Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management
Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management might perhaps best be introduced to a modern audience as a Victorian combination of The Joy of Cooking and Dr. Spock's baby book. Indeed, it covers the much same ground as these twentieth century books and it commanded in its day the same sort of reliant devotion on the part of Victorian women. A massive tome of more than 1100 pages, it offered women in a less compartmentalized age good, practical advice on all aspects of housekeeping, cooking, child care, and even the laws of the land.
Isabella Mary Beeton née Mayson (1836-1865) was the eldest in a family of twenty-one children and it is safe to assume that she was experienced beyond her years when, at the age of nineteen, she married the magazine publisher, Samuel Beeton. In fact, she managed not only the household but much of her husband's business as well, contributing, among other things, weekly columns on cooking and fashion. The Book of Household Management was first published by Samuel Beeton in 1861 and proved an immediate success, eventually running through many editions. Mrs. Beeton, alas, did not live to enjoy her success for long, dying at age twenty-eight after the birth of her fourth child.
The sample included here comes from the first edition. It was chosen to give a representative flavor of the work's broad outlines and thoroughness, while at the same time presenting aspects of the work which would appeal more to modern taste. Thus, in favor of a section on how to skin game or one on Victorian "Legal Memoranda", we have chosen the chapters dealing with puddings and pastry, including many recipes that still yield excellent results, though modern cooks should be warned that Mrs. Beeton's measurements, a novel feature in cookbooks of her day, were intended to satisfy Victorian appetites...
The pages here were scanned as black and white Tiff files at 400 dpi and converted to DjVu format using the bitonal compressor. This allows an impressive compression ratio while at the same time capturing the details of the many illustrations. DjVu is the perfect format for such a work, its builtin magnifying glass and flexible zoom features overcoming any modern frustration with the Victorian penchant for tiny point sizes.
Return to the DjVu Document.