Past Programs
Unrest, Conflict and War - 2006
The First Consumers: Mrs Beeton
25/11/2006
The nineteenth century saw the birth of modern consumerism and an interest in style and design. One of the unlikely heroines of this story is Isabella Beeton: yes, Ms Beeton, author of The Book of Household Management, which most of us tend to think of as just a cookbook, though a venerable one.
Though probably still envisaged as looking a bit like the older Queen Victoria -- a tub-like lady in black -- Isabella Beeton was a mere twenty-eight when she died. She didn't know a lot about cooking and she didn't know a lot about households, so she borrowed extensively from early authors. But she realised, as many historians have not, that the Victorian middle-class home was intimately connected with the public sphere: the purchases of fans, pianos, and carpets were helping to drive the economy forward. She helped introduce an age in which middle-class people, and not just the aristocracy, were able to buy things because they wanted them and not just because they needed them.
