The Victorian Silver-Fork Novel

The Silver-Fork Novel was a fashionable genre in the early Victorian age. It had its heyday in the 1820s and 1830s, although silver-fork novels continued to be published throughout the fourties, and there is also a distinguishable "second wave" of novels that still proved popular in the fifties and sixties. The majority of these later novels, however, are frequently satirical, self-consciously critical, or actively involved in promoting a distinctly bourgeois ideology that was far removed from the original emphasis on aristocratic elegance.

Why "silver-fork"? The derisive term “silver-fork” to describe this genre was coined by William Hazlitt in an article on “The Dandy School”, published in the Examiner in 1827. Hazlitt set out to rail against Theodore Hook’s novels and proceeded to critique the formula on which a plethora of popular novels at the time were based. As the editor of John Bull, Hook particularly seemed to invite such censure, as Hazlitt was quick to point out: “The English are not a nation of dandies; nor can John Bull afford (whatever the panders to fashion and admirers of courtly graces may say to the contrary) to rest all his pretensions upon that. He must descend to a broader and more manly level to keep his ground at all.” (145-146)

This juxtaposition of manly simplicity with the superficial flamboyance of the dandy ironically informed not only reactions to the silver-fork novel, but also the genre itself. For Hazlitt, Hook’s greatest offence was, in fact, a snobbish pretension to an association with high life that smacked at once of fawning emulation and ignorant mimicking. Hazlitt heavily criticised him for his “under-bred tone”, emphasising that “Mr Hook has a fellow-feeling with low life or rather with vulgarity aping gentility, but he has never got beyond the outside of what he calls good society” (147).

It is this recreation of high life from the outside, Hazlitt argued, that resulted in the inadvertently comical astonishment with which such writers informed their readers that “the quality eat with silver forks” (146) – an emphasis on the superficialities of a society branded as superficial. The snobbish outsider writing silver-fork fiction exhibited an admixture of ignorance and embarrassing pride in a vicarious familiarity with the details of high society, sharing the “[v]isions of good and ill breeding, of old vulgarisms and new gentilities” that preoccupy Susan Price as she is seen “meditating much upon silver forks, napkins, and finger glasses” (446) in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, and which stand in starkly comical contrast to the emotional turmoil dwelt upon by her sister and cousins.

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