SOURCE: “Elegies for the Regency: Catherine Gore's Dandy Novels,” in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 50, No. 2, September, 1995, pp. 189-209.

[In the following essay, Hughes traces the decline of Silver Fork fiction by focusing on the “plotlessness” and amorality of Catherine Gore's Cecil novels, which, Hughes argues, reflect the general mood of aristocratic life in the Regency period.]

Cecil; or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb and its sequel Cecil, a Peer epitomize the dandy novel in its purest form—a rambunctious six-volume romp through the scandalous high life of the Regency and its prolonged aftermath, presented in the guise of first-person memoirs. When the two novels were published anonymously by Richard Bentley in 1841, the flurry of speculation about their unknown author centered on prominent literary figures as well as on members of the peerage. The young William Makepeace Thackeray, to his mingled irritation and envy, found himself unexpectedly caught up in the guessing game: “it appears the whole town is talking about my new novel of Cecil. O just punishment of vanity! How I wish I had written it—not for the book's sake but for the filthy money's, which I love better than fame.”¹ Although numerous contemporary readers were fooled by the masculine persona of the narrator—the irrepressible coxcomb Cecil Danby—others began to suspect the truth. As one Edinburgh reviewer backhandedly hazarded in print, “Aut diabolus aut Mrs G———.”²

“Mrs G———” herself, the durable and redoubtable silver fork novelist Catherine Gore (1799-1861), greatly enjoyed the stir that she had created in both literary circles and high society by insisting on the cover of anonymity in order to write her novels in a masculine voice. While publicly denying that she was the author, she kept Bentley posted with a series of exuberant reports:

I have had a note from Lady Stepney today—saying that “the gentleman who wrote Cecil is to drink tea tonight with Lady Morgan.” If so, it must be the black gentleman. Have you any news on the subject? … I perceive that Bulwer and the literary world think it mine; but the fine world has decided it is Lord Howden's—a notion that will do the book some service, as he has 12,000 a year, and no one is entitled to be clever nowadays who does not keep a French cook.³

Whatever Gore's personal relation with the devil or “the black gentleman,” the novels themselves seemed questionable not only as a belated return to the naughtiness of the Regency but also as an unauthorized intrusion on masculine territory. As Thackeray later wrote of Gore, her familiarity with male secrets was “perfectly frightful”: “She knows things which were supposed hitherto to be as much out of the reach of female experience as shaving, duelling, or the bass viol.”⁴

In taking on the dubious if witty persona of Cecil Danby, who later becomes Lord Ormington, Gore secured for herself a remarkable freedom both from the increasingly stringent requirements of female propriety and from the middle-class Victorian ideology of domesticity. She was able to escape from history as well, giving free rein to the whole complex of attitudes and values associated with the now discredited Regency. And she did so without any need for apology, since the entire narrative could be disavowed as the autobiographical ramblings of a single, admittedly fallible individual. Through her extraordinary practice of gender ventriloquism, Gore found a way to indulge her own most disreputable opinions while keeping her distance from them and displacing them onto the viewpoint of the opposite sex.

When the Cecil volumes appeared, the so-called silver fork or fashionable novels—popular best-sellers that served up glamorous slices of aristocratic high life for an emerging middle-class audience—were already past their heyday.⁵ Gore's dandy novels belong to what Robin Gilmour has termed “the second wave” of the silver fork vogue, which focused on the widening generational gap between the aging Regency dandies and their Victorian successors.⁶ But even the original silver fork novel was inherently an elegiac form, produced and marketed during the volatile interim of the 1820s and 1830s but set back in the already legendary period of the Regency, which for its writers and readers was fast becoming a lost world. The vogue touched a popular nerve not only in its preoccupation with social climbing and class conflict but also in its more subtle exploitation of a self-conscious anxiety about historical closure and the unmistakable ending of an era. The fashionable novels were the first of the perennial “Regency romances,” and it was in large part through their influence that the Regency period, as they embalmed it, became the central, if increasingly negative, point of reference—both moral and historical—for the new Victorians.

Gore, much like Thackeray after her, was unable to look forward without looking back, and her best work consists of that lingering backward glance. Even in old age and in the heart of the Victorian period she was still obsessed with coming to terms with the Regency. Although she rarely attempted the dimension of inner life and personal remembrance that distinguishes a novel like Henry Esmond, Gore anticipated Thackeray in writing novels of social or “cultural memory” (Gilmour, p. 59). Taken together, her works serve to document the shared transition of her society from Regency glitz and frivolity to a more sober-minded and as yet precarious experiment in bourgeois democracy. This is what accounts for the complex, bittersweet tone of the Cecil novels, in which Gore combines a revival of the old sparkling comedy of manners with an elegy for its irrevocable loss. Gore's use of the first-person narrator enables her to evoke two Cecils—both the dazzling and insouciant member of the Regent's household, “arch-coxcomb of his coxcombical times,”⁷ and the elderly roué, still fixated on memories of his youth and shaken by the rapid decline of Regency mores.

Paradoxically, Cecil's generation, born with the French Revolution, is portrayed as young and vibrant in the decadent era of the Regency but worn out and set in its ways at the dawn of a new and potent industrial society. Although moved by the coronation of the child-queen, the older Cecil seems disoriented in the Victorian present; as he says of the Opera House, one of the few remaining Regency landmarks, “King's Theatre—Queen's Theatre,—what is it, just now?” (p. 120). Although fully aware of its shortcomings, he turns back with undisguised nostalgia to the splendors of “the gilded, not the golden age,” defending its central value of elegance while “accepting everything that glittered as graciously, if not as gratefully, as though it were refined gold” (pp. 102, 350-51). Bourgeois sincerity or earnestness holds no attraction for the unregenerate dandy; he self-consciously privileges ornament and artifice, even if they are patently spurious or deceptive. His celebrated fastidiousness is entirely aesthetic, while that of his Victorian successors will become increasingly moral.

The new Victorian vogue for “matter-of-factory,” as he calls it, neatly conflating utilitarianism and technology, is not to Cecil's taste, whether in interior decorating or in philosophical outlook (p. 45). He makes no secret of his preference for the polished manners and pleasant small talk of fashionable Regency circles, in contrast to the “smother in the air” produced by Victorian seriousness and utility: “People in general were more agreeable. Knowledge did not pretend to be useful. Society now so blue, was couleur de rose” (p. 43). In his most irreverent moods Cecil delights in thumbing his nose at stolid middle-class Victorianism, wittily debunking its earnest predilections and coolly appropriating its favorite buzzwords. He openly favors, for instance, the tight-fitting, form-revealing gowns of the Regency over the mummifying Victorian petticoats; he blithely reverses Bentham's most famous social formula, eulogizing George IV's reign as “holiday time for people intent upon promoting the greatest happiness of the smallest number”;⁸ he attempts to vindicate Beau Brummell, long reviled by proponents of moral and political reform, on their own terms, describing him as in fact “a great reformer,—a man who dared to be cleanly in the dirtiest of times” (Cecil, p. 103). It is typical of his practice to transfer the vocabulary of Victorian propriety from the moral to the aesthetic realm: “I flatter myself my tie was irreproachable!” he remarks with superb complacency. Even when he has to admit that the dandies of the Brummell school were “effeminate, conceited, frivolous, in their pursuit of pleasure,” he portrays them as essentially harmless, as “fluttering butterflies who oppose, at least, no dead weight to the general impetus” of historical progress. At its worst, their profligacy was self-contained, limited to the upper classes rather than destructive to society at large: “like certain insect tribes which prey upon each other, their victims were sought and found in their own order of society.” Middle-class defensiveness or censure is to be viewed as a foolish overreaction; it is their own fault if “of the mingled mud and spangles composing the groundwork of a court, the succeeding generation preferred the mud” (Cecil, pp. 102, 104-5).

The mingling of mud and spangles aptly typifies the Regency, with its highly polished aristocratic surface and underlying brutality; there was a disturbing paradox in the proximity between dandy refinement and the as yet “radically untamed” core of English society.⁹ The omniscient narrator of Gore's earlier novel The Hamiltons (1834) stakes out the reformist position on the “noxious beauty” of the last Georgian court: “Vice was so exceedingly decorous that it might have taken its seat on the Bench of Bishops; and corruption, in phosphorescent rottenness, sent forth a shining light.”¹⁰ Cecil, however, clings to something more like Edmund Burke's notion of the lost age of chivalry, anathema to the middle classes in its glorification of “that sensibility of principle, that charity of honor, … which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.”¹¹ The coxcomb by his very nature proclaims the value of the decorative without reference to utility or to the fundamental middle-class value of sincerity. It is characteristic of the moral middle order, as one of Gore's Regency heroines observes, to be “fond of naked truths,” while she herself, in company with the Cecils of the day, remains “modest enough to like even the truth a little drapée.”¹² Cecil is meant to be representative of his generation and class in preferring the Regency's spangles, taking them contentedly for what they are. In recording the transition to a new era, what he accentuates is not the reformist gain, alien to his own sensibility, but the accompanying note of loss: “The ornamental was about to pass away,—the graceful to evaporate” (Cecil, p. 345). In the view of both reformer and coxcomb, there could be no common ground between Regency ornament and Victorian truths.

While those Victorian truths have to do with sincerity and feeling, the mark of the dandy is artifice and aloofness, a studied detachment from any inordinate emotion that might ruffle the decorative surface.¹³ In her characterization of Cecil, Gore undertakes to dramatize a calculated aristocratic alternative to the rapidly spreading middle-class “cult of feeling,” as R. J. White describes it (p. 145). This cult was essentially a popularized and domesticated form of Romanticism associated with the revival of the Evangelical movement, which “—unlikely as it may seem—reached its height in the years of the Regency” (White, p. 139). Gore focuses on the potential for ambivalence in the middle-class attitude toward the dandy: his cold-heartedness and lack of feeling may be interpreted either as incapacity or as power. If he is inevitably shut out from the idealized middle-class domestic paradise he is ultimately invulnerable to heartbreak, unscathed by tragedy, destructive of others but endlessly resilient himself. He cannot be victimized. Gore's narrative invests him with a kind of magical attractiveness; not only is he mesmerized by his own image—one glimpse in his mother's looking glass at the age of six months is enough to make Cecil “a coxcomb for life”—but he exerts a similar fascination over even the most proper Victorians. Gore herself was irresistibly drawn to this character; even when she had to portray him as aging and passé, a sexually ambiguous “dowager dandy,” she could not stop writing about him.

Cecil's most celebrated fictional predecessor was the eponymous hero of Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham; or, The Adventures of a Gentleman (1828), which in large part established the silver fork formula. Self-consciously adopting the pose of an “egregious coxcomb,”¹⁴ Bulwer's Henry Pelham plays the dandy on an outrageous scale. Like both Gore and Thackeray after him, Bulwer attempts to satirize high society without having to repudiate it, and he locates his first-person narrator within the charmed circle of the privileged classes. As he claims in the preface to the second edition (also 1828), “we may glean no unimportant wisdom from folly itself, if we distinguish while we survey, and satirize while we share it” (p. xxxiii). Like Gore and Thackeray as well, Bulwer was misread by contemporaries, sometimes deliberately, and was severely taken to task by social reformers. It was a blistering review of his early novels by William Maginn (the editor of Fraser's Magazine), with its extensive excerpts from Pelham's notorious “Maxims on Dress,” that gave Thomas Carlyle a central metaphor for his philosophy of clothes in Sartor Resartus.¹⁵ By the time Pelham was reissued in 1840, a year before the publication of Cecil, Bulwer evidently found it prudent to bowdlerize his own text, toning down the arrant impudence of the original. Although she dispenses with Pelham's serious political ambitions, which had left Bulwer's dandy open to charges of deception and manipulation, Gore returns to the discredited figure of the Regency coxcomb, hoping to deflect criticism by making him nothing more threatening than an unmitigated trifler. The Cecil novels, which were considered for better or worse as rivaling the achievement of Pelham,¹⁶ can be seen as Gore's ultimate homage to Bulwer.

Even as a neophyte in fashionable Regency circles, Gore's Cecil Danby is self-conscious as well as self-absorbed. Not only does he put himself on display for an audience of fellow exclusives, but he is even more preoccupied with gauging his own inner sensations. He constantly examines himself for any incipient signs of feeling. Cecil, not unlike his middle-class detractors, betrays ambivalence on this crucial question: although he rejects emotional involvement as damaging to the dandy pose, at the same time he courts titillation, compulsively making experiments on his own heart or heartlessness. Eventually he becomes so divided that he takes refuge in a split personality, consulting privately with his mirror image, the plausible cynic he finds on the other side of the shaving glass. At the start of his career Cecil deliberately sets out to work up a passion for the flirtatious widow Lady Harriet Vandeleur, but he finds himself sidetracked by the novelty of his infatuation with the middle-class domestic angel, Emily Barnet. To his own astonishment, as he admits, “My feelings were for once genuine!” (Cecil, p. 55).

His relationship to Emily will supply the paradigm for his repeated future affairs. However spontaneous his admiration for her, he immediately seeks to distance and control it by viewing Emily primarily in aesthetic terms: “She was a study for an artist,” he marvels again and again; “it was something to be within reach of such an embellishment to one's existence; like knowing that a volume of choice poetry is at hand” (Cecil, p. 147). Not only does this attitude reify the angel figure, turning her into a mere decoration like the dandy himself, but it also freezes her admirer in the role of observer or connoisseur of a work of art. Cecil even aestheticizes his own response to her, calculating its visible effects on his attractiveness to another woman: “Had my recent emotion imparted unusual expression to features not altogether deficient in merit?” (p. 58).

The commitment of middle-class marriage is not part of the dandy's code: “how was I to be constant?” Cecil asks; “I did my best.—But it strikes me that it was much easier to love Cecil Danby from Southampton Buildings [the dull residence of Emily's guardian], than for Cecil Danby to be faithful” (Cecil, a Peer, II, 205). In fact his validation as a coxcomb depends on his proficiency in breaking hearts: “I had always a predisposition to womanslaughter, with extenuating circumstances, as well as a stirring consciousness of the exterminating power” (Cecil, p. 13). What Gore does in her fictional plot is to literalize the metaphor: most of the numerous women in whom Cecil is interested will actually die of broken hearts and damaged reputations. Emily's sad fate sanctifies her in Cecil's memory, at once perfecting her as an artifact and making her safely unattainable. Significantly, Gore compels us at least temporarily to associate the heartless dandy with the angel figure in their shared propensity to worship an ideal image fixed by death, as her own heroine does in The Hamiltons and as Thackeray's Amelia Sedley will later do for George Osborne in Vanity Fair (1847-48). In anticipation of Thackeray, Gore blurs the distinction between dandy and angel, showing how the extremes of neglect and possessiveness may meet, how the romantic ideal may become dangerously detached from the living and changing human being. Ironically, the corrupt Cecil chooses to idealize a good and innocent young woman, while the pure-hearted Susan Hamilton, Thackeray's model for Amelia, has devoted herself to a worthless egotist. Overestimating the extent of his remorse at Emily's death, Cecil enlists as a volunteer in the Peninsular war with the sole object of dying in battle as speedily as possible. But he finds out, much like Thackeray's narrator in Vanity Fair, that he is not made of such conventionally heroic stuff: “More people, however, expect to die of grief than fall victims to the poignancy of their sensibility. I was not an Emily Barnet. I was only Cecil Danby the coxcomb!” (Cecil, p. 177).

Through her episodic account of Cecil's later career, Gore probes the dandy's psychological pattern of “accouplement with fleeting and unsubstantial things” (Cecil, a Peer, I, 209). Cecil's Byronic pose as “withered” and “blighted” by the catastrophe of his first romance serves to protect him from any further serious involvement: “If the memory of her whose hair I still wore as a pledge of unavailing affection, were incapable of exalting my imagination, not all the countesses of the Chaussée d’Antin could screw me up to concert pitch” (Cecil, p. 230). Nor does his sense of remorse ever suffice to prevent his increasingly predatory flirtations. Even when the drunken Cecil stumbles into a hotel room containing the coffin of Helena Winstanley, who has avenged herself on him by making an interested match with his cousin, he remains entirely self-obsessed. In spite of his horror it is his own sensations that concern him, as well as his own uncertainty about them: “I hope and believe that I felt on the occasion;—not indeed with a sorrow even unto death, as in my brighter days at Cintra [the site of Emily's grave]” (p. 387). Feeling, for Cecil, is something to be brought out on special occasions, something to be artificially cultivated, not a matter of middle-class sincerity or spontaneity. Affection flourishes only when it is “unavailing”; Cecil's only real emotion, besides self-love, is regret. And even his regret has less to do with the fate of his victims than with the loss of his own youth and its Regency setting.

Not surprisingly, given the dandy's predilection for distance in affairs of the heart, Gore shows Cecil at times drifting into voyeurism. He literally becomes a peeping Tom during his convalescence from wounds suffered at Waterloo, fantasizing an adulterous passion for a German frau while maintaining his essential remoteness from bourgeois domestic intimacy. Later he joins Lord Byron's raffish pursuits in Venice, looking for vicarious experience in the shape of an “adventure,” preferably one with a heroine. He finds it in his encounter with Franszetta, a gypsy tumbler whom he prevents from stabbing her brutal father in full view of the festival crowds. Although she will reappear in his bedroom at midnight in search of her stiletto, Cecil never becomes her lover. He remains nothing more than an aristocratic eavesdropper on the primitive conflicts and fierce emotions of low life. When her murdered body is pulled from the grand canal, both Cecil and Byron (whom Gore has turned into a fictional character) visualize the scene not as a direct experience but as the imitation of a work of art, in this case Chateaubriand's Romantic novel Atala (1801): “What a realisation of the famous picture of the interment of Atala. There was Chactas,—there the dead virgin they were bearing away to the grave” (Cecil, p. 326). Two decades later, as the new Lord Ormington, Cecil will name his yacht “The Franszetta.” The dilettantism of the dandy—his dabbling in the arts, his voyeurism, his epicureanism—suggests the substitution of an aristocratic cult of aesthetic and sensual gratification for the bourgeois cult of feeling and sincerity. It suggests as well how the dilettante exploits and feeds off his victims' inherent emotional susceptibility.

In family relations as well as romance, the dandy enacts the role of observer and outsider. “I was born without a genius for family affection,” Cecil avers; “I am much inclined to doubt whether such instincts exist; or rather, whether the love of kindred be not the mere result of education” (Cecil, p. 89). His own education has been singularly deficient in this respect, for his nominal father, Lord Ormington, bitterly resents him as a changeling, the product of his mother's illicit affair with Sir Lionel Dashwood, while Lady Ormington herself spoils him much as she spoils her lapdog, with all the carelessness of a confirmed egotist and woman of the world. Her maternal coolness more than equals that affected by the dandy; when Cecil returns after having been reported killed in the Peninsular war, she thinks only of throwing off her uncomfortable black garments: “The weather is getting very close for bombazine,” she remarks in welcome (p. 185). As the illegitimate interloper, Cecil represents the most fundamental threat to the integrity of the family, and his mere presence suffices to tear it apart. He and his parents customarily live together in an uneasy state of what he calls “domestic infelicity.” And whenever he comes into contact with the domestic idyll, he is certain to undermine or destroy it, however inadvertently.

The returned Cecil finds himself unexpectedly drawn to the kindly simplicity of his older brother, John Danby, and “deeply touched by the holy and hallowing influence” of his angelic sister-in-law, Lady Susan (Cecil, p. 245). Their little son, Arthur, takes a fancy to his dashing soldier-uncle, for which he is severely punished when he is killed during an impulsive horseback ride with Cecil. Although the child's death is accidental, it is still the direct consequence of the dandy's typical recklessness, “that reckless spirit of trifling with other people's happiness” (Cecil, a Peer, I, 231). As a plot device it serves to embody the unconscious will of the aristocratic younger son, traditionally considered “detrimental” or unmarriageable and debarred from inheritance under the prevailing system of primogeniture. Although Cecil has harbored no deliberate intention of murdering his nephew, he cannot help but feel that “his blood was on my head,” even before he learns that much of his popularity in fashionable society derives from his “reputation as an assassin” (Cecil, pp. 252, 364). Years later, when Cecil has been readmitted into the household of his widowed brother, it is through his careless introduction of the younger dandy Frank Walsingham to his niece that John Danby's domestic seclusion is once again to be invaded and despoiled. As much as he has learned to admire his brother, Cecil can never belong to the same world. It is with Lady Ormington—callous, trivial, fretful as she is—that he remains most comfortable: “Our selfishnesses were enlisted under the same banner; our interests were in common. And if we did not love each other so passionately as some mothers and their offspring, whose mutual affection vies with that of the apes at the Zoological, each loved the other as much as it loved any other created being besides its created Self” (p. 391).

In the world of Gore's novels, a place where feeling is clearly dangerous—to the point of being lethal for lovesick girls as well as for deserted fathers—it comes to seem small wonder that the coxcomb is wary of committing himself. His failed romances leave him in a state of “unaffected apathy,” which Byron envies “as the genuine dolce far niente of the heart” (Cecil, p. 200), while his observation of paternal anxiety prompts him to exclaim, “Thank heaven I am still a bachelor! Give me the Pyrrhonic beatitudes of ataraxis,—the pococurante tranquillity of a luxurious indifference,—before all the family sensibilities in the world!” (Cecil, a Peer, II, 264). In the character of Cecil, Gore dramatizes the impulse to recoil from feeling and from domesticity, an impulse that invariably accompanies her recognition of their centrality in the emerging set of values about to be embraced by middle-class Victorian society. Although Cecil's self-exposure, both witting and unwitting, is unmistakable, Gore never makes it easy for the reader to identify with his victims, the passive and vulnerable angels and proto-Victorians: “We are all sad hypocrites to each other” in our pretense of love and grief, Cecil laments, implicating both himself and his readers in Thackerayan fashion (Cecil, p. 329). With Cecil as narrator, Gore is able to achieve a complicated double effect—at once playing on the reader's emotions, in such scenes as the death of little Arthur or the visit to Emily's distracted father, and then undercutting them with the dandy's cynicism and remoteness. The reader is forced to experience both extreme pathos and extreme resistance to it, as feeling and the inability to feel are held in tension. Gore's mid-century critic in the New Monthly Magazine, thought to be Francis Jocox, represents the typically Victorian response to the figure of the coxcomb when he concludes that Cecil would be “intolerable” without “the occasional substratum of sentiment involved in the stories of Emily Barnet, Franszetta, Helena, &c.” (p. 547). But even he admits that Cecil “will not let us despise or dislike him,” although “he forces us a great way towards both feelings” (p. 546).

Gore's narrative itself makes the assumption—perhaps a misjudgment by 1841—that an easy companionship can be forged between the garrulous Cecil and an audience of “brother coxcombs” (Cecil, p. 8), the immediate predecessors of Thackeray's “brother wearers of motley.”¹⁷ In any case, the sheer repetition of catastrophes, none of them in the least redemptive, comes to suggest an inescapable sense of futility. The only relatively safe place for the reader to stand is finally with the coxcomb, apart from the self-immolating emotion of his proto-Victorian foils. Such narrative detachment, in fact, becomes an implicit value for Gore, remaining a striking characteristic of her fiction from the omniscient as well as the first-person vantage point. In the Cecil novels the formal structure of her narrative effectively provides reinforcement for Gore's thematic ambivalence—her reluctance to succumb to a popular cult of feeling without examining its underside or its latent risks. By the conclusion of the sequel the angel figures are dead or married off to cads, while even John Danby, who might be expected to function as an up-and-coming Victorian prototype, has died miserably, abandoned by his daughter, with only Cecil to cling to. The dandy himself, though haunted by regrets from the past as the memory of the Regency haunted the English national consciousness, continues to float along the surface of society, having “a mighty easy time of it” as the new Lord Ormington (Cecil, a Peer, III, 287). Whatever else she may have written, Gore evidently did not intend to construct a straightforward historical parable in which Victorianism displaces the Regency. Although she was well aware of the decline of the dandy, she had serious doubts about the viability of his apparent successors.

Taking stock of his own authorship at the opening of the second series, the unblushing Cecil imagines the likely carping of critics on the unorthodox form of his memoirs: “so inartistical a production … without plot,—design,—arrangement,—and with very little moral” (Cecil, a Peer, I, 4). Accident and amorality are in fact the way of the world on “this shabby little planet,” as Cecil describes it (Cecil, p. 284). Not even the conventionally good characters are able to control the morally ambiguous results of their actions; John Danby, for example, by objecting to what he thinks is Cecil's dissipation, ends up directly inciting the cruel persecution of the innocent Emily. Much less is the coxcomb amenable to the dictates of “copy book morality” (Cecil, a Peer, I, 230), from which he rather grandly exempts himself: “I never pretend to virtues beyond my calibre,” he says complacently; or again, “I do not affect to be an amiable man.—I know myself” (Cecil, pp. 390, 275).

The autobiography of the coxcomb never becomes a Bildungsroman in any accepted sense; the episodic series of adventures leaves Cecil basically unchanged and impervious to reform. As Vineta Colby puts it, “nothing ever really touches him.”¹⁸ Although he may be temporarily impressed by the terrible or heart-wrenching events he witnesses, he invariably relapses into coxcombry, sublimely unaffected by the reforming temper, personal as well as political, that is becoming more and more predominant in the society around him. Late in the narrative Cecil confesses to being “thoroughly discomfited” by his misfortunes, but still “neither better nor wiser” for them (Cecil, a Peer, I, 275). Here self-awareness, which Cecil has in abundance, does not bring about reformation of character, as it generally tends to do in Victorian fiction. Gore's only morality play is a self-referential and parodic one; Cecil reenacts the Faust legend only when his third volume is cut short by the appearance of the (printer's) devil at his door: “I alone,—in all things fated to be exceptional,—have just been peremptorily desired to give my devil no more than his due!—My appointed hour is come! … The devil demands his own. … The brimstone and blue lights are blazing; and the green curtain waits only the signal of the prompter's whistle, to conceal me for ever from your view” (Cecil, p. 397).

The social destiny of the coxcomb, illegitimate and heirless as he is, will be an equally complete if less melodramatic extinction. As the natural offspring of Sir Lionel Dashwood, also a bachelor roué, Cecil is the product not of any lower- or middle-class intrusion into the aristocracy but of an internal decadence and corruption. Unlike her fellow silver fork novelists or her Victorian successors, Gore rarely uses illegitimacy as a plot device, and she never uses it to imply an intermingling of classes. Cecil, the twelfth Lord Ormington, is the last of the dandies, the last of the old-style aristocrats. Although he hints at illegitimate children of his own in Sicily, he will remain unmarried, self-absorbed and self-sufficient.

Cecil's half-brother, John Danby, in spite of his domestic inclinations and responsible politics, is never permitted to inherit his father's title and dies without male heirs, having suffered the loss of two young sons. His only surviving child is a daughter, suggesting perhaps the feminization and domestication of Victorian society, which will trace its descent only obliquely from that of the Regency and only through the female line, as George IV and William IV will be succeeded by their niece Victoria. Jane Danby's marriage, however, cannot be considered to represent any easy or simplistic triumph of domestic values, for she has cruelly deserted her father in order to devote herself in angelic fashion to an unworthy husband, yet another wastrel younger branch of the old aristocracy. By the end of Cecil, a Peer the direct line of the Ormingtons has become extinct, Cecil's heir presumptive being “a nineteenth cousin, who lives in Devonshire Place, and employs a country tailor” (III, 291). The obscure thirteenth Lord Ormington will personify an aristocracy in historical and economic eclipse.

In the Cecil novels Gore's complex thematic burden—the recoil from feeling, the dandy's allure and degeneration, the anomalous position of the traditional aristocracy—exerts tremendous pressure on narrative form, in effect short-circuiting the developing generic conventions of the novel. As Cecil himself cavalierly admits, the absence of a moral to his story is intrinsically connected with the absence of plot or design. The general plotlessness of the silver fork mode had long been troubling to its critics; William Maginn of Fraser's Magazine, in his diatribes against Bulwer's early fashionable novels, summarized the objections to a lack of conventional plotting. For Maginn, as self-appointed spokesman for middle-class values, Bulwer's disregard of aesthetic rules and restraints, most blatantly revealed in the loose construction of his plots, was to be seen as symptomatic of a more pervasive social and moral laxity. The “intellectual libertinism” claimed by aristocratic writers like Bulwer only confirmed their natural association with the lower and criminal classes in what Maginn denounced as a state of “mutual lawlessness.”¹⁹ Henry Taylor in the Quarterly Review similarly deplored the silver fork novel's “scanty allowance of narrative, somewhat carelessly scattered over a wide space of fiction,” and its penchant for details that function only as “separating [rather than connecting] links,” for “descriptions, however faithful and minute, which have no connexion with any object that we much care to contemplate, and which contribute to the construction of nothing.”²⁰ The silver fork school's typically elaborate “construction of nothing” came to be interpreted in social and political as well as literary terms; it was seized on by contemporary critics as a convenient symbol for the wider bankruptcy of the traditional ruling class.

Cecil's lengthy, episodic autobiography reflects the shape—or more precisely the shapelessness—of aristocratic experience as Gore understood it. The scattered elements of design or arrangement in the novel derive from other social classes and their typical plots, which remain self-enclosed and impinge only briefly on Cecil's prolixity: Franszetta's lower-class melodrama or Emily's failed middle-class plot of social advancement through marriage. Here Gore shows her implicit recognition that aristocratic experience in itself could not generate the familiar novelistic structures of “mercantile comedy” (to borrow James Kincaid's term) or of middle-class success; it could not produce patterns of social and economic rise or movements from social exclusion to acceptance and assimilation. The dynamics of social mobility are simply irrelevant to Gore's born aristocrats, who can neither gain nor lose in class status, whatever their economic or moral status. As a rule, the middle-class protagonist will be rewarded with comfort and stability;²¹ thus the end or goal of his quest may be described in formal terms as the cessation of plot, in which social advancement usually coincides with marriage.

But the silver fork hero or heroine begins in an apparently permanent condition of plotlessness and empowerment. Plot becomes less a vehicle of progress and desire than an intrusion to be repelled or contained. Cecil's narrative carries out to its logical extreme the silver fork tendency to follow the repetitive rhythms of fashionable life—the seasonal migration from London to the country estates, the desultory passages of the grand tour, the arbitrary social rituals of idleness and pleasure seeking. Although Cecil is constantly engaged in restless motion, he never really goes anywhere. At the end of the six volumes he continues to drift along in the same condition of indeterminancy in which he started out:

Like many more people than choose to own it, I have passed through life waiting for someone,—watching for something,—I scarcely knew what. … My post, alas! has brought me no letters.—Day after day, month after month, year after year, I have still been watching:—my aimless destiny unaccomplished,—eternity flowing through my hand like the limpid waters of a fountain through the unconscious, unenjoying lips of some marble Triton.

(Cecil, pp. 244-45)

This state of ennui represents the underside of the aristocratic stability, the only drawback to those “enjoyments worthy of a Satrap” (Cecil, a Peer, III, 295) that Cecil ultimately inherits but to which he has had access all along. Unlike a parvenu peer or a bourgeois philanthropist, Cecil has nothing to prove and no reason to exert himself: “My position in the world was ready made. As 12th Lord Ormington, no less than as Cecil I., I am happily privileged to enjoy my twenty-four hours in peaceful egotism” (III, 288). Unlike Bulwer's Pelham or Benjamin Disraeli's Coningsby, Cecil personifies dandyism in its purest state, untainted by ambition or by a sense of noblesse oblige.

In Gore's fiction the delights of this aristocratic destiny—as she packages them for an upwardly mobile middle-class audience—inevitably outweigh any vague malaise. Although Cecil may occasionally pause to lament his “aimless destiny unaccomplished,” he himself proves endlessly resourceful at prolonging it and postponing its accomplishment. Self-reflexive as well as self-absorbed, he openly revels in the lack of closure to his narrative, the interminable flood of reminiscences that continually threatens to overflow the boundaries of novelistic form. Twice, on coming to the limit of a third volume, he teases the reader with hints of “some of the choicest adventures of my life” as yet withheld (Cecil, p. 397). Twice, despite the harrowing of the printer's devil, he promises to return, drawing on an apparently inexhaustible fund of words, which seems to imply an equally inexhaustible experience, in gleeful defiance of the verdict of history. If only he can keep on going, Cecil implies, somehow the Regency will not have to end, nor with it the aristocratic ascendency. Like Thackeray's Pendennis, for whom he served as a model, the tireless Cecil outlasts his own autobiography to take on the role of third-person narrator in Gore's later novel entitled Self (1845).

While Gore seems perfectly comfortable with aristocratic inactivity, in Dickens's hands a decade later plotlessness becomes the author's signal of corruption and stagnation—“the perpetual stoppage,” in both feeling and politics, cultivated by the new set of dandies and exclusives anatomized in Bleak House.²² Here the unrelenting, interminable present tense of the omniscient narrative becomes the definitive Dickensian take on the whole inherited complex of silver fork themes and materials. For Dickens, Lady Dedlock's world of fashion can only be seen as “a deadened world,” or “a world wrapped up in too much jeweller's cotton” (p. 11). The shapelessness of the present tense becomes a trap from which the reader can extricate herself only through Esther Summerson's storytelling. It is Esther's reworking of the archetypal bourgeois plot that serves to relieve the claustrophobia of the omniscient narrative by opening with a chapter entitled “A Progress” and ending with a proper “Close.” Progress of any sort—whether social or political, moral or narrative—can only take place outside the world of fashion and its enchanted circle, by now more severely menaced than Gore would ever have admitted it to be: “For it is, even with the stillest and politest circles, as with the circle the necromancer draws around him—very strange appearances may be seen in active motion outside. With this difference; that, being realities and not phantoms, there is the greater danger of their breaking in” (p. 146).

The Cecil novels, like their aristocratic hero, were historically displaced. By the time of their appearance in print, the silver fork genre, like the oligarchical society it portrayed, seemed to pose an increasingly frail bulwark against the intrusion of those dangerous Dickensian realities on both narrative and social stasis. Gore herself, who always considered the first Cecil to be her best book, had confidently predicted a popular hit, even offering to refund a part of the advance from her publisher if she were proven wrong.²³ But in spite of the momentary flutter provoked by their anonymous publication, neither Cecil was much noticed by the influential reviewers, and sales were undeniably disappointing. By 1841 the general public was apparently no longer receptive to Gore's heady combination of satire and indulgence toward Cecil's unregenerate Regency attitudes. One contemporary commentator singled out The Adventures of a Coxcomb as an example of Gore at her worst, with its dazzling wit and “dashing effrontery” only serving to disguise the “unprofitable exposition of selfishness and sensuality, and of aristocratic talents steeped to rottenness in the most debasing vices.”²⁴ Gore's Victorian critics, in fact, tended to register uneasiness with the mode of satire itself, which had been dominant in Regency prose:

There is a weariness to the flesh in over-much commerce with the exercise and the victims of raillery; satire, however polished, becomes an edged tool with which we care not long to play nor to see it glancing, and doing execution in the grasp of others. Three volumes of sprightly sarcasm leave one in poor spirits—or perhaps a little angry at having spent so much time on hollow hearts that do not improve on acquaintance. (Jocox, p. 546)

The high spirits of one generation had become the “poor spirits” of the next. Clearly, the “spirit of coxcombry” (Horne, p. 167) still presiding over Gore's works was no longer that of the age.

Notes

1. Letter 197, 19 March 1841, in The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon N. Ray, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1945-46), II, 13.

2. [Abraham Hayward], “Selected Novels—Cecil and De Clifford,” Edinburgh Review, 73 (1841), 382.

3. Quoted in Gordon N. Ray, “The Bentley Papers,” The Library, 7 (1952), 193.

4. Review of Gore's Sketches of English Character (1846); rpt. in Contributions to the “Morning Chronicle,” ed. Gordon N. Ray (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1955), pp. 140, 139.

5. For general background on the silver fork novel, see Matthew Whiting Rosa, The Silver Fork School: Novels of Fashion Preceding “Vanity Fair” (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1936); Francis Russell Hart, “The Regency Novel of Fashion,” in From Smollett to James: Studies in the Novel and Other Essays Presented to Edgar Johnson, ed. Samuel I. Mintz, Alice Chandler, and Christopher Mulvey (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1981), pp. 84-133; Winifred Hughes, “Silver Fork Writers and Readers: Social Contexts of a Best Seller,” Novel, 25 (1992), 328-47; Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960); Michael Sadleir, Bulwer: A Panorama, Part One: Edward and Rosina, 1803-1836 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931); Alison Adburgham, Silver Fork Society: Fashionable Life and Literature from 1814 to 1840 (London: Constable, 1983); and Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830 (New York: Longman, 1989). The best contemporary account is in Edward Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English, ed. Standish Meacham (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970). The derisive term “silver fork” originated in William Hazlitt, “The Dandy School,” Examiner (18 November 1827); rpt. in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: Dent, 1934), XX, 146.

6. See The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981), p. 55.

7. Catherine Gore, Cecil; or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb (London: Bentley, 1845), p. 13. Cited hereafter in the text as Cecil.

8. Gore, Cecil, a Peer: A Sequel to Cecil; or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb, 3 vols. (London: Boone, 1841), I, 20. Cited by volume and page number hereafter in the text as Cecil, a Peer.

9. R. J. White, Life in Regency England (London: Batsford, 1963), p. 4.

10. The Hamiltons; or, Official Life in 1830 (London: Bentley, 1850), p. 247.

11. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Thomas H. D. Mahoney (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), p. 86.

12. The Diary of a Désennuyée (New York: Harper, 1836), p. 24.

13. The classic study of the dandy is Moers, to which I am much indebted, as I am also to Gilmour, who discusses the Cecil novels on pp. 55-56.

14. Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Pelham; or, The Adventures of a Gentleman, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1972), p. 30.

15. See Moers, pp. 177-78; Sartor Resartus first appeared as a series in Fraser's (1833-34).

16. See [? Francis Jocox], “Mrs. Gore,” New Monthly Magazine; rpt. in Littell's Living Age, 34 (11 September 1852), 545.

17. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero, ed. Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), p. 180.

18. Yesterday's Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), p. 65.

19. [William Maginn], “Mr. Edward Lytton Bulwer's Novels; and Remarks on Novel-Writing,” Fraser's Magazine, 1 (1830), 515. This article was a major source for Carlyle's Sartor Resartus.

20. [Henry Taylor], “Novels of Fashionable Life,” Quarterly Review, 48 (1832), 177, 165.

21. See James R. Kincaid, “Trollope's Fictional Autobiography,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37 (1982), 342. The term “mercantile comedy” is introduced on p. 347.

22. Charles Dickens, Bleak House: An Authorized and Annotated Text, Illustrations, a Note on the Text, Genesis and Composition, Backgrounds, Criticism, ed. George Ford and Sylvère Monod (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), p. 145.

23. See Ray, “The Bentley Papers,” pp. 190, 193.

24. Richard Hengist Horne, ed., A New Spirit of the Age (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1907), pp. 166-67. Originally published in 1844. The entry on Gore was not written by Horne but by one of his anonymous collaborators.