Abstract
Although, on the one hand, it sometimes seems that nineteenth-century novels were overflowing with details, there are limits to how much stuff a novel can describe without threatening the integrity of the narrative. A domestic manual like Beeton’s Book of Household Management, on the other hand, is much less limited in its scope for detail. From a focus on narrative, plot and story in the first three chapters, Time, Domesticity and Print Culture now turns to a wholly different way of telling time. As I explain in this chapter, the Book of Household Management conceptualizes domestic time not primarily through narrative, but through the organization of information. Part of that organization relates to its serial publication. It was compiled by Isabella Beeton, and published in 24 monthly numbers (1859–61) by Isabella’s publisher husband, Samuel Beeton. Beeton’s Book of Household Management can marshal a multiplicity of genres, differentiate between them with different fonts, font sizes and chapter divisions, and administer specific information on foodstuffs, cleaning, behaviour, natural history and the material environments of the mid-nineteenth-century home. Given these features, the book has no need for an overall narrative progression. Instead, the high level of organization invites the reader to pick his or her own way through the printed text.
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Notes
Isabella Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Household Management, Edited by Mrs Isabella Beeton (London: S. O. Beeton, 1859–62), 2 (December 1859), p. 96.
Isabella Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Household Management, 3 (January 1860), p. 97.
On the significance of Charles Knight’s many publishing ventures, see Valerie Gray, Charles Knight: Educator, Publisher, Writer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
For the serial publication of science, see Nick Hopwood, Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord, ‘Seriality and Scientific Objects in the Nineteenth Century’, History of Science, 48.3 (September/December 2010), 251–85.
Mark W. Turner, ‘The Unruliness of Serials in the Nineteenth Century (and in the Digital Age)’ in Serialization in Popular Culture, ed. by Rob Allen and Thijs van den Berg (New York: Routledge), 2014, pp. 11–32.
Dena Attar, A Bibliography of Household Books Published in Britain 1800–1914 (London: Prospect, 1987), p. 12.
For a discussing of Beeton’s confident tone, see Kathryn Hughes, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton (London: Harper, 2006), p. 205.
For the publishing schemes, see Margaret Beetham, ‘Of Recipe Books and Reading in the Nineteenth Century: Mrs Beeton and her Cultural Consequences’, in The Recipe Reader: Narratives — Contexts — Traditions, ed. by Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 15–30, p. 16.
For the scope and breath of the book, see James Buzard, ‘Home Ec. with Mrs. Beeton’, Raritan, 17.2 (September 1997), 121–35, pp. 123–6.
Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery, in all its Branches: Reduced to a System of Easy Practice, for the Use of Private Families, in a Series of Practical Receipts, which have been Strictly Tested, and are Given with the most Exact Minuteness (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1845).
Andrea Broomfield, Food and Cooking in Victorian England: A History (Westport and London: Praeger, 2007), p. 40.
Robert Kemp Philp, Enquire Within: A Work of Practical Instruction Upon Literally Everything that a Housekeeper Ought to Know, for the Use or Ornament of a Home, and the Health and Comfort of its Occupants (London: Houlston and Stoneman, [1855–56]).
Laurel Brake, Print in Transition, 1850–1910: Studies in Media and Book History (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave, 2001), p. 30.
D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986).
Michael Warner, ‘Publics and Counterpublics’, Public Culture, 14.1 (Winter 2002), 49–90.
Quoted in Nicola Humble, Culinary Pleasures: Cook Books and the Transformation of British Food (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), pp. 9–10.
Samuel O. Beeton and John Sherer (eds), Beeton’s Dictionary of Universal Information (London: S. O. Beeton, 1858–62).
Because of access issues, I have used a facsimile of the 1861 volume edition for reference. The actual text is identical, as the serial and volume editions were set from the same block; only in its title does the Cassell edition deviate from the first edition, preferring the later ‘Mrs Beeton’s Book’ rather than the earlier version, ‘Beeton’s Book’. Isabella Beeton, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, facsimile of the 1st edn (London: Cassell, 2000), pp. 4–5. All further references in brackets in the text.
Annette Cozzi, The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 83.
Nicola Humble does in fact acknowledge this. Humble, ‘Introduction’, in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, ed. by Nicola Humble, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. vii–xxx, p. xvii.
Robert Kemp Philp, The Practical Housewife: By the Editors of the Family Friend (London: Ward and Lock [1855]), p. 13.
Maria Rundell, A New System of Domestic Cookery, facsimile of 1816 edn (London: Persephone Books, 2009), p. xiv.
Alison Light, Woolf and the Servants (London: Penguin Fig Tree, 2007), p. 282.
Michel Foucault calls it ‘the temporal elaboration of the act’ which organizes the act into controlled successive stages, allowing complete control of the subordinate’s body. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), pp. 151–2.
Mrs G. W. M. [Susannah Frances] Reynolds and William E. Hall, The Household Book of Practical Receipts, in the Arts, Manufactures, and Trades, Including Medicine, Pharmacy, and Domestic Economy. Illustrated with Diagrams (London and Paris: Printed for the proprietor, by John Dicks, at the office of Reynold’s Miscellany, 1847).
Alexis Soyer, The Modern Housewife or Ménagère, 2nd edn (London: Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., 1849).
Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel from Richardson to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Janet Morgan, ‘Preface,’ in Maria Rundell, A New System of Domestic Cookery, facsimile of 1816 edn (London: Persephone Books, 2009), pp. v–xix, p. vii.
Ellen Gruber Garvey, ‘The Power of Recirculation: Scrapbooks and the Reception of the Nineteenth-Century Press’, in New Directions in American Reception Study, ed. by Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 211–31, pp. 212, 213.
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© 2016 Maria Damkjær
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Damkjær, M. (2016). Decomposition: Mrs Beeton and the Non-Linear Text. In: Time, Domesticity and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137542885_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137542885_5
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