For many students and teachers of literature, it is the silver fork novel's place in literary history – rather than the individual texts themselves – that holds the most interest. To that end, then, I would like to conclude by situating the silver fork novel within the context of nineteenth-century literary history and considering some of the genres that both preceded and followed it. Silver fork novels played a marked role in the development of nineteenth-century fiction, forming a link between the novel of manners and later works of Victorian fiction and inspiring a second-wave of fashionable fiction in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As Richard Cronin explains, ‘The fashionable novels of the 1830s are no longer much read, and yet they have at least a historical importance. It is through them that we can most easily trace a line that joins Byron and Jane Austen with the major Victorian novelists.’ Similarly, Tamara Wagner writes, ‘The silver fork novel, or novel of fashionable highlife, played a much more influential role in the development of nineteenth-century literature than has commonly been acknowledged’. Silver fork authors established practices for engaging with the world of fashion in its material, social and theoretical forms that served as templates for later writers, particularly those looking to replicate the silver fork novel's success in the popular marketplace.

Arguably, any nineteenth-century novel could be studied in relation to the fashionable fiction of the 1820s and 1830s, yet here I focus on a few representative texts and genres, including the novel of manners, satires and second-wave fashionable novels, that demonstrate the silver fork novel's influence on Victorian fiction, particularly with regard to literary representations of fashion, class relationships and social hierarchies.