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Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management
Isabella Beeton
Oxford University Press
May 2000
On Sale: May 18, 2000
672 pages ISBN: 0192833456 EAN: 9780192833457 Paperback
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Self-Help
'As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any
enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house.' A
founding text of Victorian middle-class identity,
Household Management is today one of the great unread
classics. Over a thousand pages long, and written when its
author was only 22, it offered highly authoritative advice
on subjects as diverse as fashion, child-care, animal
husbandry, poisons, and the management of servants. To the
modern reader expecting stuffy moralizing and watery
vegetables, Beeton's book is a revelation: it ranges
widely across the foods of Europe and beyond, actively
embracing new food stuffs and techniques, mixing domestic
advice with discussions of science, religion, class,
industrialism and gender roles. Alternately fashionable
and frugal, anxious and blusteringly self-confident,
Household Management highlights the concerns of the ever-
expanding Victorian middle-class at a key moment in its
history. The abridged edition does justice to its high
status as a cookery book, while also suggesting ways of
approaching this massive, hybrid text as a significant
document of social and cultural history.
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