Loving my own life and senses as I do, no power shall induce me, as a private individual, to open another Fashionable Novel.

Thomas Carlyle's infamous commentary on the fashionable novel in Sartor Resartus (1833–4) is one of several nineteenth-century critiques that have influenced responses to silver fork fiction throughout much of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Carlyle's dramatic language – the texts are a threat to his ‘life’, his ‘senses’ and his sanctity as a ‘private individual’ – is characteristic of the debate that surrounded the publishing and popularity of fashionable novels. Robin Gilmour speculates, ‘it is doubtful if he [Carlyle] had read more of Pelham than appeared in Maginn's review’, yet such speculation does not discredit Carlyle's perspective; instead, it further underscores the important role of periodicals in determining the critical fortunes of the fashionable novel.

Fashionable novels were formulaic; that is, readers and writers had a certain set of expectations about what they would find and/or include in a fashionable novel. Following Francis Russell Hart's identification of the Regency as ‘a world in which social spectacle tried to ritualize an elusive and bewildering social reality, and fashion tried to stabilize a chaos of styles’, the formulaic nature of these novels emerges as part of the impulse, on the side of fashion, to give shape and meaning to a period that saw considerable social and political upheaval. The formula also had implications for the silver fork novel that affected its relationship to the world of fashion, textual structure and situation within the literary marketplace. Since the nineteenth century, the silver fork formula has contributed to the dismissal of fashionable novels as ‘fluff’ literature; however, I would like to reconsider the formula to demonstrate how it did more than just facilitate the hasty productions of hack writers – it also served as an active artistic and marketing strategy for both authors and publishers. This chapter focuses on the literary history of the fashionable novel, providing an overview of the silver fork formula and using that formula as a starting place from which to examine how the genre was shaped by critical exchanges among silver fork authors and their critics.