupon they simply reissued it under their own name. Uncle Tom probably achieved the greatest short-term sale of any book published in Britain in the nineteenth century, and the firm of Clarke and Beeton walked away with a very large slice of the stupendous profits. For a young man venturing into the marketplace for the first time, the omens must have seemed stunning.

Fired by his spectacular good fortune, Sam was determined to get first dibs on Mrs Stowe’s follow-up book. And so late in that delirious summer of 1852 he took the extraordinary step of tearing off to the States to beard the middle-aged minister’s wife in her Massachusetts lair. Initially she refused to see him, then relented and almost immediately wished she had not. The young man’s opening gambit, of presenting her with the electrotype plates from the luxury British edition, was sadly misjudged. Included among these was a cover illustration comprising a highly eroticized whipping scene, exactly the kind of thing that Mrs Stowe had taken pains to avoid. ‘There is not one scene of bodily torture described in the book – they are purposely omitted,’ she explained reprovingly to him in a later letter, probably wondering whether this brash young Englishman had really got the point of her work at all.

Next Sam tried cash, offering Mrs Stowe a payment of £500. If he thought that she would roll over in gratitude, then he could not have been more mistaken. For all that she liked to present herself as an unworldly minister’s wife, Mrs Stowe had a surprising grasp of the pounds, shillings and pence of authorship. It had not escaped her sharp attention that Sam, together with other British firms, had harvested from her work ‘profits … which I know have not been inconsiderable’. In the end she accepted the £500, together with a further £250, but not before making it quite clear in a letter to Sam that this did not constitute any kind of payment, promise, or obligation.

As if to emphasize to Sam that he was not quite the uniquely coming man he thought himself to be, the Fates conspired that as he left Mrs Stowe after his first interview, he bumped into another British publisher walking up her drive. Sampson Low had crossed the Atlantic for exactly the same purpose, to coax Mrs Stowe into giving him an early advantage in publishing the sequel to Uncle Tom. In the end Mrs Stowe agreed to furnish both Beeton and Low, together with another British publisher Thomas Bosworth, with advance pages of her next work, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As it turned out, this shared arrangement was lucky, since it meant that each of the firms got to bear only one third of the colossal losses. The Key turned out to be a dreary affair, nothing more than a collection of the documentary sources on which the novel had been based. The fact that Mrs Stowe insisted beforehand that ‘My Key will be stronger than the Cabin,’ suggests how little she understood – and, perhaps, cared about – the reasons for her phenomenal popular success.

It says something about Sam’s character that, right from the start, there were people who were delighted to see him take this tumble. Vizetelly, the man who had first brought Uncle Tom to Clarke but who had missed out on the staggering profits from the subsequent editions, was particularly thrilled at the loss that Sam was now taking with The Key. When Vizetelly, who was ten years older than Beeton and already recognized as a noisy talent in Fleet Street, had approached the lad at the end of the summer of 1852 to ask about his share of the profit, he was sent away with a flea in his ear and an abiding dislike of the cocky upstart. Decades later, writing his puffily self-serving autobiography, Vizetelly was still gloating over the fact that ‘With a daring confidence, that staggered most sober-minded people, the deluded trio, Clarke, Beeton, and Salisbury, printed a first edition of fifty thousand copies, I think it was, the bulk of which eventually went to the trunk makers, while the mushroom firm was obliged to go into speedy liquidation.’

Vizetelly’s claim that Clarke, Beeton went into immediate liquidation looks like wishful thinking. Certainly there is no formal record of them being forced to close down. Nor is it true, as earlier Beeton biographers have maintained, that it was at this point that Beeton ditched Clarke and went into business on his own. Right up until 1855 Clarke and Beeton were printing some books and magazines under their joint names while also continuing to work separately. It was not until 1857 that the break finally came, with characteristic (for Sam) bad temper. In February of that year Beeton v. Clarke was heard before Lord Campbell. Both parties had hired QCs, which hardly came cheap, to argue over whether Clarke, who was now operating independently out of Paternoster Row, owed Beeton £181. The wrangle dated back to the mad days of summer 1852 when, during their scrappy coming to terms over the profits of Uncle Tom, the firm of Clarke, Beeton and Salisbury had bought from Henry Vizetelly his profitable imprint ‘Readable Books’. Now that the relationship between Clarke and Beeton had dramatically soured, they were bickering like estranged lovers over small sums of money. The jury found for Sam, one of the few occasions in his long litigious career when he would emerge vindicated.

Typically Sam made huge cultural capital from the Uncle Tom affair. Not only did he manage to win Mrs Stowe round by his charismatic presence for long enough to extract introductions to several American intellectuals, including her brother Revd H. W. Beecher of Brooklyn, Wendell Holmes, and Longfellow, he also talked up his relationship with the celebrity authoress thereafter, managing to imply that she was anxiously watching over the affairs of Clarke, Beeton from the other side of the Atlantic. The Preface to the sixth edition of Uncle Tom, published this time by ‘Clarke & Co, Foreign Booksellers’, shows just how far he was prepared to go:

In presenting this Edition to the British public the Publishers, equally on behalf of the Authoress and themselves, beg to render their acknowledgements of the sympathy and success the work has met with in England … Our Editions are the real ‘Author’s Editions’; we are in direct negotiation with Mrs Stowe; and we confidently hope that when accounts are made up we shall be in a position to award that talented lady a sum not inferior in amount to her receipts in America.

Thereafter Sam would tie his own name to Mrs Stowe’s in the public’s mind wherever possible. Thus years later, in Beeton’s Dictionary of Universal Information, he could not resist retelling the story of how he had crossed the Atlantic in the late summer of 1852 to present Mrs Stowe with a voluntary payment of £500. The fact that he had first tried to get away with giving her some printers’ plates that he no longer needed and she particularly disliked was, typically enough, never mentioned.