Tarnished silver : the silver-fork novel and the rhetoric for reform

Histories of the British novel cast only sidelong glances at the fiction of 1820s during the reign of George IV, an age when the landowning upper classes were at once politically dominant as well as under siege in social life and in literature. This dissertation examines the silver-fork novels written prior to the Reform Bill to show how these novels were not simply popular narratives caught in what is often considered a literary void between Austen and Dickens, but were rather transitory narratives that marked a manifold juncture in the social history of the early nineteenth century between the decadent Regency period and the Victorian age of reform. ''Tarnished Silver" examines how the silver-fork novels of Theodore Hook, Robert Plumer Ward, Thomas Henry Lister, Benjamin Disraeli, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton went beyond merely reflecting the artificiality of fashionable society, helping to foster a reform ideology predicated on creating a politically active and socially responsible aristocracy.

Chapter One of this dissertation constructs a theory of the silver-fork novel, both as literary text and historical cultural critique by considering certain ideological pressures which critically reflected upon the socio-political realities that shaped readership and author alike. This chapter also surveys both the contemporary and modern critical assessments of the silver-fork novel, and concludes that the serious critical purpose that lies beneath the surface triviality of the genre as a whole has not been fully discerned by literary critics. In demonstrating how silver-fork novelists helped to shape a liberal paradigm for the critical social novel, Chapters Two through Six of this study examine the ways in which particular silver-fork novels represent a dialectical and critical involvement with the problem of aristocratic authority, and demonstrate how these novels helped structure the emergent critical potential of the genre by working towards the consolidation of a reform ideology that would trickle down through all levels of society.

This dissertation concludes that silver-fork novels provide the reader with a cultural criticism representing both historical continuity and social change, and can be seen as laying the groundwork for the Victorian social problem novel.