Journalist, playwright, novelist, and English improvvisatore, Theodore Hook tapped into readers’ interest in representations of fashionable life with his Sayings and Doings (1824–8). Hook’s stories – influenced by his political journalism and theatrical experience and sometimes adapted for the stage – engage fundamental questions about speech, action, and personal identity. They constitute a hybrid genre of sociological documentary and imaginative fiction by an observer who stands both inside and outside the world he depicts. While William Hazlitt popularized the term “silver–fork fiction” in his reviews of Hook, the tendency to assimilate Sayings and Doings to later, longer silver–fork novels has obscured what is innovative about Hook’s fictional debut and how it embodies the distinctive climate of the 1820s. Sayings and Doings is an experimental hybrid of fiction, social critique, and metafiction that combines techniques of representation from theatre, improvisational performance, and newspaper journalism.