SOURCE: “Subgenres of the Novel from 1830 to 1837: Silver-Fork Fiction,” in The Victorian Novel before Victoria: British Fiction during the Reign of William IV, 1830-1837, Macmillan Press, 1984, pp. 106-19.

[In the following excerpt, Engel and King claim that Silver Fork fiction, while relatively short-lived and undistinguished as a sub-genre, formed the basis for the great satiric novels of the Victorian era.]

Madame de Staël, a theorist of Romanticism during and after the French Revolution, lived in England for several years and offered a vivid critique of its society by comparing the English people to their cherished ale: ‘The top is all forth, the middle good, the bottom dregs.’²⁴ During the reign of William iv, the school of fiction devoted to the ‘froth’ was known variously as the ‘dandy’ school, the ‘silver-fork’ school and the school of the fashionable novel. Although the vogue for such fiction began with the publication of Robert Plumer Ward's Tremaine in 1825, the genre reached its peak immediately with Disraeli's Vivian Grey (1826) and Bulwer's Pelham (1828).²⁵ Thus, the history of this subgenre of Victorian fiction is remarkable in that the school actually flourished for a mere three years before beginning a numbing twenty-two-year decline. Although fashionable novels continued to be published until 1850, their popularity began to wane as early as 1830.

The long decline of the silver-fork novel was reflected in and perhaps augmented by the satires and parodies of major Victorian prose writers. Indeed, the parodies and satires are more familiar today than their originals: Carlyle's chapter on ‘The Dandiacal Body’ in Sartor Resartus, ‘Lady Flabella’ in Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, Thackeray's Novels By Eminent Hands and, of course, his Vanity Fair. The grist which the fashionable novels provided for the satiric mills of Carlyle, Dickens and Thackeray was precisely their ‘frothiness’—the insipid artificiality of the verbal texture itself and the insubstantial, trivial vision of human experience that the words evoked. In his recent study, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley, George Levine cites as one premise behind realistic fiction ‘the moral urgency of seeing with disenchanted clarity and valuing the ordinary as the touchstone of human experience’.²⁶ According to their Victorian critics, fashionable novelists neither saw with clarity, disenchanted or otherwise, nor paid much attention to the ordinary and commonplace. Not only were their characters upper class and one-dimensional, but their narratives focused on experiences from which the majority of Britons were excluded: attending balls at Almack's, for example, or hiring and firing footmen. For most readers, its critics argued, the fashionable novel offered no insights into their own lives but only romantic fantasies which belied the breadth, complexity and limitations of life as most people knew it. And by heroizing dandies and debutantes, silver-fork fiction encouraged snobbery, toadyism and a disregard for the lower classes; it also held up frivolity and idleness as summa bona in an age whose bywords were fast becoming earnestness and work.

The fashionable novels of William's reign certainly deserve much of the ridicule directed at them through satire and parody, especially the charge that they are unrealistic. Nevertheless, beneath the froth, as with English ale, there is body—in this case a body of realism and concern with broad social and moral issues that the satires and parodies ignore. Indeed, it can be argued that in certain ways the fashionable novels of 1830-7 foreshadow, albeit dimly, the great works of Victorian realism yet to come.

All silver-fork novels concern themselves with the extraordinary, but their specific unrealistic or romantic emphases seem to diverge according to the sex of the author. The most notable male novelists of the early 1830s—Disraeli and Bulwer—wished to apotheosize the dandy into a romantic hero.²⁷ Actually, these two romantic novelists wrote only one fashionable novel apiece in the 1830s before moving on to other kinds of fiction: Disraeli published The Young Duke in 1830 and Bulwer published Godolphin in 1833 (both novels have been discussed in previous chapters). The protagonists of the two novels are similar in the extent to which their aspirations romantically outdistance the desires of ordinary men. Godolphin desires to attain the ideal—ideal truth, ideal beauty, ideal excellence—although the closest he comes is in his rather pathetic collection of objets d’art. Less visionary, the Duke of St James desires to host the most lavish entertainments and own the grandest houses in England, and for a while his seemingly endless wealth allows his most extravagant dreams to materialize. But in neither novel does the fashionable world provide a suitable milieu for truly heroic behaviour; power exercised amid froth creates more rhetorical spume than waves of social action. However, both novels also reflect the era of social concern and reform which by 1830 was encroaching even on the dilettantism of the upper class. Godolphin and the Duke of St James each have a chance to metamorphose from dandy into politician. But Godolphin rejects his chance until it is too late, and therein lies his tragedy. Out of joint with the newly reform-oriented times, he withdraws from society and dies just as he has finally decided to enter politics. In contrast, St James decides to take seriously his membership in the House of Lords, makes a brilliant speech in behalf of Catholic rights, and thereby wins the love and respect of May Dacre, whom he had pursued unsuccessfully in his role as a dandy. Disraeli can transform his hero into a more realistic character only by limiting his wealth and, more significantly, his satisfaction with the fashionable world. As the young duke shifts his interest from pleasure domes to Parliament, he foreshadows the earnest aristocratic politicians of Trollope's fiction, especially Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium.

Although Bulwer and Disraeli were the most important male silver-fork novelists, the market for silver-fork fiction was decidedly dominated by women, of whom the most representative are Catherine Gore and Marguerite, Countess of Blessington. Without question, these were the two authors who helped establish the silver-fork novel as essentially feminine—written by women, about women and for women. Both began writing fashionable novels in the 1830s and continued until the 1850s, when the vogue for silver-fork fiction played itself out. During William's reign, Mrs Gore wrote four such novels: Women as They Are (1830), Mothers and Daughters (1831), Pin-Money (1831) and The Diary of a Désenuyée (1836); Lady Blessington wrote two: The Two Friends (1835) and The Victims of Society (1837).²⁸ Lady Charlotte Bury was the other author who published a number of fashionable novels during this brief period, but her literary talents were far below those of the other two women. As Matthew Rosa observes: ‘More than any other of the female writers, she justified Thackeray's attacks by showing just how bad a fashionable novel could be.’²⁹ The remainder of this section on silver-fork fiction will treat only Mrs Gore and Lady Blessington but will not make thematic or stylistic distinctions between the two authors' works. Although Mrs Gore's reputation as a novelist is considerably better than Lady Blessington's, her higher status is primarily due to Cecil and its sequel Cecil, a Peer, both published after this period. During William's reign, the quality and style of both women's works were similar enough to warrant a collective discussion.

Unlike the novels of Bulwer and Disraeli, the novels of Lady Blessington and Mrs Gore do not owe their lack of realism to heroes who try acting out their extraordinary dreams. Instead, the lack of verisimilitude is more a matter of triviality or artificiality in style, characterization and perspective. Though the silver-fork novel is not uniformly weak in these areas, its unrealistic, tedious style was a favourite subject for contemporary parodies, as illustrated by the following sentence from ‘Lady Flabella’, the work which Kate Nickleby reads to Mrs Wititterly in Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9):

At this instance, while the Lady Flabella yet inhaled that delicious fragrance by holding the mouchoir to her exquisite, but thoughtfully chiselled nose, the door of the boudoir (artfully concealed by rich hangings of silken damask, the hue of Italy's firmament) was thrown open, and with noiseless tread two valets-de-chambre, clad in sumptuous liveries of peach-blossom and gold, advanced into the room followed by a page in bas de soie—silk stockings—who, while they remained at some distance making the most graceful obeisances, advanced to the feet of his lovely mistress, and dropping on one knee presented, on a golden salver gorgeously chased, a scented billet.³⁰

As the parodic title suggests, the style of the fashionable novel was often not just artificial but flabbily so—flabby with excessive subordination, with gratuitous Frenchisms, with pretentious circumlocutions, and with cloyingly hyperbolic adjectives which make everything in the fashionable novel ‘delicious’, ‘exquisite’ and ‘sumptuous’. The serpentine sentence from Lady Flabella contains 107 words, but its length is often exceeded in the fashionable novels of the 1830s. For example, the following sentence from Lady Blessington's The Two Friends contains 115 words, 8 subordinate clauses and 12 prepositional phrases:

The ‘world's dread laugh,’ which had, on more than one occasion, followed a speech of his, uniting the elevated code of Plato with the enthusiasm and fire of a Mirabeau, had alarmed the more worldly mind of Arlington, who shrank back affrighted from the influence that Desbrow had hitherto exercised over his opinions, and the sarcastic mockery with which he had heard his name assailed at the clubs, though it failed to lessen his friendship, had the effect of decreasing his respect for Desbrow, until, by degrees, he had grown to think him a mere visionary, more likely to injure than advance any cause he espoused, and whose counsel it would be weakness to follow.³¹

And the pretentious circumlocutions which Dickens mocks are often outdone by the novels themselves, as when in Mothers and Daughters Mrs Gore writes that a conversation which one curious character wishes to overhear is ‘beyond the reach of the attentive Mary's delicate auricular organization’.³²

A great frustration when reading Mrs Gore and Lady Blessington is the evidence that their potential far exceeded their achievement. Mrs Gore, for example, who was a great admirer of Pope, is sometimes capable of the crisp, effective zeugma and deliberate bathos found in the following sentence from The Diary of a Désenuyée: ‘I entered … that long and echoing ball-room, where so many hearts, promises, and fans have been broken.’³³ As to Lady Blessington, those who attended her salons attested to her dazzling skill in conversation, but as her biographer, Michael Sadleir, remarked: ‘The novels are stilted, colourless, and terribly genteel; and posterity is constrained, with the help of a few reminiscences and the half-dozen of her actual remarks which have survived, to imagine as best it can her fascination and her wit.’³⁴ Perhaps it was the self-consciousness of being a woman writer, perhaps it was an exaggerated sense of the squeamishness or vacuity of their female readers, or perhaps it was the haste with which they often wrote which kept Mrs Gore and Lady Blessington from developing a more brilliant style, such as that we associate with Restoration comedy of manners, a far more impressive upper-class genre.

Weaknesses in the verbal texture of these novels tended to produce weakness in characterization as well. The most searing indictment of character portrayal in silver-fork fiction occurs in an essay George Eliot wrote for the Westminster Review in 1856, entitled ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’. Though her criticisms are directed against the last gasps of the genre, when it had been alloyed with the pneumonic bluestocking or proselytizing heroine, some of her strictures apply equally well to the fashionable fiction of the 1830s:

It is true that we are constantly struck with the want of verisimilitude in their representations of the high society in which they live; but then they betray no closer acquaintance with any other form of life. If their peers and peeresses are improbable, their literary men, tradespeople, and cottagers are impossible: and their intellect seems to have the peculiar impartiality of producing both what they have seen and heard and what they have not seen and heard, with equal unfaithfulness.³⁵

Certainly, few of the characters in Mrs Gore's or Lady Blessington's novels come alive like those in the novels of Dickens and Thackeray, but one problem may be the homogeneity of their historical counterparts, the members of the upper class during the Regency and the 1830s. As Lady Blessington observes in the preface to Victims of Society, ‘They who move in a highly artificial state of society, acquire, however, a kind of family resemblance; and every general description is susceptible of personal application.’ The characters lack the variety and idiosyncrasies on which Dickens, for example, capitalized by portraying middle-class and lower-class characters. As Chesterton pointed out: ‘The humble characters of Dickens do not amuse each other with epigrams; they amuse each other with themselves. The present that each man brings in hand is his own incredible personality.’³⁶ Lacking the wit of a Congreve or a Wilde, the fashionable novelists of the 1830s have few characters who amuse even by epigrams. Their physical descriptions, usually set pieces that coincide with each character's introduction, are seldom better than this example of Lady Theodosia Mitford from Mrs Gore's Women As They Are: ‘She was tall, and rather distinguished in her air; but with no better pretensions to beauty than those of an open, animated countenance; or to wit, than the liveliness of a happy temperament modified by the instigations of a correct understanding.’³⁷ Only a few delightful eccentrics (such as the vulgar parvenue Mrs Waddlestone in Pin-Money who, adorned with a green turban, is likened to a great canteloupe) jolt us awake after the more typically soporific gathering of the dandy, the heiress, the dowager, the rake and their assorted clones. If either Mrs Gore or Lady Blessington had ever created a scene in which these characters conducted a seance, we would assume the purpose would be to try to contact the living.

Although no one has ever bothered to defend silver-fork fiction on the basis of its style or characterization, it has been argued that the genre furthered the development of Victorian realism by its careful attention to surface detail—its conscientious cataloguing of what the upper class ate, wore, inhabited and visited.³⁸ Such a contribution would indeed be significant, for as Levine points out: ‘The great realistic fictions are exuberant with details, even when they are melancholy thematically. The alienation implied by description is partially compensated for by the sheer pleasure of being able to see, as if for the first time, the clutter of furniture, the cut of clothing, the mutton chop and the mug of hot rum. … The very vitality of detail is part of the realist's gesture at life, for they will not succumb to the conventions of patterning.’³⁹ Even the parodies lend credence to the assertion that fashionable fiction abounds (as the adjective silver-fork implies) with detailed descriptions of upper-class accoutrements. Dickens and Thackeray list everything from the fabric of a footman's liveries to the pattern of an heiress's china.

However, a careful reading, at least of the fashionable novels of the 1830s, reveals that the works have almost none of the details of fashionable life implied by the parodists or alluded to by historians of the novel. There are a few passages full of physical details, but these same few examples are repeatedly bandied about by the critics and historians; actually, such passages are exceptions, not the rule, for the novels of this period. Only in Disraeli's The Young Duke is serious attention paid to what Levine calls ‘the clutter of furniture’ and ‘the cut of clothing’, and it should be noted that at the time Disraeli wrote The Young Duke, he knew nothing of aristocratic circles except what his imagination could embellish upon hearsay.⁴⁰ If Levine is correct in suggesting that description implies alienation, perhaps the intimacy of Bulwer, Mrs Gore and Lady Blessington with the beau-monde (an intimacy not yet shared by Disraeli) made them take for granted and therefore neglect most of the physical details of the milieu in which they themselves moved. Where detailed physical description does present itself in Mrs Gore's and Lady Blessington's novels, it usually refers not to the fashionable world but to the natural—perhaps because of the influence of the Romantic poets, or perhaps, if we accept Levine's theory, because it was to nature that Mrs Gore and Lady Blessington brought the clarity of alienated vision. In the following passage from Mothers and Daughters, for example, Mrs Gore lingers over the myriad of details which create the ambience of a late August afternoon in a way that she never lingers over a dinner party in a London mansion:

A light sprinkling of rain in the afternoon had brought back the freshness of verdure and fragrance of atmosphere distinguishing the earlier summer; and although among the adjoining farms, the stubble whence the redundant shocks of corn had been recently removed, gave visible tokens of the advanced progress of the year, extensive fields of purple clover, flushed with bloom and overcharged with sweetness, still spoke of the genial maturity of the season. The blackbirds poured forth their evening song among shrubberies fashioned according to the antique or Verulamian school of gardening, which exhibited straight gravel walks, protected by dense masses of evergreens—by impervious walls of ilex, and phylera, and yew, and cypress. (iii, pp. 330-1)

The forks which are detailed in these novels are more often sylvan than silver.

Where realistic descriptions of upper-class life do occur, they inevitably mirror fashionable conversation and etiquette instead of physical objects or settings. The characters of Mrs Gore and Lady Blessington seldom indulge in passionate or metaphysical histrionics like the romantic heroes of Bulwer and Disraeli. Rather, the dialogue of their characters remains within the realm of what to them was ‘everyday’: the latest scandals, the annoying behaviour of relatives and friends, and the day's agenda of parties and social calls. Wives quarrel with husbands for spending too much time in Parliament or at their clubs; husbands quarrel with wives about spending too much money on ballgowns or opera boxes. Among the everyday matters is etiquette: the etiquette of being presented at Court, wrangling invitations to the most loudly heralded social events, or being chaperoned to Almack's. In The Two Friends, for example, after Lord and Lady Wolmer ‘arrive at the hour usually chosen by people of tact to make their appearance in a country house’ (p. 32), the narrator digresses for six paragraphs on when and when not to make an appearance at such house-parties. Middle-class readers who looked to these novels of the 1830s as guides to emulating the upper class would learn little about what to wear or what to serve at tea, but they could learn much about what to discuss or how to behave.⁴¹

But more than a profusion of aural and behavioural details, the realism of Mrs Gore and Lady Blessington is a matter of perspective. As Vineta Colby has ably shown in Yesterday's Woman, silver-fork fiction served as a ‘bridge between upper-class romance and middle-class domestic fiction’.⁴² Female authors do not glorify the upper class as Lady Flabella or Lords and Liveries suggests. Rather, they measure it by middle-class standards and criticize it where it falls short, especially when its shortcomings involve those values which uphold the sacredness of the family. Upper-class society, as portrayed in these novels, acts as a centrifugal force which pulls the female protagonists away from domestic happiness and duty. Often chances for such happiness are tainted at the outset, because fashionable marriages are made not in heaven but by manoeuvring mamas, like Maria Willingham in Mothers and Daughters: ‘Like a skillful general, she addressed herself in the first instance to the numeration and disposition of her forces, calculating with callous selfishness those deductions of “killed and wounded” which Time—the general enemy—had gradually made in the sum total of her London acquaintance’ (iii, p. 3). Once the specific enemy—the husband—is captured, the marriage itself is regarded as a business transaction, accompanied by legal contracts befitting a corporate merger.

Equally scrutinized and criticized as dangerous to domestic happiness is the liberating power of affluence, which freed upper-class wives (and five of the six heroines of these 1830s novels are married) from many of the restrictions placed on their less well-to-do sisters. Superficially, such liberation seems fortunate, as Lady Blessington notes in Victims of Society: ‘The woman of fashion, having emancipated herself from the drudgery of household cares and domestic duties, and having substituted the services of hirelings, has ample time to perform the self-imposed functions of her office’ (p. 163). But when those functions are purely social, the balls begin to bore, the parties to pall. Ennui is perhaps the most recurrent theme in the fashionable novel. What Mrs Gore and Lady Blessington attack is not ennui itself but the symbiotic relationship between it and self-centredness. To emphasize the dangers of this self-absorbing liberation, inimical to the health of both family and country, these authors set up the same kinds of foils that Thackeray uses with more sophistication in Vanity Fair: what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar term the ‘angel’ and the ‘monster’, a ‘sweet heroine inside the house’ and a ‘vicious bitch outside’.⁴³

The angel in silver-fork fiction is the protagonist, good-hearted but naive and easily led astray. The monster, a scheming villainess, is emancipated not just from domestic drudgery but from all claims of duty, morality and concern for others. Such a woman could, of course, exist in any social stratum, but in these novels she is aided by a milieu in which artificiality is the norm, the real and the apparent are easily confused, and rank can excuse a multitude of sins, as it does for Lord Steyne in Vanity Fair. These self-centred women either tempt the heroines to emulate their disregard for home, hearth and husbands, or they merely use the protagonists to further their own schemes. Though not all of the emancipated villainesses end up writhing in misery and remorse, every one of them serves as a catalyst for crises which teach the heroines to place domestic happiness before self-gratification. In Pin-Money, Frederica renounces her desire to control her own money and trusts to the largesse of her husband after her supposed friend Mrs Erskyne tempts her into expenses that nearly ruin her marriage. Abandoning Mrs Erskyne and her set, Frederica moves closer to the feminine ideal articulated by her brother, Lord Launceston: ‘There are still, thank Heaven, women to be found in our own rank of life, who reconcile a cheerful indulgence in the pleasures of society with an unsullied purity in their domestic character.’⁴⁴ Fashionable life does not have to be renounced, but its essentially selfish pleasures must be subordinated to the comfort of home and husband.

Thus, the characteristic mode of realism to which the fashionable novel contributed is domestic. Yet the novels of Mrs Gore and Lady Blessington occasionally detour into another avenue associated with Victorian realism, the avenue of social reform. Reflecting the reformist Zeitgeist of the 1830s, Gore and Blessington, again from a middle-class perspective, criticize upper-class indifference towards the lower classes. As the narrator observes in The Diary of a Désenuyée, ‘Reform, revolutions, cholera, nothing seems to touch the giddy throng which, every spring, bursts forth like the butterflies into the sunshine of the season!’ (p. 112). Indeed, the rich demonstrate an awareness of the misery of the masses only when it serves their own purposes. In Pin-Money, aristocrats who wish to economize by firing their French cooks blame ‘agricultural distress, or the distress of the manufacturing classes, or some other national disaster which could not possibly produce a reaction upon the pockets of the higher ranks of society for two years to come’ (p. 163). More appalling, a villainess in Victims of Society hopes that ‘the cholera will increase’ (p. 144) so that the British nobility can abandon London and its etiquette to entertain each other in the country like Boccaccio's Florentines. No different from the other villainesses in these novels, she has been corrupted by her exposure to French values, especially the ‘Let-them-eat-cake’ attitude of the deposed French aristocracy. Although neither Lady Blessington nor Mrs Gore is a Jacobin by any stretch of the imagination, both imply, with rather Podsnappish smugness, that the French aristocracy deserved the horrible retribution of the French Revolution. Lady Blessington devotes nineteen chapters of The Two Friends to disparaging the French nobility's callousness, and in The Diary of a Désenuyée, the heroine, while in Paris, astonishingly predicts another revolution by the French to occur in 1848, even though this novel was written twelve years earlier.

The most shocking indictment of the English upper class occurs in the form of a nightmare suffered by the heroine in The Diary of a Désenuyée: ‘Stretched under horsecloths, round the naked chamber, lay men, women and children, purple with the typhus; and in the midst, extended on the unhinged door of the hovel, the corpse of a young woman, already—but no! my pen cannot record such a combination of horrors.’ In this dream, the heroine is accosted in the harshest tone and terms by the dying: ‘Why do you reprehend these people? It is for you they are suffering! The leavings of your lap-dog would be dainties to sustain the strength of this dying family! They are tormented to afford you the means of languishing in an opera-box! A heavy account shall be demanded of you for this thing! You shall answer before the Most High God for the sufferings of these nursing mothers—of these poor young children’ (p. 54). One would expect the grotesquerie and indignation of this passage in Dickens or Carlyle, but in silver-fork fiction it seems anomalous, even surreal. And it should be pointed out that neither Mrs Gore nor Lady Blessington makes any attempt to integrate into the fashionable novel large social issues like those alluded to here. However, such passages show that the reformist spirit of the 1830s, which insisted upon the obligations of the Haves to the Have-nots, had seeped into even the frothiest fiction of the era.

Although these social issues are alluded to only sporadically and peripherally in the fashionable novels of the 1830s, the upper class was being called to accountability by the British press, and upper-class awareness of the press's scrutiny is very apparent in all the novels by these two women. Much of the press coverage, of course, consisted of society-page gossip, which Thackeray lambasts in The Book of Snobs and to which Lady Isabella alludes in Women As They Are when she complains that the modern English novel contains ‘vulgarity and bad taste secondary only to that of the columns of your newspapers … which announce to admiring Europe that Lady Alberville wore a train of Pomona green; and that some old Marchioness, who has been morally defunct these twenty years, arose from the catacombs in the identical robe of crimson velvet which ought to have been covering her coffin’ (i, p. 223). Mrs Gore and Lady Blessington might have ignored the details of fashionable dress and dining, but the newspaper gossips most certainly did not. Nor did they refrain from attacking the upper class for their extravagance or from circulating details of their scandals. Upon returning to England from France, Lady Blessington herself was ostracized by respectable female society because The Age, a London tabloid, had printed rumours of her liaison with Alfred d’Orsay in an effort to extort hush-money from her.⁴⁵ In her novels as well as in Mrs Gore's, what the characters fear most about a scandal is that it will be disseminated to the public through the newspapers. As the novels suggest, it was through the press that the aristocracy was beginning to feel the tyranny of public opinion.

As narratives wherein the protagonists accommodate themselves to the social units of family and class by limiting their egocentric aspirations, the fashionable novels of Mrs Gore and Lady Blessington are realistic rather than romantic. As Ioan Williams points out, the great realists of the nineteenth century ‘argue that unless the individual accepts that Reality lies outside himself and reconciles himself to its pressure, he can never build a firm basis for personal morality or happiness’.⁴⁶ The fashionable novelists proffer this same argument in a minor key. What makes them far lesser novelists than Thackeray, who combines the milieu of the fashionable novel with realism in a major key, is in part their limited view of human nature, especially female nature, which in turn leads to a simplistic view of how a woman can reconcile herself to the pressures of external reality. In the novels of Gore and Blessington, an absolute dichotomy exists between the angelic protagonist and her monstrous foil. The villainess-monster represents not just female selfishness but also self-assertiveness—what Gilbert and Gubar call ‘the intransigent female autonomy’.⁴⁷ The ideal towards which the protagonists evolve—the ideal of ‘domestic purity’—is one of selflessness, defined as passivity and submission to the needs, desires and advice of others. Although fashionable society was in many ways a matriarchy, Mrs Gore and Lady Blessington criticize the scheming, manoeuvring mothers who try to impose their will on everyone else. Moreover, the women who exercise such matriarchal power are usually widows beyond childbearing age. For the woman at her biological peak, the ideal is marriage, childbearing and fulfilment through her husband and children.

In Vanity Fair, Thackeray takes these two opposing female absolutes of the fashionable novel and effectively blurs many of the moral distinctions between them. Despite his reference to Becky Sharp's writhing nether parts, and despite his condemnation of her callousness, he still can delight—and delight us—in her energy, her resilience, her irrepressible determination to shape her own destiny. He also portrays the parasitic nature of Amelia's passivity and the misery she brings on herself by seeking fulfilment through her husband. By placing Becky initially outside the sphere of fashionable society and by having Amelia descend from it into genteel poverty, Thackeray raises an issue which Mrs Gore and Lady Blessington ignore: if, for the sake of argument, one granted that a woman could fulfil herself through her husband, preferably a rich one, what of the woman whose husband dies or abandons her? And what of the woman who must make her own way, without husband or family to make it for her? Finally, Thackeray's realism surpasses that of the two women authors because he is less willing than they to accept any glib formula for human happiness. The novels of Mrs Gore and Lady Blessington are essentially closed forms. Once the heroine learns to subordinate ‘vanity fair’—her own egoism as well as the vanities of fashionable society—to the needs and desires of her family, her problems vanish and she is doomed to a static state of happily-ever-after. Even though the fashionable novels are realistic in their middle-class perspective, their deflation of heroic and egocentric aspirations, and their focus on everyday life, ultimately they still retain the romantic imperative of (in Levine's phrase) ‘bend[ing] reality to the shape of desire’.⁴⁸ The vision of human nature and human experience in Vanity Fair is far less reassuring and more open-ended than this. In Thackeray's novel, although desires are chastened and illusions shattered, egoism can never be fully banished from the human spirit—only suppressed, to re-emerge in subtler forms. For Lady Blessington and Mrs Gore, ‘vanity fair’ is the reality without, capable of transcendence; for Thackeray, it is the inescapable reality within.

Notes

1. Lady Blessington quotes Madame de Stael in The Victims of Society (1837), which can be found in The Works of Lady Blessington, 2 vols (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1838; rpt New York: Woman of Letters, AMS Reprint Series, 1975) i, p. 164. All future citations to Blessington's novels will be to this edition.

2. The best survey of silver-fork fiction is still Matthew Whiting Rosa's The Silver-Fork School: Novels of Fashion Preceding ‘Vanity Fair’ (Columbia University Press, 1936). Those fashionable novels dealing primarily with the dandy are analysed in Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (New York: Viking, 1960). Vineta Colby's Yesterday's Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel (Princeton University Press, 1974) contains an excellent chapter on Mrs Gore.

3. George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (University of Chicago Press, 1981) p. 23.

4. Ellen Moers, The Dandy, devotes a chapter each to Disraeli and Bulwer. Thomas Henry Lister, the other male novelist of the silver-fork school, published only one novel during William's reign—Arlington—and Lister was not nearly as influential a fashionable novelist as either Bulwer or Disraeli.

5. Two other novels by Mrs Gore published during this period were not fashionable: Mrs Armytage, or, Female Domination (1836) and The Hamiltons (1831), which is partly disqualified as a silver-fork novel because of its characters' excessive interest in politics. Also disqualified is Lady Blessington's The Repealers (1833) which deals with the subject of Irish Absentees.

6. Rosa, The Silver-Fork School, p. 158.

7. Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, ch. 28.

8. The Works of Lady Blessington, i, p. 8.

9. Mothers and Daughters: A Tale of the Year 1830, 3 vols (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831) ii, p. 6.

10. The Diary of a Désenuyée (Philadelphia; Carey and Hart, 1836) p. 19.

11. Michael Sadleir, The Strange Life of Lady Blessington (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1947) p. 198.

12. Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Priney (Columbia University Press, 1963) pp. 303-4.

13. Charles Dickens, The Last of the Great Men (New York: Press of the Reader's Club, 1942) p. 64.

14. Women as They Are; or, The Manners of the Day, 3 vols (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1830) ii, p. 84. George iv said that this novel was the best bred and most amusing novel published in his remembrance; as Matthew Rosa points out: ‘By 1830 George was a dying man’ (Silver-Fork School, p. 123).

15. See Lionel Stevenson's The English Novel: A Panorama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960) p. 223; also Colby's Yesterday's Woman, pp. 53-4.

16. Levine, The Realistic Imagination, p. 21.

17. When Disraeli's father first heard of The Young Duke he exclaimed: ‘What does Ben know of dukes?’ Quoted in William F. Monypenny and George E. Buckle's The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield (London: Macmillan, 1929) i, p. 132.

18. See Bulwer's England and the English, ed. Standish Meacham; Classics of Historical Literature, ed. John Clive (University of Chicago Press, 1970) Book iv, ch. 2.

19. Colby, Yesterday's Woman, p. 53.

20. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Yale University Press, 1979) p. 29.

21. Pin-Money: A Novel (London: Routledge, 1854) p. 209.

22. See Sadleir, The Strange Life of Lady Blessington, p. 118.

23. Ioan Williams, The Realist Novel in England: A Study in Development (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974) p. x. See also Levine, The Realistic Imagination, p. 15.

24. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p. 28.

25. Levine, The Realistic Imagination, p. 134.