Double biography about the not-so-eminent Victorians Samuel Beeton and his wife Isabella. Isabella learned housekeeping as the eldest child in a family of 21 (housed in the Derby Grandstand at Epsom); after her marriage in 1856 to publisher Beeton, she began contributing columns on fashion, housekeeping, and child-rearing to his Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine. She did a lot of research (and a good deal of plagiarism) for her comprehensive Household Management, the cookery and housekeeping book indispensable to generations of middle-class Englishwomen. Isabella died of childbed fever in 1865; despondent Sam loses his money and business a year later.