A Burglar Caught by a Skeleton & Other Singular Tales from the Victorian Press (13 page)

A recipe for lark pie. Tips on the preparation of eel stew. A comprehensive list of the duties of a footman. Advice for treating someone struck by lightning.

For anyone who required these things in the second half of the nineteenth century, there was one place to turn: Mrs Beeton’s
Book of Household Management
, a domestic version of Google, painstakingly compiled over the course of four years by the wife of a prominent publisher.

Within its 2,751 numbered paragraphs, the book dispensed pithy wisdom on the art of dressing a bullock’s heart, the practicalities of cleaning plate and whether or not a drowned man should be hung up by his heels. (Not, was the conclusion. Far better to stick him in a bath, then tickle his nose with a feather.)

If you had half a calf’s head handy and a partially drained bottle of sherry, Isabella Beeton was there to explain how to fashion them into mock turtle soup. If you needed to brush up on the origin of the onion, she was ready with the answer. And if you’d forgotten how long to boil carrots, a quick flick to the right section would put you right. Ah yes, two and a quarter hours.

To her devoted readership, she represented an ideal of British motherhood, a lighthouse beam to guide them through the rocky waters of etiquette and the expectations of the age.

But though the book is rightly cherished for offering a glimpse of day-to-day home life in the Victorian era, it isn’t, of course, anything like the full picture.

To the slum-dwellers of the great cities of Britain, Mrs Beeton’s rarefied world was as foreign as the French names of the dishes she recommended for her dinner parties.

Thirty years after the
Book of Household Management
first appeared on bookshelves, Friedrich Engels’
The Condition of The Working Class in England
was finally published in English. Flicking from one to the other is like flipping a flan to find the underside teeming with maggots.

‘Among ill-paid workers, even if they have no large families, hunger prevails in spite of full and regular work; and the number of the ill-paid is very large’, wrote Engels. ‘In these cases all sorts of devices are used; potato parings, vegetable refuse, and rotten vegetables are eaten for want of other food, and everything greedily gathered up which may possibly contain an atom of nourishment.’

Even if they could scrape together the money for some of the more modestly-priced ingredients in Mrs Beeton’s recipes, it didn’t necessarily follow that the poor had anywhere to cook them. Nor did it mean they knew how to cook. In that, at least, they shared some common ground with the aristocracy. When the Marchioness of Londonderry announced that she knew how to grill a chop, it made the
Illustrated London News
.

There was another sector of society that fell beyond the scope of Mrs Beeton’s culinary advice: the unscrupulous. This was a time of wholesale adulteration of food and drink, when milk was diluted with water or thickened with starch, when beer was crafted with strychnine and when red lead lent an appealing hue to cheese.

There must have been quite a surreptitious demand for such sly recipes, but the virtuous Mrs Beeton certainly didn’t oblige. Nor, come to think of it, did she explain how to kill and cook a dog for an impromptu victory feast after an election. So the Liberals of West Bromwich, as we shall see, were forced to improvise.

Whisky Corsets – A Singular Fraud

A Canadian correspondent tells a story which reminds one of James Russell Lowell’s famous despatch on petroleum smugglers ‘with the pectoral proportions of a Juno.’

A novel method of avoiding the Sunday liquor law, he says, was discovered in Montreal about a fortnight ago.

The proprietor of a candy-store was arraigned in the Recorder’s Court, charged with ‘selling liquor on Sunday out of whisky corsets’. The latter part of the charge astounded the clerk of the court, until the chief of police explained that after some months of effort to detect how liquor was sold on Sunday in the French quarter of the city, one of his men while in a candy-store saw a man pass the proprietor five cents. The proprietor produced a small rubber tube from under his vest, one end of which the man put to his mouth and sucked.

The officer pounced on the proprietor and a search revealed that the man wore a pair of tin corsets, with doubled space between the inner and outer partitions, holding over a gallon of liquor. To this the tube was attached by a stop-cock.

The customers leaned over the counter, took the tube in their mouth, and sucked until the proprietor thought they had the worth of their money, when the supply was turned off and the tube put back underneath the vest. The police discovered that many a buxom candy-store woman wore similar tank-corsets and did a rushing business with rubber tubes on Sundays.

Warrants are out for several of the ingenious violators of the law.

The Worcestershire Chronicle
, February 20, 1892

Extraordinary Poisoning Near Rugby

A most melancholy occurrence has just taken place in a farm house at Ashby St Ledgers, a village on the borders of Northamptonshire.

It appears that Mr William Payne Cowley, a farmer living in that village with his mother (who is a widow) and his brothers, had his sheep dipped, or washed, last week. The object of this dipping or washing is the extermination of vermin, and for this purpose a strong mixture of arsenic and soft soap diluted with water, is used.

On Tuesday morning last, Mr W.P. Cowley sent his brother, Mr Edwin Cowley, to the adjoining town of Daventry, where he purchased 6lb of white arsenic and a barrel of soft soap weighing 30lb.

On the following morning, Mr W.P. Cowley and his mother prepared the sheep dipping mixture, in which some lambs were washed. In this operation Mr Cowley and several of his labourers were employed.

After assisting her son in the preparation of the soap and arsenic, Mrs Cowley proceeded to make a batter pudding for the dinner of her family and the labourers and servants. By some means as yet unaccounted for, it appears that some arsenic must have become mixed with the pudding, for the whole of the persons who partook of it, ten in number, became violently sick just after dinner, and exhibited all the symptoms of being poisoned.

The best medical assistance in the neighbourhood was procured, but one man has already died, and another is not expected to survive; the others are all more or less affected.

The Leeds Mercury
, July 16, 1862

Hilarious Burglars

A remarkable siege has just been sustained by a villa at Passy, the owner of which is away in the country.

Three burglarious youths entered the place, and pillaged the house from ground floor to garret. They might have got off with their booty, but the attractions of the larder and the wine cellar were too much for them.

They feasted on the good things which had been left behind by the family, and finished up with Burgundy, champagne, and prime cognac.

Then they lit the gas, danced, became maudlin, and sang songs, the strains of which floated on the night wind and awoke some neighbours, who sent for the police.

Twenty ‘agents’ of the law surrounded the villa with revolvers cocked. Nevertheless they seemed afraid to move, as the drunken burglars threatened them from the windows, and they were loath to act without the instructions of their Inspector.

That respectable functionary was in bed, and instead of getting up he told the policeman who had called him to keep the house well surrounded until morning.

At an early hour the Inspector rose, and with the aid of his own men, of the milk-distributors, and of the early risers of the locality generally, went into the house and handcuffed the youthful miscreants, who were helplessly intoxicated. They had kept the policemen at bay during the night by exhibiting two rusty swords and a flintlock pistol.

The Dundee Courier and Argus
, August 30, 1888

A Drunken Child

On Wednesday morning a child about seven years old was admitted into the East Dispensary, Liverpool, insensible. The boy was the son of an organ grinder, and had gone into a public house for the purpose of making a collection, when several drinks of whiskey were given to him by the customers, and he fell to the ground.

He was attended to by the doctor, remained in the institution a considerable time, and afterwards was taken home by his parents, still suffering from the effects of the spirits he had consumed.

The Citizen
, Gloucester, December 18, 1890

A Priest’s Ruse

A clever trick was practised on Wednesday night by Father Nugent, a well-known Catholic priest, in Liverpool. An entertainment was given in the League Hall, Liverpool, in celebration of St Patrick’s Day, to about 3,000 persons.

When all had assembled Father Nugent gave orders to close and lock all the doors, and all means of exit were accordingly kept shut until after eleven o’clock, the time at which the public-houses close. Father Nugent is a great promoter of temperance organisations in the town.