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, Theodore 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 Bulwer 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 contribution to the short-lived, but nonetheless significant, 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 profitable 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, offering guidance for socially-aspirant members of the middle class who longed to peer behind the faade 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 marketplace of the early nineteenth century; however, I would like to consider first the critical and social implications of studying this genre and raise the questions: why silver fork? Why now?

Copyright

Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel

A Critical Situation
For over seventy years, Matthew Rosas The 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, Rosas text includes chapters on many of the most prolific silver fork novelists, such as Bulwer Lytton,3 Disraeli, Gore, Bury and Blessington, as well as publisher Henry Colburn. Part biography, part critical overview, Rosas 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 books subtitle suggests, Rosas attitude towards his subject matter often hovers between condescending and dismissive. The value of the silver fork novel, according to Rosa, lies primarily in its ability to contextualize Thackerays masterpiece. Indeed, Rosa closes his work on a nostalgic note, effectively reducing the entire silver fork genre to a few notable pages, concluding, Today, only he [Thackeray] remains, but countless leaves [from silver fork novels], some of them delicate and lovely, drifted 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: The quality of Lady Blessingtons 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 criticism 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 theoretical, historical, and empirical exploration has been lost to serious inquiry.6

Copyright

Smiths work offers 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. That 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 exclusivity 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 influence scholarship throughout much of the twentieth century.7 The novels did hold considerable value for nineteenth-century readers, however much of which was self-consciously cre-

Introduction

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 after Matthew Rosa, Michael Sadleir has also made significant contributions to the study of the silver fork novel. His extensive 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 offers 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 proportion of downright bad novels than any similar group, with the possible exception of the gothic Romances; but the flimsiest and gaudiest specimen bears inevitably the mark of the hectic period which produced it.8 The 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 profiting 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 fiction [Gothic novels and novels of sensibility] lay the output of upwards of fifteen 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 shortcomings of the genre yet also offering 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 fiction include Ellen Moerss The Dandy (1960), Francis Russel Harts The Regency Novel of Fashion (1981), Alison Adburghams Silver Fork Society (1983) and Elliot Engel and Margaret F. Kings The Victorian Novel Before Victoria (1984). Of these, most are primarily social histories, with only Engel and Kings work focusing mainly on literature. Engel and King include a short section on the silver fork novel, however, like many of their nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors, they are somewhat dismissive. For example, they assert, The fashionable novels of Williams 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 effectively 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.

Copyright

Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel

Copyright

Listers Granby (1826), Hart writes, The presence of such figures 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 find this to be the genres 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 Hughess Silver Fork Writers and Readers: Social Contexts of a Best Seller (1992) was one of the first articles to offer an analysis of the genre based on readership studies, arguing, The source of the silver fork novels undeniable popular appeal during the Reform Bill era seems to have been precisely its ability to accommodate the mixed motives of its largely middle-class readership.13 And, several other critics, including April Kendra, Tamara Wagner, Ellen Miller Casey and Muireann OCinneide, have taken feminist approaches to these texts, considering the ways in which they offered opportunities for the publication and professionalization 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 first-ever special issue of a journal Womens Writing dedicated to the silver fork novel. The issue includes articles on the novels use of parody, presence in the periodical press and relationship to other nineteenth-century works by writers such as Dickens and Thackeray. Much of this contemporary scholarship takes one of two approaches: situating the silver fork novel in relation to a broader historical or literary phenomenon or offering 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, historical contexts and close textual and theoretical analyses will help to establish a comprehensive body of criticism in this field. In her essay Gendering the Silver Fork: Catherine Gore and the Society Novel April Kendra establishes two subcategories of fashionable fiction: the dandy novel and the society novel, which we may consider, respectively, as male and female fashionable novels.15 She argues that the difference lies in the construction of the protagonist the dandy (male novels) or society itself (female novels) and the way in which the novels conflict is resolved. Kendra concludes her essay with a nod to future critical work, suggesting that her categories are a starting place, rather than a definitive framework, for the study of fashionable fiction: I expect that a greater examination of the fashionable novel will discover a number of subgenres not identified here, and that the dandy and society novels will occupy only two positions on a larger spectrum.16 Kendra provocatively anticipates possibilities beyond her own gender-based distinctions, and I would

Introduction

suggest that additional markers for categorizing silver fork novels and studying their impact on the early nineteenth-century literary marketplace might include authorial productivity (prolific 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 Kendras that work to synthesize the genre will doubtless continue to advance considerations of the silver fork novel in scholarly venues and beyond. In addition, bibliographic work on these texts is certainly needed particularly 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. Bassetts excellent database At the Circulating Library, which currently catalogues all three-volume novels published during the Victorian period (18371901) and is being constantly expanded to include additional works of fiction, through which I first 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 fiction and aims to make the study of the silver fork novel relevant for students and scholars of nineteenthcentury literature and culture. I approach the silver fork genre from multiple perspectives on fashion: fashion as in to fashion or to make studying the construction 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 fiction during this period. This framework allows me to provide a considerable overview of the genre and its commonalities as well as to account for some distinctions among the texts. Moreover, such an approach combines close textual analysis and intertextual study with a consideration of the broader cultural and social functions of the genre and fiction 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.

Copyright

Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel

Silver Fork Novels in the Popular Marketplace

In Romantic Encounters (2007), Melissa Frazier offers a useful definition of the literary marketplace in which she establishes the connection between the literary marketplace and the professionalization of authorship:
any assumptions of direct socioeconomic cause and literary effect deflect attention from the fact that the realities of the literary marketplace are very difficult to determine. The 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 sufficiently so that writers are enabled to turn for financial 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

Copyright

Frazier acknowledges that the literary marketplace is a contemporary historical and critical construction, the exact nature of which can be quite difficult to determine. However, she also mentions several components of the literary marketplace, such as the role of readers, production of texts and professionalization of authorship that offer 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 influence upon the development of the genre and their broader implications for fiction in general. Moreover, because one defining 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 profitable for both writers and publishers. In their accounts of the fashionable world, silver fork novelists engaged questions about the relationship between literature specifically novels and the world in which it was circulated and read. In Realism, Ethics, and Secularism (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 define it adequately.19 Nonetheless, for the Victorian writers in Levines 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. The novelists, then, worked to construct a version of fashionable society that would attract both middle-class readers and members of the ton. This

Introduction

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), identifies 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,
The 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 refining, spiritualizing, even transcending the economic base of society; yet culture also became steadily more implicated with money power, and drawn more comprehensively 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 transcending class differences, yet they remain caught up within the market forces and struggles for social power that enforced those class differences. The 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. This 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 The reading public was not only growing, it was also becoming more diverse, particularly with regard to class and education. Thus, 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 flimsy, inexpensive paper that railway 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 offered for consumers choice, there are none more classifying than legitimate works of art, which, while distinctive in general, enable the production of distinctions ad infinitum by playing on divisions and sub-divisions into

Copyright

Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel

genres, periods, styles and authors.24 The various subgenres of the novel that emerged during the nineteenth century were often associated with and marketed to distinct classes, and silver fork novels took advantage of such class distinctions by constructing social relations within their texts to reaffirm and protect the position of the ton, while simultaneously offering 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 profile of the popular marketplace evolved. As one reviewer noted in an 1812 account of George Crabbes 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. The 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

Copyright
Reading Fashion

This 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 significant for silver fork novelists, many of whom were writing for profit. For the silver fork novel, as discussed in Chapter 3, the audience consisted of members of both the middle and upper classes. These groups had distinct motivations for reading and, moreover, needed to be educated into their roles as readers of fashionable fiction education that silver fork novelists undertook within their texts.

In his study of readership, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (1982), Hans Jauss explains the complex relationship among authors, publishers and the reading public: 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 public.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

Introduction

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. The 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 The English Common Reader (1957). Altick explains, the class structure and the occupational and geographical distribution of the people underwent alterations which affected the availability of reading matter, educational opportunities, the conditions under which reading could be done, and the popular attitude toward print.27 And, in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (2004), William St Clair builds on Alticks 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 mentalities and to determine the fate of the nation.28 St Clair also critiques those critical studies that do not consider readers, drawing on Pierre Bourdieus work in The 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 The Making of English Reading Audiences 17901832 (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. They are complicated social and textual formations; they have interpretive tendencies and ideological contours.30 Klanchers 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 acknowledging changing class hierarchies yet refusing to fully endorse those changes. Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel is also heavily informed by theories of fashion, 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 The Regency Novel of Fashion, explaining,

Copyright

10

Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel Fashion is a code of social styles and behaviors, characterized by rapid change, associated 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 competitiveness, which in turn generates a reactionary mystique of exclusiveness.31

Copyright

Such attention to the fashion system as a context for the study of literature foregrounds processes and movement and provides a framework in which to situate the evolution of fiction during this period. Moreover, fashion theory attends to the function of signifiers 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 mystified the world of ton through their depictions of fashionable culture. Such fashionable signifiers also offered 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 The Fashion System (1983).32 This technique is common in the silver fork novel where authors often 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. This 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 developed a unique narrative mode to facilitate their depiction of the fashionable world and to accommodate the material presence of fashionable objects within their pages. That narrative mode also involved the careful construction of the fashionable world as a distinct sphere, separate from the rest of early nineteenthcentury 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. This interplay between fashion and literature is informed, in part, by the role of fashion as an organizing system. Fashion is constantly in flux, and through such movement, it offers 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 consequently 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

Introduction

11

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 remaking itself. The fashion system is always on the move, after all, writes John Potvin, never satisfied 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 definable signifiers 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 signifiers and depicting fashionable signifiers in their pages, required both authors and readers to learn to navigate the rapidly-changing class structures of the early nineteenth century. The idea of fashion as an organizing system, 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 patronage. 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 profitability of fiction. In his 1836 review of multiple fashionable novels, including Bulwer Lyttons Pelham, Gores Mrs. Armytage and Blessingtons The Two Friends, for the British and Foreign Review, William Wallace writes,
It was this paltry compound of curiosity and pretension that produced the inundation 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. The abuse is, however, we repeat, chargeable upon the public taste. Stuffed figures, clad in counterfeit finery, pretending to represent dukes, dandies, and the intervening gradations pasteboard interiors rendered imposing by the nomenclature of upholstery; flimsy or vapid dialogue, made up of certain cant terms relating to Tattersalls, the opera, Crockfords, and Almacks, 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 gratified, or duped by them.37

Copyright

12

Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel

Copyright

Wallaces article demonstrates how silver fork novels create the fashionable world through the depiction of fashionable locales, use of French and illustration 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 redefine and protect their own status. Wallace also notes that the novels treatment of class and nationalism sources of tension in the fashionable world and beyond were defining 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. Becketts The Aristocracy in England 16601914 (1986) and Richard Prices British Society 16601880 (1999).38 The 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 mobility that would come to define 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), reflects the structuring of society as a dynamic process of interaction between individuals, social groups and institutions, as opposed to a static hierarchy.39 Such class tensions, Erickson notes, also influenced the decisions of publishers who understood the financial importance of appealing to the fashionable 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. The above British and Foreign Review article also complains about the fashionable novelists use of French language and phrases. The rise of the silver fork novel came shortly after 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 influences from across the Channel. As Gerald Newman notes in The Rise of English Nationalism (1987), in general the upper classes were most receptive to Continental influences, and English importations of French culture reveal the selective influence of the cosmopolitan upper classes.41 Moreover, as Michael Sadleir somewhat cynically observes, the tone of this historical moment was certainly worth capturing in fiction: the shrill ferment of a post-war and pre-revolutionary carnival pervade these otherwise worthless books and give them documentary value.42 Beyond just lending the novels documentary value, however, the question of nationalism was engaged

Introduction

13

by many silver fork authors as part of their cultural commentary and construction of the fashionable world.

Fashionably Disappointed in Jane Austen

Despite 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 firmly within eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary traditions, drawing from the novel of manners and prefiguring Victorian fiction. In Listers Granby, for example, 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 Edgeworths or Miss Austens. They are full of common-place people, that one recognizes at once. You cannot think how I was disappointed in Northanger Abbey, and Castle Rackrent, 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. Radcliffes were lovely things but they are so old!43

Lady Harriet is, in many ways, Listers satire on the learned woman. Readers know that she attends intellectual gatherings and, during an upcoming scientific experiment, has volunteered to be struck with lightning.44 However, despite her ridiculous prattle, her commentary on fiction 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 Maturins 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 imaginative 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 Lyttons Pelham (1828) is taken up with the protagonists attempt to solve the murder of Sir John Tyrrell, and his Godolphin (1833) includes a mystical astronomer among its secondary characters. Letitia E. Landons Ethel Churchill (1837), too, has Gothic overtones as Henrietta performs alchemy in Sir Johns laboratory. Thus, 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 Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. More importantly, however, Lady Harriets characterization of Radcliffes Gothic works as old serves as a self-reflexive statement on

Copyright

14

Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel

the very genre in which it appears. The silver fork novel and the world of fashion 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 reflect on the ephemerality of his own genre ephemerality that helps to account for the novels notable absence from much contemporary scholarship and offer a fashionable perspective on history through the character of Lady Harriet. Lady Harriets other objection to the novels of Austen and Edgeworth is that they are populated with common-place people. This, like her celebration of the Gothic, reveals Lady Harriets 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 significant with regard to the connection between silver fork novels and the novels of manners that preceded them. In writing about the geopolitics of fashionable fiction, Edward Copeland notes,
it is as if the immediate post-Austen authors of the 1820s and 1830s gather up Austens 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

Copyright

While the characters in silver fork novels may have a different place in the world, with regard to their fashionable status and class, than most of Austens characters, they are nonetheless similar in their everydayness. That 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 fictional characters and their real-life counterparts was part of what readers sought in fashionable novels; they relished the opportunity to find portraits of notable fashionables and, thereby, convince themselves that they were reading accurate transcripts of high life. The 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 fashions concern with the mercuriality of contemporary society.46 Of course, fashionable novels were not the first to depict the social world in detail, but, as the following chapters 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 define the silver fork genre. One of the genres predecessors in depicting high society was certainly Frances Burneys Evelina (1778), subtitled a young ladys entrance into the world. For Evelina the world is the world of fashion as seen during the London Season, and the first half of Burneys novel chronicles her eponymous heroines attendance at a catalogue of fashionable venues, including Vauxhall, Ranelagh

Introduction

15

and the Opera, in detail worthy of any silver fork novel. The 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 often 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 Austens Mrs Bennet who risks the health and reputation of her daughters in an attempt to find 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 figure makes an appearance in works such as Marianne Spencer Stanhopes Almacks (1826) and Charlotte Burys aptly titled The Manoeuvering Mother (1842). Indeed, this latter text appears to be a direct homage to Austen, as Bury follows Lady Wetherals attempts to play matchmaker for her five daughters. Early in the novel, the reader learns of Lady Wetherals intentions when she announces the fate of her eldest daughter Anna Maria, who will be out in five years, and I have arranged that she shall marry Tom Pynset.47 The 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 Wetherals five daughters are married by the end of the novel, yet the consequences for the mothers manoeuvring are much more severe than those depicted in Austens novel. While the Bennet family is left with a slight social stigma from Lydias elopement with Wickham, the matter is rectified and tempered by the excellent marriages of Elizabeth and Jane. In contrast, Lady Wetherals fourth daughter, Clara, dies from nervous stress after she is pressured into marriage with the abusive Sir Foster Kerrison, and the third Wetheral daughter Julia also suffers an unhappy match, leaves her husband for another man, and eventually becomes an invalid. In Burys 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. Thus, Bury gently comments on gender roles, family expectations and their influence upon an individuals ability to achieve a happy ending. In addition to providing plotlines that were both useful for silver fork novelists and familiar for their readers, novels of manners also established that daily social interactions within or beyond high society were a desirable subject for

Copyright

16

Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel

Copyright

fiction. While the silver fork novelists moved from Austens 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 often criticized for creating characters that lack depth and roundness, existing, instead, as walking and talking embodiments of fashion, and this certainly becomes evident for contemporary readers in considering these works within the contexts of their literary predecessors. This difference may be due, in part, to the fashionable novelists attention to external 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, preferring, instead, to allow her readers to draw from their own imaginations and build on the few clues such as Elizabeth Bennets fine 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 authentic connection to and immersion within the world of fashion. Such description emphasizes show over substance, ultimately serving as a (perhaps unintentional) commentary on the superficiality 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 fiction of the Minerva Press. Associations with the Minerva Press, however, were often cast as negative, as one reviewer of C. D. Burdetts English Fashionables Abroad (1827) demonstrated, Speaking of this work as a mere novel, it is as very trash as Minerva in her degeneracy ever brought forth.50 Although this reviewer appreciates the scenes of life abroad, as an example of that much-contested genre, the novel, English Fashionables 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 identified with cheap fiction was the famous publishing house in Leadenhall Street that to nineteenth-century critics the name Minerva meant little more than an convenient epithet of contempt.51 Similarly, the protagonist of Catherine Gores 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 unfit 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. Radcliffe, 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 satisfied 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

Introduction

17

Here, Henry, like Austens Catherine Morland, serves as a warning to readers who derive their understanding of the world from fiction and his situation demonstrates how such novels sometimes oversimplify the fashionable world in their construction of high society. The Minerva Press published many Gothic novels as well, and in her overview of proprietor William Lanes list, Blakely attends to such works as The Children of the Abbey (1796) by Regina Maria Roche, noting that A novel more typical of the general run of Minerva productions could hardly be suggested, and describing how Roches heroine Amanda is persecuted in the usual style of the popular love-intrigue; until after poverty, calumny, hectic 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 promote his novels. Minerva Press books, however, like silver fork novels, were not noted for their posterity. Ann W. Engar explains, As a whole, Minerva fiction 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 often 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 reflected their status within the circulating libraries and explains, That Minerva novels of this period were invariably published in boards meant that they were retailed to circulating libraries ready-to-rent.55 The 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 fiction. 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 benefited from the Minerva tradition. Several decades later, Victorian novelists would take a similar stance with regard to silver fork novels. The period of the silver fork novels birth and rise was certainly a period of change in the writing and publishing of novels and the composition of reading audiences, as Peter Garside explains, During this period [180029] the understanding of what constitutes a novel tightened, production and marketing became increasingly professional, output of fiction 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

Copyright

18

Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel

fork authors and reviewers also considered broader issues of novel reading and writing. One reviewer, writing on Bulwer Lyttons 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. The novel has gone forth like a Roman conqueror, not only adding new regions to its domain, but often incorporating 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 reflections on the nature of fiction, the silver fork novel also helped critics to articulate the development of a literary tradition. 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 fine 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

Copyright

Although this writer finds Gore to be inferior to Austen in her mode of composition, her works are nonetheless placed in dialogue with Austens, and this comparison is presented as edifying for the reader. Despite such manoeuvres, however, the exclusion of silver fork fiction from scholarly and historical conversations began nearly as soon as the novels popularity started to wane in the middle of the nineteenth century. One review of David Massons British Novelists and their Styles: Being a Critical Sketch of the History of British Prose Fiction (1859) skips from Scott to Dickens and Thackeray with only the brief comment: Of Sir Bulwer Lyttons historical novels we cannot say much.59 And, Massons book itself hardly gives early nineteenth-century fiction much more attention, following a lengthy discussion of Scott with a list of those writers who followed him in the 1820s and 1830s and offering several categories for their work, one of which, The 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 connected with these an early example of the critical tendency to locate the novels as sociological curiosities rather than literary works.60 Twentieth- and twentyfirst-century criticism of the history of the novel has hardly been kinder to the silver fork genre. Ian Watts seminal study The Rise of the Novel (1957) focuses on the eighteenth century, and in a short Note at the end of the book, identifies only Jane Austen and the French Realists as the inheritors of the novel form in

Introduction

19

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-mans land between Romantic 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. The juxtaposition of these two studies neatly reflects how using periodization as a framework for critical study can do a disservice to works that do not fit within familiar categories of date or genre. In The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism, tienne Balibar calls attention to the problems of periodization, while also acknowledging its usefulness for historians:
It [periodization] is the concept of discontinuity in continuity, the concept which fragments the line of time, thereby finding the possibility of understanding historical phenomena in the framework of an autonomous totality Thus 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 offer a comprehensive solution 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 offers a new point of entry into nineteenth-century studies that encourages a reimagining of periodization practices. With its heyday ranging 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. The 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 Victorianism 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 literary history can help to break down some of the artificial 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 fiction, and the novel in general, that are not based primarily on chronology or periodization but rather on social and cultural factors, such as

Copyright

20

Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel

the popular marketplace, construction of a reading public and the confluence 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 nave enough to suggest that they can always be incorporated into already-overstuffed 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 fictional 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 different effect. Currently, most silver fork novels are available only in early (usually first) editions. Silver fork novels were popular, but that popularity was fleeting; 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 Disraelis Vivian Grey and Bulwer Lyttons 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 18261841, edited by Harriet Devine Jump. This six-volume set includes Listers Granby, L. E. L.s Romance and Reality (1831), Bulwer Lyttons Godolphin, Blessingtons Victims of Society (1837), Rosina Bulwer Lyttons Cheveley (1839) and Gores Cecil (1841). Each text includes extensive notes and an introduction that contextualize the novel for readers unfamiliar with the genre and the period and also work to advance the scholarship on fashionable fiction. These 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.

Copyright

Introduction

21

Other options for scholars interested in silver fork novels include print-ondemand publishers and Google Books. The former print and bind editions of the novels that are usually direct facsimiles of nineteenth-century editions. For example, Elibron Brooks offers a reprint of Richard Bentleys 1850 edition of Catherine Gores The Hamiltons (originally published in 1834), and Kessinger Publishings edition of Gores Cecil also comes from Bentley (1845, originally 1841). The quality of such editions varies greatly, and the publishers include disclaimers to this effect within their texts. The 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 fine. Given the scarcity of these texts and the difficulty of accessing them, print-on-demand editions, which are often 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 offers a wide range of fashionable novels. As with any electronic texts, these, too, vary in quality and often only one volume of a three-volume work may be available. The 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; nonetheless, 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 difficulty of doing research in this field, 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 purposes 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 materials 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 novels, 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 connection 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-fashioning that enabled writers to position themselves as authorities on high society.

Copyright

22

Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel

Copyright

This chapter also looks at how the novels commented on class and gender through their depiction of specific Regency institutions such as the fashionable club Almacks, Carlton House and the figure of the Dandy. In addition, the chapter also explores the influence 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 formulaic 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. This chapter incorporates a number of (in)famous critiques of the fashionable novel by writers such as Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot and W. M. Thackeray to demonstrate how the genre was viewed during the nineteenth century and how those critiques have influenced 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 fiction 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. This chapter explores the relationship between readers and the popular marketplace, offering 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 distinguishing features of the fashionable world: exclusivity. This 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 narration as a way of making their texts complicit in the exclusivity they represent. The 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. This chapter also discusses the career of publisher Henry Colburn who was the most prolific and also most problematic publisher of fashionable novels, known for using marketing techniques that were seen as unscrupulous by some and brilliant by others. Considering the fashionable novel in this context demonstrates an important link in the transformation of the novel into a commodity item. The concluding chapter places the silver fork novel in the larger continuum of nineteenth-century British fiction and looks at how the legacy of the silver fork novel influenced a range of writers that followed it, including many of the major Victorian novelists.

Introduction

23

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 critical significance. 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. The question of timing remains, however, and I would like to offer a two-part answer: both cultural and literary. The 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 traditional 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 fit neatly into one category or another can continue to be reconsidered and appreciated 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. The prevalence of women writers publishing in this genre, the commercial nature of the texts and their construction of early nineteenth-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 fields of book history and publishing history as well as the rich and emerging fields of material culture studies and marketplace studies. Just as periodization has become less rigid, so, too, have many theoretical approaches, as scholars blend different 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 offer a point of connection to popular culture with regard to fashion and the influence of the popular marketplace. That 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 facilitate 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 influence, yet they nonetheless have value, to follow Barbara Hernstein Smiths definition, 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 popular Regency Romance writers such as Georgette Heyer, Judith Lansdowne and

Copyright

24

Fashioning the Silver Fork Novel

Copyright

Elizabeth Aston, among many others. These 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 audiences. Although very different from silver fork novels in structure and form and often 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 Almacks is de rigueur. Georgette Heyer (190274), one of the most popular of the Regency Romance novelists Pamela Regis cites A 1984 survey taken in Great Britain of the public libraries, which reports that between four and six copies of her novels were borrowed on any given day includes the Lady Patronesses of Almacks as characters 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 flow 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 This character sketch reveals the dual nature of Lady Jerseys character as both social butterfly and social manager, which was central to her role at Almacks and is equally important to her role within the novel. As the novel progresses, Heyer also calls attention to Lady Jerseys role in the matchmaking endeavours that often played out at Almacks. Speaking from the perspective of the disagreeable Lady Buxted, she writes: No mother with a daughter to dispose of eligibly could afford to disdain the patronage of Lady Jersey, the acknowledged Queen of Londons most exclusive club, known to the irreverent as the Marriage Mart.66 Lady Jerseys influence at Almacks translated into her influence over much of London society manoeuvring mothers in particular and, as the discussion of Almacks in Chapter 1 demonstrates, such influence 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 DesJardien, one of the stories in An Evening at Almacks (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 fire by his cigarette and then becomes transparent when doused with water to quench the flame. The gravity of the situation is compounded because it occurs during an evening at Almacks and is witnessed by the company, including the Lady Patronesses. Lady Esther manipulates the situation to her advantage, using the impossible position to suggest that Lord Travers had broken off his engagement. As the story unfolds, however, Travers and his fiance Clara are reconciled, and Lady Esther is banned from Almacks in an amusingly dramatic scene: A dismissal from the company at Almacks, Clara knew, was for life, with no second chances. Lady Esther would

Introduction

25

never pass through these rooms again.67 Here, again, the role of Almacks as a policing force within society is emphasized and enacted by the Lady Patronesses. Travers and Clara are then readmitted to Almacks, which signifies that they have been accepted by society. Because of its exclusivity and glamour, Almacks is a particularly popular element of Regency Romance novels; moreover, it offers 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, readership and patriarchal constructions of womens identities and desires. Widely read and distributed, romance novels accounted for more than half of the massmarket 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 fiction. Radway argues, by carefully choosing stories that make them feel particularly happy, they can escape figuratively into a fairy tale where a heroines similar needs are adequately met.69 Romance novels 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 conflict. 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 status 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. The Regency world depicted in romance novels and silver fork fiction was characterized by the fashion system and its dynamic movement in which fashions trickle down through society. John Potvin characterizes this process in The Places and Spaces of Fashion (2009), writing, The fashion system is always on the move, after all, never satisfied 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-first 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. That 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

Copyright

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 definite and to channelize them and, consequently, to fix 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

Copyright

Thus, 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 mystification around itself and employs certain social institutions and practices to preserve that mystery. In the early nineteenth century, silver fork novels participated in this mystification as fashion 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. The novel of fashion may have been a passing fad, but its impact continues to resonate throughout the literary marketplace.