MRS ISABELLA BEETON

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVI, Issue 21244, 14 January 1939, Page 16

MRS ISABELLA BEETON

A FAMOUS VICTORIAN COOK One of the best-known English women and an intimate of every British household, Isabella Mayson’s portrait is very properly in the National Portrait Gallery side by side with such luminaries as George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Mrs Gaskell, and others. Born in 1836, Isabella was a contemporary of Charlotte Yonge, who though her senior outlived her for a quarter of a century. Mrs Gaskell and Isabella died in the same year and Elizabeth Barret Browning only four years earlier. Isabella could have found a link with the past in Madame Tussaud, who died when she was 14 and who was born nearly 30 years before the French Revolution. Equally she had a link with the future in Ouida and Florence Nightingale, who overlapped into her period and died in 1908 and 1910 respectively. Isabella Mayson was an extremely good looking woman, one of the handsomest of a glaxy in which Mrs Gaskell perhaps remains supreme. She wore her hair parted in the middle with a becoming plait over the top and she dressed in the bell-sleeved, striped dress, with huge brooch and chain and white collar, of the fashion of the day. Equally she wore a velvet band round her slender wrist, which is well displayed in the portrait. Isabella’s services to her country are probably incalculable, even though during the war she fell into disrepute for her too lavish spending. She has, however, risen from the ashes of her disgrace in new and more splendid form which no longer thinks anything of a dozen eggs for one spongecake and still lords it in the kitchen as the one and only Mrs Bee ton.