‘Exclusive’ was a byword of Regency society, and the state of being exclusive – exclusivism or exclusiveness – came to characterize the fashionable world. Exclusivism, perhaps best defined by Tait's Edinburgh Magazine in 1834 as ‘the principle of keeping others without a certain pale, and boasting of being within ourselves’, became the mechanism or system through which members of the ton were able to set and perpetuate fashions as well as to maintain their social and cultural power. Exclusivism was a self-sustaining system that relied upon the very people it sought to exclude; that is, the exclusives’ status as insiders could be maintained only if a substantial number of outsiders were vying to get into their circle. Silver fork novels depict the relationship between the exclusives and those who sought to join their elite circles as oppositional yet interdependent, and in doing so, reveal the fragile social and economic structures supporting the ton. Fashionable novelists accomplished this, in part, by creating what I term ‘exclusive narration’ – a technique that made the novels themselves complicit in the reproduction of this ideology. Moreover, because silver fork novels created their own exclusive system among readers and writers, they perpetuated a cycle of consumption in which readers were encouraged to continue purchasing silver fork novels by the promise that each book would bring them a step closer to inclusion in the exclusive world.

‘Agreeable, or Brilliant, or at Least Original’: Exclusive Identities

Within the fashionable world depicted by silver fork novelists, ‘exclusive’ has multiple functions. First, certainly in precedence, are ‘the exclusives’. A term often used synonymously with the ton or the fashionables, ‘the exclusives’ were an insular high-society group who used a set of constantly changing criteria to determine an individual's status and acceptance.