Fashionable novels, also called silver-fork novels, were a 19th-century genre of English literature that depicted the lives of the upper class and the aristocracy.
Contents
Era
The silver-fork novels dominated the English literature market from the mid-1820s to the mid-1840s. They were often indiscreet, and on occasion "keys" would circulate that identified the real people on which the principal characters were based. Their emphasis on the relations of the sexes and on marital relationships presaged later development in the novel.
Genre and satire of the genre
Theodore Hook was a major writer of fashionable novels, and Henry Colburn was a major publisher. Colburn particularly advertised fashionable novels as providing insight into aristocratic life by insiders. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Benjamin Disraeli and Catherine Gore were other very popular writers of the genre. Many were advertised as being written by aristocrats, for aristocrats.
As more women wrote the genre, it became increasingly moralized: "middle-class morality became central, and the novels detailed the demise of the aristocracy, though the characteristically Byronic heroes of the genre remained." The most popular authors of Silver Fork novels were women, including Lady Blessington, Catherine Gore and Lady Bury.
William Hazlitt coined the term "silver fork" in an article on “The Dandy School” in 1827. He characterized them as having "under-bred tone" because while they purported to tell the lives of aristocrats, they were commonly written by the middle-class. Thomas Carlyle wrote Sartor Resartus in critique of their minute detailing of clothing, and William Makepeace Thackeray satirized them in Vanity Fair and Pendennis.
In modern culture
In Donna Leon's fourth Commissario Guido Brunetti novel, Death and Judgment aka A Venetian Reckoning (1995), chapter 22, English professor Paola Brunetti explains to her husband, Guido Brunetti, silver fork novels are "books written in the eighteenth century, when all that money pored into England from the colonies, and the fat wives of Yorkshire weavers had to be taught which fork to use."