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.

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 façade 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?

A Critical Situation

For over seventy years, Matthew Rosa's 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.