The Oxford Companion to English Literature | fashionable novel
fashionable novel, or
‘silver-fork school’
, a class of novel, popular
c.
1825
–
50
, which held up for admiration the lives of the wealthy and fashionable.
Hook
was one of the leaders of this highly successful school of writing.
Hazlitt
, in his essay on ‘The Dandy School’ (
Examiner
,
1827
), castigates the narrow superficiality of such novels which encourage the reader, he feels, only to ‘the admiration of the folly, caprice, insolence, and affectation of a certain class’.
Bulwer-Lytton
(whose own
Pelham
was a celebrated example) held that the genre was influential in the paradoxical sense that its effect was ultimately to expose ‘the falsehood, the hypocrisy, the arrogant and vulgar insolence of patrician life’.
M.
W.
Rosa
, in The Silver-Fork School (
1936
), discusses the work of
S.
Ferrier
,
T.
H.
Lister
,
Disraeli
,
P.
Ward
,
Mrs
Gore
, and others,...
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