introduction from fashioning the silver fork novel
TRANSCRIPT
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INTRODUCTION: WHY SILVER FORK? WHY NOW?
To understand literary form is, in other words, to understand how it is both generally and at particular moments coincident with or identical to social form.1
Lady Charlotte Bury, Robert Plumer Ward, T. H. Lister, Lady Catherine Stepney, Marianne Spencer Stanhope, C. D. Burdett, Th eodore Hook: names that have all but fallen out of the annals of literary history. Benjamin Disraeli, Countess of Blessington, Catherine Gore, L. E. L., Edward and Rosina Bul-wer Lytton, Lady Caroline Lamb: names that echo on the fringes of Romantic and Victorian studies. During the early decades of the nineteenth century, however, readers could expect to encounter any one of these authors while browsing the shelves of a fashionable bookstore or circulating library. Indeed, what all of these writers – and many others – have in common is their con-tribution to the short-lived, but nonetheless signifi cant, phenomenon of the fashionable or ‘silver fork’ novel.2
Flooding the marketplace from the mid-1820s to the mid-1840s (with a few holdovers into the 1850s), silver fork novels were popular with readers and profi table for both authors and publishers. In the still new three-volume format, they detailed the lives and loves of London fashionables – or members of the ton, as they were known. In doing so, the novels positioned themselves as a type of conduct book, off ering guidance for socially-aspirant members of the middle class who longed to peer behind the façade of fashion into the world of the ton and, perhaps, even gain access to that world. In the following chapters, I discuss the characteristics of the genre and its place within the literary and cultural mar-ketplace of the early nineteenth century; however, I would like to consider fi rst the critical and social implications of studying this genre and raise the questions: why silver fork? Why now?
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2 Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel
A Critical Situation
For over seventy years, Matthew Rosa’s Th e Silver-Fork School: Novels of Fashion Preceding Vanity Fair (1936) was the only book-length study of the silver fork novel and one of the few pieces of scholarship on the genre. Fairly comprehensive, Rosa’s text includes chapters on many of the most prolifi c silver fork novelists, such as Bulwer Lytton,3 Disraeli, Gore, Bury and Blessington, as well as publisher Henry Colburn. Part biography, part critical overview, Rosa’s text provides an invaluable starting point for a study of the silver fork novel as it brings together a wealth of primary sources and historical contexts for the novels.
However, as the book’s subtitle suggests, Rosa’s attitude towards his subject matter oft en hovers between condescending and dismissive. Th e value of the sil-ver fork novel, according to Rosa, lies primarily in its ability to contextualize Th ackeray’s masterpiece. Indeed, Rosa closes his work on a nostalgic note, eff ec-tively reducing the entire silver fork genre to a few notable pages, concluding, ‘Today, only he [Th ackeray] remains, but countless leaves [from silver fork nov-els], some of them delicate and lovely, drift ed into the mold out of which grew the sturdy trunk of Vanity Fair’.4 Harsher value judgements, too, abound, such as the claim with which Rosa opens his chapter on the Countess of Blessington: ‘Th e quality of Lady Blessington’s work does not entitle her to an important place in literary study’.5 In Contingencies of Value (1988), Barbara Hernstein Smith argues that the way in which literary scholars assign value to works can be limiting and problematic, writing:
the fact that literary evaluation is not merely an aspect of formal academic criti-cism but a complex set of social and cultural activities central to the very nature of literature has been obscured, and an entire domain that is properly the object of theo-retical, historical, and empirical exploration has been lost to serious inquiry.6
Smith’s work off ers a useful frame for the study of the silver fork novel because the genre is fully embedded within and responding to the social and cultural contexts surrounding its production. Th at close engagement with fashionable elements of early nineteenth-century culture, however, has also caused silver fork novels to be mostly ignored by contemporary critics and seen, instead, as passing fads or sociological curiosities. Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel aims to reinsert the silver fork novel into critical conversations by focusing on literary and cultural contexts, including the fashionable world, the concept of exclusiv-ity and the literary marketplace. As Smith writes, ‘value creates value’, and the perpetual devaluing of the genre, as I argue in Chapter 2, has its roots in the early reviews of silver fork novels and has continued to infl uence scholarship through-out much of the twentieth century.7 Th e novels did hold considerable value for nineteenth-century readers, however – much of which was self-consciously cre-
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ated by authors and publishers – and this process of creating value is part of what makes the novels relevant for literary study today.
Publishing both before and aft er Matthew Rosa, Michael Sadleir has also made signifi cant contributions to the study of the silver fork novel. His exten-sive Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1951) catalogues a number of silver fork novels and provides attributions for many works that were published anonymously or pseudonymously. Sadleir also off ers a brief critical commentary on the silver fork novel in his introduction to the volumes, acknowledging the challenges facing scholars of this genre because the silver fork school ‘produced a higher propor-tion of downright bad novels than any similar group, with the possible exception of the gothic Romances; but the fl imsiest and gaudiest specimen bears inevitably the mark of the hectic period which produced it’.8 Th e ‘hectic period’ of the 1820s and 1830s was marked by changing social structures, particularly with regard to class and gender, and the silver fork novel evolved as a form uniquely suited to negotiating and profi ting from those changes; thus, the study of form and the relationship between the literature and the fashionable world can lend interest and relevance to some of these ‘downright bad novels’. Sadleir rightly questions the literary merit of silver fork novels, yet he does gesture towards the possibility that the study of silver fork novels could be useful for the study of the novel in general because ‘between these two categories of desired fi ction [Gothic novels and novels of sensibility] lay the output of upwards of fi ft een still neglected years’.9 Sadleir refers to the period from 1825 to 1840, when the silver fork novel was in its heyday, and I begin my study where he left off – acknowledging the shortcom-ings of the genre yet also off ering a reconsideration of the silver fork novel with the goal of reinserting it into the continuum of literary history.10
Other notable contributions to the study of fashionable fi ction include Ellen Moers’s Th e Dandy (1960), Francis Russel Hart’s ‘Th e Regency Novel of Fash-ion’ (1981), Alison Adburgham’s Silver Fork Society (1983) and Elliot Engel and Margaret F. King’s Th e Victorian Novel Before Victoria (1984). Of these, most are primarily social histories, with only Engel and King’s work focusing mainly on literature. Engel and King include a short section on the silver fork novel, how-ever, like many of their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors, they are somewhat dismissive. For example, they assert, ‘Th e fashionable novels of William’s reign certainly deserve much of the ridicule directed at them through satire and parody’.11 Such a dismissive tone damages the future critical reception of the novels, not because they were underappreciated brilliant texts, but because it eff ectively stops the critical conversation from considering the broader cultural work of these novels and the implications of their popularity. In contrast to Eliot and King, Moers, Adburgham and Hart treat the silver fork novel as a historical artefact that continues to be relevant for its accounts of the lives and lifestyles of the Regency fashionables. For example, in discussing the character types in T. H.
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4 Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel
Lister’s Granby (1826), Hart writes, ‘Th e presence of such fi gures makes Granby uniquely interesting as an anatomy of the social politics of fashion’.12 Silver fork novels certainly do function in this way, and many readers may fi nd this to be the genre’s most useful element. Nonetheless, as contemporary scholarship has begun to demonstrate, fashionable novels are also rich for more complex literary study, particularly with regard to their implications for book history, material culture and the development of the novel during the nineteenth century.
Beginning in the 1990s, feminist theory, cultural studies and re-evaluations of the canon led a handful of scholars to revisit the silver fork novel. Winifred Hughes’s ‘Silver Fork Writers and Readers: Social Contexts of a Best Seller’ (1992) was one of the fi rst articles to off er an analysis of the genre based on readership studies, arguing, ‘Th e source of the silver fork novel’s undeniable popular appeal during the Reform Bill era seems to have been precisely its ability to accommo-date the mixed motives of its largely middle-class readership’.13 And, several other critics, including April Kendra, Tamara Wagner, Ellen Miller Casey and Muire-ann O’Cinneide, have taken feminist approaches to these texts, considering the ways in which they off ered opportunities for the publication and professionaliza-tion of nineteenth-century women writers.14 Indeed, the importance of the silver fork novel to gender studies was underscored in 2009 with the publication of the fi rst-ever special issue of a journal – Women’s Writing – dedicated to the silver fork novel. Th e issue includes articles on the novels’ use of parody, presence in the periodical press and relationship to other nineteenth-century works by writ-ers such as Dickens and Th ackeray. Much of this contemporary scholarship takes one of two approaches: situating the silver fork novel in relation to a broader his-torical or literary phenomenon or off ering a close study of an individual work or works from a feminist or cultural studies perspective. Because the scope of the novels and the world they represent is so vast, incorporating cultural studies, his-torical contexts and close textual and theoretical analyses will help to establish a comprehensive body of criticism in this fi eld.
In her essay ‘Gendering the Silver Fork: Catherine Gore and the Society Novel’ April Kendra establishes two subcategories of fashionable fi ction: the dandy novel and the society novel, ‘which we may consider, respectively, as male and female fashionable novels’.15 She argues that the diff erence lies in the con-struction of the protagonist – the dandy (male novels) or society itself (female novels) – and the way in which the novels’ confl ict is resolved. Kendra concludes her essay with a nod to future critical work, suggesting that her categories are a starting place, rather than a defi nitive framework, for the study of fashionable fi ction: ‘I expect that a greater examination of the fashionable novel will discover a number of subgenres not identifi ed here, and that the dandy and society nov-els will occupy only two positions on a larger spectrum’.16 Kendra provocatively anticipates possibilities beyond her own gender-based distinctions, and I would
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suggest that additional markers for categorizing silver fork novels and studying their impact on the early nineteenth-century literary marketplace might include authorial productivity (prolifi c authors versus those who published just one or two novels), publisher (Henry Colburn versus his competitors) and publication date (the novels of the 1820s versus those of the 1840s).
Studies such as Kendra’s that work to synthesize the genre will doubtless con-tinue to advance considerations of the silver fork novel in scholarly venues and beyond. In addition, bibliographic work on these texts is certainly needed – par-ticularly given that many of the writers are understudied or almost completely absent from the world of literary studies, and many of their works continue to lurk, undiscovered, in library archives. Indeed, I am indebted to Troy J. Bassett’s excellent database At the Circulating Library, which currently catalogues all three-volume novels published during the Victorian period (1837–1901) and is being constantly expanded to include additional works of fi ction, through which I fi rst encountered the work of fashionable novelists Catherine Stepney and C. D. Burdett.17
Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel builds on the existing criticism of the genre as well as more general work on nineteenth-century fi ction and aims to make the study of the silver fork novel relevant for students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature and culture. I approach the silver fork genre from multiple perspectives on ‘fashion’: fashion as in ‘to fashion’ or to make – studying the con-struction of the genre and the silver fork formula; fashion as in ‘ton’ or the world of fashion – studying the relationship between the novels and the fashionable world; and fashion as in ‘to be popular’ – studying the literary marketplace, publishing practices and commercialization of fi ction during this period. Th is framework allows me to provide a considerable overview of the genre and its commonali-ties as well as to account for some distinctions among the texts. Moreover, such an approach combines close textual analysis and intertextual study with a consid-eration of the broader cultural and social functions of the genre – and fi ction in general. Reinserting the silver fork novel into the continuum of literary history not only opens up a wealth of texts for literary study – as many contemporary scholars have already begun to show – but such analysis also contributes to the broader study of the development of the novel over the course of the nineteenth century by crossing the established boundaries of the ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’ periods. As both a product and creator of fashion, the silver fork novel was in dialogue with many of the literary and social movements of the early nineteenth century, and, as such, it connects various distinct elements of the culture.
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6 Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel
Silver Fork Novels in the Popular MarketplaceIn Romantic Encounters (2007), Melissa Frazier off ers a useful defi nition of the literary marketplace in which she establishes the connection between the liter-ary marketplace and the professionalization of authorship:
any assumptions of direct socioeconomic cause and literary eff ect defl ect attention from the fact that the realities of the literary marketplace are very diffi cult to deter-mine. Th e term literary marketplace usually refers to a fairly recently arrived-at set of socioeconomic conditions governing the production and consumption of literature. Whereas at one time writers were either independently wealthy or supported by a wealthy patron, under the conditions of a literary marketplace both readership and the production and availability of books increase suffi ciently so that writers are enabled to turn for fi nancial support not to their own means nor to individual patrons but to the reading public at large, giving rise to what we might call a profession of letters.18
Frazier acknowledges that the literary marketplace is a contemporary histori-cal and critical construction, the exact nature of which can be quite diffi cult to determine. However, she also mentions several components of the literary marketplace, such as the role of readers, production of texts and professionaliza-tion of authorship that off er a useful starting point for locating the silver fork novel within the popular marketplace. In the following chapters, I consider the relationship between the silver fork novel and the popular marketplace by approaching each of these topics and considering their infl uence upon the development of the genre and their broader implications for fi ction in general. Moreover, because one defi ning feature of silver fork novels was their subject matter and their depiction of high life, I consider how the novels constructed the fashionable world within their pages and how such content was profi table for both writers and publishers.
In their accounts of the fashionable world, silver fork novelists engaged questions about the relationship between literature – specifi cally novels – and the world in which it was circulated and read. In Realism, Ethics, and Secular-ism (2008), George Levine acknowledges the problematic nature of the term ‘realism’, noting that it seems ‘almost absurd to try to talk about it as though it were possible to defi ne it adequately’.19 Nonetheless, for the Victorian writers in Levine’s study, the realist endeavour was linked to epistemology and ethics and a desire ‘to reach beyond words to describe the way things are’.20 For silver fork novelists, the motivation to represent the ‘way things are’ in the lives of the Regency fashionables was shaped by the expectations of readers as well as the literary marketplace in which the novels were produced – both of which had a tenuous relationship to the world of fashion as simultaneously attractive and repellent. Th e novelists, then, worked to construct a version of fashionable soci-ety that would attract both middle-class readers and members of the ton. Th is
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endeavour involved claiming a degree of verisimilitude for the silver fork novel and its depictions of high life and was accomplished through authorial claims to accuracy within the pages of and prefaces to their texts that were bolstered by the work of publishers and reviewers and reinforced by communities of readers.
Considerations of the literary marketplace also draw on economic criticism, which Paul Delany, in Literature, Money, and the Market (2002), identifi es as an approach that views ‘the author as one whose drive for economic self-assertion has to engage with the external constraints of the literary marketplace’.21 Delany discusses the concept of ‘prestige culture’, explaining,
Th e entire domain of English high culture can be seen as a patination that is gradually laid down on the surface of possessions … Culture presented itself as a way of refi n-ing, spiritualizing, even transcending the economic base of society; yet culture also became steadily more implicated with money power, and drawn more comprehen-sively into the marketplace.22
Culture, then, becomes something purchasable and marked by the acquisition of material objects. Silver fork novels participate in this economically-driven construction of culture because the novels position themselves as keys to tran-scending class diff erences, yet they remain caught up within the market forces and struggles for social power that enforced those class diff erences.
Th e constraints of the literary marketplace, as noted above, vary, yet they all require authors to be aware that literature exists in the public sphere and must reach beyond the critics and the salons to court a more general readership. Th is situation was particularly important for silver fork authors who were writing for the largest reading public Britain had ever seen and were aware of the need to cater to the tastes and expectations of their readers. As Lee Erickson explains in his study of publishing practices, ‘English publishing in the early nineteenth century expanded at an even greater rate than it had in the eighteenth century and followed the rise in the general standard of living and the growth of the economy’.23 Th e reading public was not only growing, it was also becoming more diverse, particularly with regard to class and education. Th us, space opened up for the emergence of new subgenres of literature and various forms of delivery, such as the serialization of novels or production of cheap ‘railway editions’ of texts – novels, or parts of novels, printed on fl imsy, inexpensive paper that rail-way riders could read to pass the time as they travelled and then easily discard. At the same time, however, the new popular marketplace was comprised of readers whose ideas of taste were as varied as their backgrounds, and their preferences were aligned with class. As Pierre Bourdieu explains in Distinction (1984), ‘of all the objects off ered for consumers’ choice, there are none more classifying than legitimate works of art, which, while distinctive in general, enable the produc-tion of distinctions ad infi nitum by playing on divisions and sub-divisions into
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8 Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel
genres, periods, styles and authors’.24 Th e various subgenres of the novel that emerged during the nineteenth century were oft en associated with and marketed to distinct classes, and silver fork novels took advantage of such class distinc-tions by constructing social relations within their texts to reaffi rm and protect the position of the ton, while simultaneously off ering middle-class readers access to that world. Socially ambitious middle-class readers could treat the novels as ‘conduct books’ that educated them on the practices of the fashionable elite, yet the texts ultimately reinforced traditional class hierarchies by declining to depict such transgressive events as cross-class marriages or the complete integration of the fashionable world by middle-class parvenus.
Widespread ideas about reading and publishing practices changed in the early nineteenth century as the class profi le of the popular marketplace evolved. As one reviewer noted in an 1812 account of George Crabbe’s Life and Works,
In this country there are probably not less than two hundred thousand persons who read for amusement or instruction among the middling classes of society. In the higher classes there are not so many as twenty thousand. It is easy to see therefore which a poet should choose to please for his own glory and emolument, and which he should wish to delight and amend out of mere philanthropy. Th e fact too, we believe, is, that a great part of the larger body are to the full as well educated and as high-minded as the smaller; and, though their taste may not be so correct and fastidious, we are persuaded that their sensibility is greater.25
Th is review calls attention to changes in readership and the expanding role of middle-class readers in providing an audience for literature and contributing to the market demand for books – a situation that underscores why middle-class readership was signifi cant for silver fork novelists, many of whom were writ-ing for profi t. For the silver fork novel, as discussed in Chapter 3, the audience consisted of members of both the middle and upper classes. Th ese groups had distinct motivations for reading and, moreover, needed to be educated into their roles as readers of fashionable fi ction – education that silver fork novelists undertook within their texts.
Reading Fashion In his study of readership, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (1982), Hans Jauss explains the complex relationship among authors, publishers and the reading pub-lic: ‘literature and art only obtain a history that has the character of a process when the succession of works is mediated not only through the producing subject but also through the consuming subject – through the interaction of author and pub-lic’.26 For silver fork novels, which were aimed at and courted a particular audience through their presence on booksellers’ shelves, in the pages of periodicals and on the gossiping lips of London fashionables, ‘the interaction of author and public’ is
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particularly relevant. Moreover, this interaction was reciprocal because the silver fork novel and the version of the fashionable world constructed within its pages both shaped and were shaped by the tastes of readers and critics.
Th e nineteenth century was marked by important changes in readership with regard to the literary marketplace, literacy rates and the distribution of texts, as Richard Altick documents in his extensive study Th e English Common Reader (1957). Altick explains, ‘the class structure and the occupational and geographical distribution of the people underwent alterations which aff ected the availability of reading matter, educational opportunities, the conditions under which reading could be done, and the popular attitude toward print’.27 And, in Th e Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004), William St Clair builds on Altick’s work, investigating the dynamics among writers, publishers and readers that determined the nature and scope of the literary marketplace in the early nineteenth century. Indeed, as St Clair asserts, the importance of readership cannot be underestimated because ‘Reading helped to shape mentali-ties and to determine the fate of the nation’.28 St Clair also critiques those critical studies that do not consider readers, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s work in Th e Field of Cultural Production (1993) to explain that ‘All exclusively text-based approaches, because they either ignore readers altogether, or they derive their readers from the texts, are caught in a closed system’.29 Here, following Bourdieu and St Clair, I work with dual constructions of readership – the way in which texts construct and respond to readers and the way in which readers construct and respond to texts – as well as the relationship among texts, readers and the literary marketplace, through the parallel study of the novels, reviews, articles, letters and relevant material and cultural contexts.
In Th e Making of English Reading Audiences 1790–1832 (1987), Jon P. Klancher studies the sociology of readership and the relationship between the group and the individual and explains, ‘Audiences are not simply aggregates of readers. Th ey are complicated social and textual formations; they have interpretive tendencies and ideological contours.’30 Klancher’s work helps to situate silver fork novels within early nineteenth-century society – particularly with regard to class relationships. Fashionable novels were embedded within early nineteenth-century class systems and, like many of their readers, express a multifaceted view of class politics and the role of the individual within social systems, tentatively acknowl-edging changing class hierarchies yet refusing to fully endorse those changes.
Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel is also heavily informed by theories of fash-ion, which help to establish how fashion was – for those living in and writing about Regency society – part of an organizing social system rather than the by-product of one. For example, Francis Russell Hart writes about fashion and social change in ‘Th e Regency Novel of Fashion’, explaining,
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10 Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel
Fashion is a code of social styles and behaviors, characterized by rapid change, associ-ated with historic periods when new social alternatives are numerous and available and when traditional modes of social control – custom, name, title, even wealth – have lost their credibility. Its spectacular character requires public visibility on a large scale. Its ephemerality makes for hectic instability. Its availability encourages a democratic com-petitiveness, which in turn generates a reactionary mystique of exclusiveness.31
Such attention to the fashion system as a context for the study of literature fore-grounds processes and movement and provides a framework in which to situate the evolution of fi ction during this period. Moreover, fashion theory attends to the function of signifi ers of fashion (material and otherwise) as markers of class and the development of a sign system in which silver fork novels were certainly complicit as they mystifi ed the world of ton through their depictions of fash-ionable culture. Such fashionable signifi ers also off ered opportunities for the reinstatement of social control within a context where new social alternatives – particularly with regard to gender and class – were emerging.
‘Fashion and literature in fact utilize a common technique whose end is seemingly to transform an object into language: it is description’, explains Roland Barthes in Th e Fashion System (1983).32 Th is technique is common in the silver fork novel where authors oft en cast themselves as experts on the world of ton and devote entire chapters to the description of preparations for a ball or the details of a dinner. As a result, then, silver fork novels become crammed with objects, giving them a distinctly materialist character. Th is interplay between fashion and literature, Barthes argues, has implications for textual structure as well because ‘through the language which henceforth takes charge of it, Fashion becomes narrative’.33 As the works discussed here demonstrate, silver fork novels devel-oped a unique narrative mode to facilitate their depiction of the fashionable world and to accommodate the material presence of fashionable objects within their pages. Th at narrative mode also involved the careful construction of the fashionable world as a distinct sphere, separate from the rest of early nineteenth-century society – a manoeuvre that enabled silver fork novelists to further appeal to middle-class readers seeking to move into that world while also reassuring the ton of their exclusive position.
Th is interplay between fashion and literature is informed, in part, by the role of fashion as an organizing system. Fashion is constantly in fl ux, and through such movement, it off ers participants a way of viewing the ‘here and now’ of their own social and cultural moment. Writing in 1901, George Simmel explains,
Fashion always occupies the dividing-line between the past and the future, and conse-quently conveys a stronger feeling of the present, at least while it is at its height, than most other phenomena … Few phenomena of social life possess such a pointed curve of consciousness as does fashion.34
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As such, fashion becomes a way of organizing the world, and it is a system of organization that is both uniquely invested in hierarchies and constantly remak-ing itself. ‘Th e fashion system is always on the move, aft er all’, writes John Potvin, ‘never satisfi ed to stand still, always seeking out the new, that which is exciting and desirable’.35 Existence within this world, then, requires ways of determining and understanding current fashions while also anticipating what is to come. In such a situation, value is assigned to material and defi nable signifi ers of fashion – cultural objects and/or behaviours that help to organize the world. Indeed, as Herbert Blumer writes in ‘Fashion Movements’ (1939),
While fashion is thought of in relation to clothing, it is important to realize that it covers a much wider domain. It is to be found in manners, the arts, literature, and philosophy, and may even reach into certain areas of science … Its operation requires a class society, for in its essential character it does not occur either in a homogenous society like a primitive group, nor in a caste society.36
Blumer notes that fashion systems are predicated upon class systems, and the juxtaposition of traditional class hierarchies, an emerging middle class and the doctrine of exclusivism during the Regency makes this period particularly rich for a discussion of fashion. Silver fork novels, which served the dual purpose of acting as fashionable signifi ers and depicting fashionable signifi ers in their pages, required both authors and readers to learn to navigate the rapidly-changing class structures of the early nineteenth century. Th e idea of fashion as an organizing sys-tem, then, helps to frame the study of a genre that both critiques the fashionable world in its satirical portraits of the ton and remains dependent upon its patron-age. Like other elements of fashion, the silver fork novel is a work in progress; that is, it is in a constant state of coming into being, remaking itself and falling out of fashion, while also negotiating a literary marketplace that was just beginning to appreciate and understand the function, potential and profi tability of fi ction.
In his 1836 review of multiple fashionable novels, including Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham, Gore’s Mrs. Armytage and Blessington’s Th e Two Friends, for the British and Foreign Review, William Wallace writes,
It was this paltry compound of curiosity and pretension that produced the inunda-tion of fashionable novels, so called, which over-ran its bounds – then receded from the high-water mark, – and of the return of which there are some signs at this season. Th e abuse is, however, we repeat, chargeable upon the public taste. Stuff ed fi gures, clad in counterfeit fi nery, pretending to represent dukes, dandies, and the intervening gradations – pasteboard interiors rendered imposing by the nomenclature of uphol-stery; fl imsy or vapid dialogue, made up of certain cant terms relating to Tattersall’s, the opera, Crockford’s, and Almack’s, – and of names and scraps from the French art of cookery, with a copious sprinkling of the most barbarous Anglo-French phrases – all these will continue to furnish forth novels of high life, in three volumes, whilst there are people ignorant and foolish enough to be gratifi ed, or duped by them.37
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12 Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel
Wallace’s article demonstrates how silver fork novels create the fashionable world through the depiction of fashionable locales, use of French and illustra-tion of aristocratic pursuits. Indeed, such class markers were necessary because, increasingly, members of the middle class were gaining access to the material trappings of high society, and the fashionables were forced to redefi ne and pro-tect their own status. Wallace also notes that the novels’ treatment of class and nationalism – sources of tension in the fashionable world and beyond – were defi ning features of the genre. Indeed, nineteenth-century constructions of class and nationalism are certainly important historical contexts for the fashionable novel, and throughout I draw on several useful studies of the politics and culture of the period, including J. V. Beckett’s Th e Aristocracy in England 1660–1914 (1986) and Richard Price’s British Society 1660–1880 (1999).38
Th e practice of ‘exclusivism’ – an attempt, on the part of the ton, to preserve their cultural leadership and social superiority and stem the tide of class mobil-ity that would come to defi ne the early decades of the nineteenth century – also emerged during this period. Early nineteenth-century class mobility, as Andrew Miles explains in Social Mobility in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century England (1999), refl ects the ‘structuring of society as a dynamic process of inter-action between individuals, social groups and institutions’, as opposed to a static hierarchy.39 Such class tensions, Erickson notes, also infl uenced the decisions of publishers who understood ‘the fi nancial importance of appealing to the fash-ionable taste in the publishing marketplace during the period’ and ‘made more money and assumed less risk by selling fashionable literature to the few who were well off than by catering to the undeveloped tastes of many who were newly literate’.40 Nonetheless, as silver fork novels exposed the inner workings of the ton to upwardly mobile middle-class readers, the middle-class readership grew and the fashionable elite continued to change the markers of fashion to preserve their unattainable exclusivity.
Th e above British and Foreign Review article also complains about the fash-ionable novelists’ use of French language and phrases. Th e rise of the silver fork novel came shortly aft er the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the novels were, therefore, situated within a culture that was intrigued by French fashions and simultaneously wary of cultural and political infl uences from across the Channel. As Gerald Newman notes in Th e Rise of English Nationalism (1987), in general the upper classes were most receptive to Continental infl uences, and ‘English importations of French culture reveal the selective infl uence of the cosmopoli-tan upper classes’.41 Moreover, as Michael Sadleir somewhat cynically observes, the tone of this historical moment was certainly worth capturing in fi ction: ‘the shrill ferment of a post-war and pre-revolutionary carnival pervade these other-wise worthless books and give them documentary value’.42 Beyond just lending the novels ‘documentary value’, however, the question of nationalism was engaged
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by many silver fork authors as part of their cultural commentary and construction of the fashionable world.
Fashionably Disappointed in Jane AustenDespite rumours to the contrary, the silver fork genre did not spring fully-formed from the head of publisher Henry Colburn, although he is credited with doing much to promote and establish the genre. Instead, silver fork novels exist fi rmly within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary traditions, drawing from the novel of manners and prefi guring Victorian fi ction. In Lister’s Granby, for exam-ple, Lady Harriet vexes fashionable dandy Mr Trebeck with her opinions on the literature of the day:
But do tell me your favorite novels. I hope you like nothing of Miss Edgeworth’s or Miss Austen’s. Th ey are full of common-place people, that one recognizes at once. You cannot think how I was disappointed in Northanger Abbey, and Castle Rack-rent, for the titles did really promise something. Have you a taste for romance? You have? I am glad of it. Do you like Melmoth? It is a harrowing book. Dear Mrs. Rad-cliff e’s were lovely things – but they are so old!43
Lady Harriet is, in many ways, Lister’s satire on the learned woman. Readers know that she attends intellectual gatherings and, during an upcoming scientifi c experiment, has ‘volunteered to be struck with lightning’.44 However, despite her ridiculous prattle, her commentary on fi ction does reveal something about the literary world of the day and the place of the fashionable novel within it. Although the heyday of the Gothic novel had ended by the 1820s, the genre was still popular and was perpetuated by works such as Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), which Lady Harriet praises. At the same time, the Gothic genre was also being satirized by writers such as Jane Austen who warns against the overstimulation of Gothic reading habits by depicting the trials of her imagi-native heroine Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey (1818). A number of silver fork novels do, nonetheless, borrow from the Gothic genre and trade on its popularity. For example, much of the third volume of Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham (1828) is taken up with the protagonist’s attempt to solve the murder of Sir John Tyrrell, and his Godolphin (1833) includes a mystical astronomer among its secondary characters. Letitia E. Landon’s Ethel Churchill (1837), too, has Gothic overtones as Henrietta performs alchemy in Sir John’s laboratory. Th us, while they may eschew the mouldering castles and picturesque landscapes of their Gothic forebears, many silver fork novels do employ plot devices such as mistaken or disguised identities, damsels in distress and compromised fortunes and virtues, which would certainly have resonated with fans of Ann Radcliff e and Matthew Lewis. More importantly, however, Lady Harriet’s characteriza-tion of Radcliff e’s Gothic works as ‘old’ serves as a self-refl exive statement on
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the very genre in which it appears. Th e silver fork novel and the world of fash-ion it depicts are ephemeral, ever-changing and obsessed with the new and the novel; thus, the dismissal of novels published only thirty years earlier as ‘old’, and by extension uninteresting and irrelevant, allows Lister to both refl ect on the ephemerality of his own genre – ephemerality that helps to account for the novels’ notable absence from much contemporary scholarship – and off er a fash-ionable perspective on history through the character of Lady Harriet.
Lady Harriet’s other objection to the novels of Austen and Edgeworth is that they are populated with common-place people. Th is, like her celebration of the Gothic, reveals Lady Harriet’s distaste for the everyday – the bleeding nuns and lecherous monks who populate Gothic novels were a rarity in much of Britain. However, her comment is also signifi cant with regard to the connection between silver fork novels and the novels of manners that preceded them. In writing about the ‘geopolitics’ of fashionable fi ction, Edward Copeland notes,
it is as if the immediate post-Austen authors of the 1820s and 1830s gather up Aus-ten’s characters in a box, take them to London, and drop them onto the London map of Westminster, Mayfair, and Marylebone to make their way up or down Regent Street as best they can.45
While the characters in silver fork novels may have a diff erent place in the world, with regard to their fashionable status and class, than most of Austen’s charac-ters, they are nonetheless similar in their ‘everydayness’. Th at is, they represent certain ‘types’, such as the debutante, the manoeuvring mother and the rake, that one might encounter in the fashionable world. Indeed, the professed likeness between fi ctional characters and their real-life counterparts was part of what readers sought in fashionable novels; they relished the opportunity to fi nd por-traits of notable fashionables and, thereby, convince themselves that they were reading accurate transcripts of high life.
Th e silver fork novel draws on its literary forebears, and, Lauren Gillingham notes, ‘integrates the narrative, historical, and heroic models that had been made available in the works of these predecessors with the novel of fashion’s concern with the mercuriality of contemporary society’.46 Of course, fashionable novels were not the fi rst to depict the social world in detail, but, as the following chap-ters will demonstrate, the unique dialogue among readers, reviewers and authors in the dynamic literary marketplace of the 1820s and 1830s, with particular regard to the treatment of the fashionable world, helped to defi ne the silver fork genre. One of the genre’s predecessors in depicting high society was certainly Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778), subtitled ‘a young lady’s entrance into the world’. For Evelina ‘the world’ is the world of fashion as seen during the London Season, and the fi rst half of Burney’s novel chronicles her eponymous heroine’s attendance at a catalogue of fashionable venues, including Vauxhall, Ranelagh
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and the Opera, in detail worthy of any silver fork novel. Th e plotline, too, in which a young, unsophisticated girl must learn to navigate social pitfalls and educate herself in the workings of society, appears in several fashionable novels, although it is not oft en the primary narrative thread as it is for Burney. Instead, silver fork novelists, such as Catherine Gore, frequently use this plot to establish a contrast between those within and those aspiring to fashionable society and enable authorial commentary on the pitfalls of fashionable ambition.
Another popular plotline for silver fork novelists also has its roots in the novels of manners: the manoeuvring mother plot. Of course, the most famous nineteenth-century manoeuvring mother is Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet who risks the health and reputation of her daughters in an attempt to fi nd husbands for them – an agenda that she pursues unabashedly over the course of Pride and Prejudice (1813). Given that so many silver fork novels include some form of a romance plot, it is not surprising that this fi gure makes an appearance in works such as Marianne Spencer Stanhope’s Almack’s (1826) and Charlotte Bury’s aptly titled Th e Manoeuvering Mother (1842). Indeed, this latter text appears to be a direct homage to Austen, as Bury follows Lady Wetheral’s attempts to play matchmaker for her fi ve daughters. Early in the novel, the reader learns of Lady Wetheral’s intentions when she announces the fate of her eldest daughter Anna Maria, who ‘will be out in fi ve years, and I have arranged that she shall marry Tom Pynset’.47 Th e man in question, Tom, later proposes to the third Wetheral daughter, Julia, whose rejection of him has echoes of Elizabeth Bennet rejecting the pompous parson Mr Collins; Julia states, ‘I am sorry you misunderstood my manner. Excuse me, but I never can like you in any light but that of a pleasant acquaintance, and I hope you will not renew the subject’.48 All of Lady Wetheral’s fi ve daughters are married by the end of the novel, yet the consequences for the mother’s manoeuvring are much more severe than those depicted in Austen’s novel. While the Bennet family is left with a slight social stigma from Lydia’s elopement with Wickham, the matter is rectifi ed and tempered by the excellent marriages of Elizabeth and Jane. In contrast, Lady Wetheral’s fourth daughter, Clara, dies from nervous stress aft er she is pressured into marriage with the abu-sive Sir Foster Kerrison, and the third Wetheral daughter Julia also suff ers an unhappy match, leaves her husband for another man, and eventually becomes an invalid. In Bury’s novel, only the youngest daughter Christobelle – who has been ignored by her mother and nurtured by her father due to her bookish tendencies – enters into a good marriage with a man of her choice, Sir John Spottiswoode. Th us, Bury gently comments on gender roles, family expectations and their infl uence upon an individual’s ability to achieve a ‘happy ending’.
In addition to providing plotlines that were both useful for silver fork novel-ists and familiar for their readers, novels of manners also established that daily social interactions – within or beyond high society – were a desirable subject for
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fi ction. While the silver fork novelists moved from Austen’s ‘3 or 4 Families in a Country Village’ to the broader scale of fashionable London, they nonetheless built on her depictions of everyday occasions, use of dialogue and pointed social commentary.49 Fashionable novelists were oft en criticized for creating characters that lack depth and roundness, existing, instead, as walking and talking embodi-ments of fashion, and this certainly becomes evident for contemporary readers in considering these works within the contexts of their literary predecessors. Th is diff erence may be due, in part, to the fashionable novelists’ attention to exter-nal versus internal events; that is, they focus on what a character says and does rather than what he or she thinks and feels. Jane Austen rarely provides more than a glancing physical description of her characters and their settings, prefer-ring, instead, to allow her readers to draw from their own imaginations and build on the few clues – such as Elizabeth Bennet’s ‘fi ne eyes’ – that she does give. In contrast, most silver fork novels are heavily invested in description – particularly of clothing and furnishings – which is important for establishing their authen-tic connection to and immersion within the world of fashion. Such description emphasizes show over substance, ultimately serving as a (perhaps unintentional) commentary on the superfi ciality of the fashionable world and demonstrating how both the characters and writers of silver fork novels were caught within it.
Another precursor of the silver fork novel was the fi ction of the Minerva Press. Associations with the Minerva Press, however, were oft en cast as negative, as one reviewer of C. D. Burdett’s English Fashionables Abroad (1827) demonstrated, ‘Speaking of this work as a mere novel, it is as very trash as Minerva in her degen-eracy ever brought forth’.50 Although this reviewer appreciates the scenes of life abroad, as an example of that much-contested genre, the novel, English Fashiona-bles Abroad is found wanting and thereby classed with the Minerva books. Indeed, as Dorothy Blakely explains in her comprehensive study of the Minerva Press, ‘So closely identifi ed with cheap fi ction was the famous publishing house in Leaden-hall Street that to nineteenth-century critics the name Minerva meant little more than an convenient epithet of contempt’.51 Similarly, the protagonist of Catherine Gore’s Castles in the Air (1847), Henry Wrottesley Powerscourt, opens the novel by describing how his reading practices, which included the works of the Minerva Press, have made him sadly unfi t for the realities of everyday life:
I was soon as deeply read in modern romance as the most literary of Brighton misses; not only Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliff e, but all the trash of the Minerva press. My notions of life were consequently of the wildest description … My impressions of social morality, moreover, were of the lowest order; and by the time I had added the contents of a country-town library to those of the Bond Street book-box, was not only satisfi ed that every young Lord was a rake – every old one a political jobber – every dowager a manoeuvrer intent on entrapping unwary youths into matrimony with her daughters – every attorney a pettifogger – and every guardian a rogue, but that my precocious insight into the villanies of the world had made a man of me before my time.52
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Here, Henry, like Austen’s Catherine Morland, serves as a warning to readers who derive their understanding of the world from fi ction and his situation dem-onstrates how such novels sometimes oversimplify the fashionable world in their construction of high society. Th e Minerva Press published many Gothic novels as well, and in her overview of proprietor William Lane’s list, Blakely attends to such works as Th e Children of the Abbey (1796) by Regina Maria Roche, not-ing that ‘A novel more typical of the general run of Minerva productions could hardly be suggested’, and describing how Roche’s heroine Amanda ‘is persecuted in the usual style of the popular love-intrigue; until aft er poverty, calumny, hec-tic fevers, and attempted seductions have assailed her in vain, she is married to the elegant Lord Mortimer’.53 Along with Gothic novels and novels of manners, Minerva Press works held the seeds of the silver fork formula in their attention to class and the function of the marriage plot.
Like Henry Colburn, who would become notorious in the 1820s and 1830s for his advertising and marketing strategies, Minerva Press founder William Lane also had interests in the periodical press, serving as proprietor of the Star and the Evening Advertiser from 1788 to 1792 – a position that he used to pro-mote his novels. Minerva Press books, however, like silver fork novels, were not noted for their posterity. Ann W. Engar explains, ‘As a whole, Minerva fi ction was throwaway literature – quickly written, read, and forgotten’.54 In operation from 1790 to 1820, the Minerva Press published books that were generally distributed through libraries – oft en libraries that were attached to Assembly Rooms, thereby targeting a fashionable clientele. In his bibliographic study of Minerva Press books, Jonathan Hill discusses how the books’ form refl ected their status within the circulating libraries and explains, ‘Th at Minerva novels of this period were invariably published in boards meant that they were retailed to circulating libraries ready-to-rent’.55 Th e books of the Minerva Press are certainly ripe for additional study, and as forerunners to the silver fork novel they played an important role in shaping a marketplace for popular fi ction. Moreover, their occasional mention within the texts and reviews of silver fork novels reveals a self-consciousness on the part of silver fork novels to distance their works from the negative reputation of the Minerva Press, even as they benefi ted from the Minerva tradition. Several decades later, Victorian novelists would take a similar stance with regard to silver fork novels.
Th e period of the silver fork novel’s birth and rise was certainly a period of change in the writing and publishing of novels and the composition of read-ing audiences, as Peter Garside explains, ‘During this period [1800–29] the understanding of what constitutes a novel tightened, production and marketing became increasingly professional, output of fi ction almost certainly overtook that of poetry, and the genre eventually gained new respectability’.56 It follows, then, that in their defence or self-conscious criticism of their genre, many silver
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fork authors and reviewers also considered broader issues of novel reading and writing. One reviewer, writing on Bulwer Lytton’s Devereux (1829), likens the change in the genre to a military conquest:
To say that novel writing, within the last few years, has changed its very nature, would give but a faint idea of what change has actually taken place. Th e novel has gone forth like a Roman conqueror, not only adding new regions to its domain, but oft en incor-porating with itself all the better institutes of the newly acquired country: it is the change not so much of alteration, as of acquisition.57
In addition to sparking important refl ections on the nature of fi ction, the silver fork novel also helped critics to articulate the development of a literary tradi-tion. Of Catherine Gore, one critic writes,
We consider Mrs. Gore to be one of the most elegant and unexceptionable of the female writers of the present day; her style is easy and graceful, the plot of her stories simple, and yet not careless, and the tendency of her works almost always excellent … In her fi ne appreciation of character, we are reminded of Miss Austen; the latter however was never careless – never gave evidence of writing in haste; her works are each in their way complete specimens of her style, and her characters almost always true to her own conceptions: this is praise which we cannot bestow on Mrs. Gore, in whose works there is great inequality.58
Although this writer fi nds Gore to be inferior to Austen in her mode of com-position, her works are nonetheless placed in dialogue with Austen’s, and this comparison is presented as edifying for the reader.
Despite such manoeuvres, however, the exclusion of silver fork fi ction from scholarly and historical conversations began nearly as soon as the novels’ popu-larity started to wane in the middle of the nineteenth century. One review of David Masson’s British Novelists and their Styles: Being a Critical Sketch of the History of British Prose Fiction (1859) skips from Scott to Dickens and Th ack-eray with only the brief comment: ‘Of Sir Bulwer Lytton’s historical novels we cannot say much’.59 And, Masson’s book itself hardly gives early nineteenth-cen-tury fi ction much more attention, following a lengthy discussion of Scott with a list of those writers who followed him in the 1820s and 1830s and off ering several categories for their work, one of which, ‘Th e Fashionable Novel’, receives only a passing mention as a form that ‘aims at describing life as it goes on in the aristocratic portions of London society and in the portions immediately con-nected with these’ – an early example of the critical tendency to locate the novels as sociological curiosities rather than literary works.60 Twentieth- and twenty-fi rst-century criticism of the history of the novel has hardly been kinder to the silver fork genre. Ian Watt’s seminal study Th e Rise of the Novel (1957) focuses on the eighteenth century, and in a short ‘Note’ at the end of the book, identifi es only Jane Austen and the French Realists as the inheritors of the novel form in
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the early decades of the nineteenth century. In addition, the recent Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (2008) includes one reference to silver fork novels, describing them as ‘lost in the no-man’s land between Roman-tic and Victorian Studies’ – a description that accurately represents their critical neglect.61 Likewise, the Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (2001) mentions silver fork novels only twice, both times in passing references. Th e juxtaposition of these two studies neatly refl ects how using periodization as a framework for critical study can do a disservice to works that do not fi t within familiar categories of date or genre.
In ‘Th e Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism’, Étienne Balibar calls attention to the problems of periodization, while also acknowledging its useful-ness for historians:
It [periodization] is the concept of discontinuity in continuity, the concept which fragments the line of time, thereby fi nding the possibility of understanding histori-cal phenomena in the framework of an autonomous totality … Th us the concept of periodization gives theoretical form to a problem which historians have never been able to evade in their practice, but without itself providing them with a theoretical solution, a precise theoretical methodology.62
Reconsidering the silver fork novel certainly cannot off er a comprehensive solu-tion to the problems of periodization that plague nineteenth-century studies. However, a reciprocal relationship emerges: attention to periodization can help to situate both the silver fork novel and criticism on the genre, likewise, studying the silver fork novel off ers a new point of entry into nineteenth-century studies that encourages a reimagining of periodization practices. With its heyday rang-ing from about 1825 to 1845, the silver fork novel cuts across traditional literary period boundaries, straddling the Romantic and the Victorian. Yet, neither of these periods can properly contain the genre. Th e fashionable novel is certainly in dialogue with both Romanticism – particularly the fashionable celebrity culture of writers such as Lord Byron, who is a favourite of many fashionable readers and writers and even appears as a character in Godolphin – and Victo-rianism – in its exploration of the social consciousness of the novel. However, the silver fork novel itself is neither Romantic nor Victorian; it is a transitional genre with ties to a variety of other subgenres, including the novel of manners, Gothic novel and historical novel. Instead of further carving up the nineteenth century and its literature, however, reinserting the silver fork novel into liter-ary history can help to break down some of the artifi cial boundaries established by periodization by emphasizing the continual development of the novel as a genre. Revisiting the silver fork novel opens up points of entry into the study of nineteenth-century fi ction, and the novel in general, that are not based primarily on chronology or periodization but rather on social and cultural factors, such as
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the popular marketplace, construction of a reading public and the confl uence of the literary and material world.
I would not argue that the study of silver fork novels should replace the study of other works, nor am I naïve enough to suggest that they can always be incor-porated into already-overstuff ed course syllabi. However, in both scholarship and teaching, we can acknowledge the historical importance of these novels and the work that they did with regard to the development and evolution of both the literary marketplace and the genre of the novel itself. One cannot be sustained on a diet of fashionable parties and shopping alone, but fi ctional accounts of such pursuits are nonetheless both a pleasant and an important addition to the literary and historical record.
A Note on Editions
While the dearth of contemporary criticism may not deter scholars and students from working with silver fork novels, the dearth of available texts can have quite a diff erent eff ect. Currently, most silver fork novels are available only in early (usually fi rst) editions. Silver fork novels were popular, but that popularity was fl eeting; most novels did not go beyond a second or third edition, and if they did, the subsequent editions were usually printed within a year or two of the original publication. Some of the more popular novels and those whose authors went on to achieve literary or political success, such as Disraeli’s Vivian Grey and Bulwer Lytton’s Pelham, were sporadically reprinted during the Victorian period and later appeared in collected editions of their authors’ works that are accessible in many libraries. Richard Bentley also reprinted a handful of novels by writers including Catherine Gore and Frances Trollope in his ‘Standard Novels’ series through the middle of the nineteenth century. Most silver fork novels enjoyed a brief period of popularity, however, and then disappeared from the literary scene, leaving scholars to ferret them out in archives, special collections and the occasional used book store.
In 2005, Pickering & Chatto published Silver Fork Novels 1826–1841, edited by Harriet Devine Jump. Th is six-volume set includes Lister’s Granby, L. E. L.’s Romance and Reality (1831), Bulwer Lytton’s Godolphin, Blessington’s Victims of Society (1837), Rosina Bulwer Lytton’s Cheveley (1839) and Gore’s Cecil (1841). Each text includes extensive notes and an introduction that con-textualize the novel for readers unfamiliar with the genre and the period and also work to advance the scholarship on fashionable fi ction. Th ese texts – which I refer to throughout as the ‘scholarly editions’ – are quite useful for researchers, and although they are primarily intended for library purchase, the availability of critical editions of even a limited number of novels certainly works to promote scholarship on the genre.
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Other options for scholars interested in silver fork novels include print-on-demand publishers and Google Books. Th e former print and bind editions of the novels that are usually direct facsimiles of nineteenth-century editions. For example, Elibron Brooks off ers a reprint of Richard Bentley’s 1850 edition of Catherine Gore’s Th e Hamiltons (originally published in 1834), and Kessinger Publishing’s edition of Gore’s Cecil also comes from Bentley (1845, originally 1841). Th e quality of such editions varies greatly, and the publishers include dis-claimers to this eff ect within their texts. Th e copy of Cecil that I received from Kessinger is preceded by a Printing Statement that explains, ‘Due to the very old age and scarcity of this book, many of the pages may be hard to read due to the blurring of the original text, possible missing pages, missing text, dark backgrounds and other issues beyond our control’.63 Indeed, my copy has all of these problems. However, other texts that I have received from such publishers are perfectly fi ne. Given the scarcity of these texts and the diffi culty of access-ing them, print-on-demand editions, which are oft en available through online booksellers, may be the most practical for many scholars who, nonetheless, must remain aware of the shortcomings of these texts. For those researchers inclined to working with electronic texts, Google Books off ers a wide range of fashiona-ble novels. As with any electronic texts, these, too, vary in quality and oft en only one volume of a three-volume work may be available. Th e number of silver fork novels accessible online in full-text form is still small compared to the number that was published during the early decades of the nineteenth century; nonethe-less, Google Books can be particularly useful for bibliographic scholarship, as it sometimes includes multiple editions of a text and can be used in conjunction with other forms of the works.
I mention the issue of availability of texts not to highlight the diffi culty of doing research in this fi eld, but rather to call attention to the need for more scholarship that, in turn, should facilitate the production of new editions – work that the editors at Pickering & Chatto have already begun. For the pur-poses of this study, I use a combination of the abovementioned editions – full details of which appear in the notes and bibliography and are mentioned in the chapters where relevant.
In the following chapters, I bring together silver fork novels, primary materi-als and critical and theoretical sources to consider the fashioning of the genre. My goal here is not to provide a comprehensive study of a small selection of nov-els, but, instead, to sample as wide a range as possible to establish the extent and potential of the fashionable novel and demonstrate its relevance for and connec-tion to myriad other literary works, social phenomena and cultural concerns.
Chapter 1 introduces the ton and considers the relationship between the silver fork novel and the world of fashion by looking at the authorial self-fash-ioning that enabled writers to position themselves as authorities on high society.
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Th is chapter also looks at how the novels commented on class and gender through their depiction of specifi c Regency institutions such as the fashionable club Almack’s, Carlton House and the fi gure of the Dandy. In addition, the chapter also explores the infl uence of the London Season on the content and form of the silver fork novel.
One common critique of the silver fork novel was that the genre was for-mulaic and, thus, easily produced by any hack writer who might put pen to paper. Chapter 2 uses this formula as a starting place from which to undertake an analysis of the generic features of the silver fork novel and its place within the literary marketplace of the early nineteenth century. Th is chapter incorpo-rates a number of (in)famous critiques of the fashionable novel by writers such as Th omas Carlyle, George Eliot and W. M. Th ackeray to demonstrate how the genre was viewed during the nineteenth century and how those critiques have infl uenced the current state of criticism on the silver fork novel. Employing the idea of ‘fashion’ as ‘to make’, this chapter also includes an analysis of relevant nineteenth-century reviews and critical articles to demonstrate how certain features of fashionable fi ction emerged from dialogues between authors and reviewers, thereby resulting in a dynamic and self-conscious genre.
In Chapter 3, I consider the role of silver fork readers and the way in which silver fork novelists professed to educate those readers who aspired to high society. Th is chapter explores the relationship between readers and the popular market-place, off ering a context for the discussions of the silver fork novel and the world of fashion in which it was situated. Chapter 4 addresses one of the most distin-guishing features of the fashionable world: exclusivity. Th is chapter theorizes the ‘fashion system’, looking at how exclusive policies and practices enabled Regency fashionables to exert a degree of control in a rapidly-changing social landscape. Silver fork novelists built on this exclusivity, developing what I term ‘exclusive nar-ration’ as a way of making their texts complicit in the exclusivity they represent.
Th e commercialism and publishing practices surrounding silver fork novels are the subject of Chapter 5. Here, ‘fashion’ is used in the sense of popularity and trends, as I examine how the novels were advertised and marketed as well as how the material world of high society was incorporated into the novels in a form of early nineteenth-century ‘product placement’. Th is chapter also dis-cusses the career of publisher Henry Colburn who was the most prolifi c and also most problematic publisher of fashionable novels, known for using marketing techniques that were seen as unscrupulous by some and brilliant by others. Con-sidering the fashionable novel in this context demonstrates an important link in the transformation of the novel into a commodity item. Th e concluding chapter places the silver fork novel in the larger continuum of nineteenth-century Brit-ish fi ction and looks at how the legacy of the silver fork novel infl uenced a range of writers that followed it, including many of the major Victorian novelists.
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Why Now?
I began by asking the questions: why silver fork? Why now? As I hope I have begun to show, the silver fork genre is both understudied and rich in cultural and criti-cal signifi cance. While the availability of the novels may pose a challenge, changes in the way in which scholars interact with texts have been fortuitous for those interested in such limited-access genres. Th e question of timing remains, however, and I would like to off er a two-part answer: both cultural and literary. Th e silver fork novel is an apt subject to consider within the current state of literary studies. With regard to nineteenth-century studies, in particular, the genre bridges the tra-ditional categories of ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, and if we see the division of the nineteenth century as a product of early twentieth-century scholarship rather than an accurate representation of the spirit of the age, authors and texts that refuse to fi t neatly into one category or another can continue to be reconsidered and appre-ciated for their ability to bridge gaps in history and in scholarship.
More broadly, the silver fork novel is also adaptable to a variety of modes of literary and historical study. Th e prevalence of women writers publishing in this genre, the commercial nature of the texts and their construction of early nine-teenth-century class structures certainly beg analysis that is rooted in Feminism and/or Marxism. However, the importance of the novel as a commodity object and its social and cultural functions are also relevant for the fi elds of book history and publishing history as well as the rich and emerging fi elds of material culture studies and marketplace studies. Just as periodization has become less rigid, so, too, have many theoretical approaches, as scholars blend diff erent perspectives, creating new frameworks that better accommodate the multivocality of their subjects. In addition, as academics face pressures to consistently articulate the relevance of our work, silver fork novels off er a point of connection to popular culture with regard to fashion and the infl uence of the popular marketplace. Th at is not, of course, to suggest that we need to cheapen or change the rigor of analysis and criticism but rather to suggest that the study of silver fork novels does facili-tate arguments for the embedding of literary study within contemporary culture. Silver fork novels may not share the status of other nineteenth-century works in terms of their aesthetic quality or lasting infl uence, yet they nonetheless have ‘value’, to follow Barbara Hernstein Smith’s defi nition, in their engagement with the literary, social and cultural moment of their production, and evolving trends in scholarship and the expansion of the literary canon have created a space within contemporary critical practices to accommodate these texts.
Indeed, with regard to the role of fashion and the appeal of such study for contemporary readers beyond academia, silver fork novels are also relevant because of the ways in which they have been recreated, to a degree, by popu-lar Regency Romance writers such as Georgette Heyer, Judith Lansdowne and
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24 Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel
Elizabeth Aston, among many others. Th ese writers take elements of the silver fork novel, such as the description of the details of fashionable life and depiction of the scandals and intrigues of the ton and translate them for contemporary audi-ences. Although very diff erent from silver fork novels in structure and form and oft en lacking their satirical and critical commentary, Regency Romance novels do share subject matter with their forebears. For example, in contemporary novels set among the Regency ton, a visit to the exclusive club Almack’s is de rigueur. Georgette Heyer (1902–74), one of the most popular of the Regency Romance novelists – Pamela Regis cites ‘A 1984 survey taken in Great Britain of the pub-lic libraries’, which reports ‘that between four and six copies of her novels were borrowed on any given day’ – includes the Lady Patronesses of Almack’s as char-acters in a number of her novels, which were published from 1921 to 1972.64 In Frederica (1965), Heyer gives a brief, but telling, description of the most socially powerful member of this group, Lady Jersey: ‘Lady Jersey was known, in certain circles, as Silence; but anyone who supposed that her fl ow of light, inconsequent chatter betokened an empty head much mistook the matter: she had a good deal of intelligence, and very little escaped her’.65 Th is character sketch reveals the dual nature of Lady Jersey’s character as both social butterfl y and social manager, which was central to her role at Almack’s and is equally important to her role within the novel. As the novel progresses, Heyer also calls attention to Lady Jersey’s role in the matchmaking endeavours that oft en played out at Almack’s. Speaking from the perspective of the disagreeable Lady Buxted, she writes: ‘No mother with a daughter to dispose of eligibly could aff ord to disdain the patronage of Lady Jersey, the acknowledged Queen of London’s most exclusive club, known to the irreverent as the Marriage Mart’.66 Lady Jersey’s infl uence at Almack’s translated into her infl uence over much of London society – manoeuvring mothers in particular – and, as the discussion of Almack’s in Chapter 1 demonstrates, such infl uence was a source of critical commentary for many silver fork novelists.
In addition to being a marriage market and arbiter of fashion, the exclusive club also set the standards for social behaviour. In ‘Scandalous’, by Teresa DesJar-dien, one of the stories in An Evening at Almack’s (1997), Lord Travers and Lady Esther are found in a compromising position: as a result of her unwelcome advances, her dress is accidentally set on fi re by his cigarette and then becomes transparent when doused with water to quench the fl ame. Th e gravity of the situation is compounded because it occurs during an evening at Almack’s and is witnessed by the company, including the Lady Patronesses. Lady Esther manip-ulates the situation to her advantage, using the impossible position to suggest that Lord Travers had broken off his engagement. As the story unfolds, how-ever, Travers and his fi ancée Clara are reconciled, and Lady Esther is banned from Almack’s in an amusingly dramatic scene: ‘A dismissal from the company at Almack’s, Clara knew, was for life, with no second chances. Lady Esther would
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Introduction 25
never pass through these rooms again.’67 Here, again, the role of Almack’s as a policing force within society is emphasized and enacted by the Lady Patronesses. Travers and Clara are then readmitted to Almack’s, which signifi es that they have been accepted by society. Because of its exclusivity and glamour, Almack’s is a particularly popular element of Regency Romance novels; moreover, it off ers contemporary readers a glimpse of the social dynamics and gender politics depicted in the silver fork novel.
Romance novels, as Janet Radway illustrated in her seminal work Reading the Romance (1984), have much to contribute to analyses of book production, read-ership and patriarchal constructions of women’s identities and desires. Widely read and distributed, romance novels accounted for more than half of the mass-market paperbacks sold in 2000, according to Pamela Regis, and their appeal and place within literary discussions has been of increasing interest to scholars.68 Indeed, the formulaic nature of Regency Romance novels is another element that they share with silver fork fi ction. Radway argues, ‘by carefully choosing stories that make them feel particularly happy, they can escape fi guratively into a fairy tale where a heroine’s similar needs are adequately met’.69 Romance nov-els are valued by their readers for escapism and neat resolutions; therefore, the struggle to overcome the challenges of society must feature as part of the central confl ict. Nonetheless, like silver fork novels, romance novels have faced much critical censure. One source of contestation, suggests Lydia Cushman Schurman in the introduction to Scorned Literature (2002), has concerned the novels’ sta-tus as elements of mass-marketed popular culture: ‘Since mass production also requires mass consumption, an awareness of audience invariably becomes part of the scorners’ rhetoric’.70 However, this mass circulation has also resulted in the spread of certain images of the Regency; for example, most contemporary readers who express a familiarity with fashionable Regency institutions are not scholars of the nineteenth century but rather fans of Georgette Heyer.
Th e Regency world depicted in romance novels and silver fork fi ction was characterized by the fashion system and its dynamic movement in which fash-ions trickle down through society. John Potvin characterizes this process in Th e Places and Spaces of Fashion (2009), writing, ‘Th e fashion system is always on the move, aft er all, never satisfi ed to stand still, always seeking out the new, that which is exciting and desirable’.71 While fashion has always been a part of culture in some form or another, in the twenty-fi rst century, due to technology and media, individual access is greater than ever. In addition, in contemporary culture, fashion is no longer of, it just is. Th at is, no longer does fashion have to be attached to another element of culture: fashions of music, fashions of dress; instead fashion itself has become the focus. Designers are not just making clothing, they are creating ‘fashion’, and, as such, are participating in a cultural
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26 Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel
phenomenon that extends far beyond the runway. Herbert Blumer articulates the power wielded by such ideas of fashion,
It seems quite clear that fashion, by providing an opportunity for the expression of dispositions and tastes, serves to make them defi nite and to channelize them and, consequently, to fi x and solidify them … In the long run fashion aids, in this manner, to construct a Zeitgeist or a common subjective life, and in doing so, helps to lay the foundation for a new social order.72
Th us, a closed system emerges – continually bringing in the new and turning out the old in the relentless pursuit of fashion.
Fashion is an organizing system that is constantly changing and articulated by an elite group that creates a sense of mystifi cation around itself and employs certain social institutions and practices to preserve that mystery. In the early nineteenth century, silver fork novels participated in this mystifi cation as fash-ion became a determining factor in the literary marketplace, and both novelists and publishers responded to this phenomenon with increased attention to the fashionable world as the subject of and the market for their books. Th e novel of fashion may have been a passing fad, but its impact continues to resonate throughout the literary marketplace.