The Silver Fork School and Nineteenth-Century Realisms: The Cases of Catherine Gore and Benjamin Disraeli

This paper will discuss how the silver fork novel, also known as ‘the fashionable novel’, participated in the development of nineteenth-century British realism by examining the cuts and revisions in different versions of several silver fork novels. This genre, which flourished in Britain during the 1820s and 30s before declining, is famous for its plotlessness and lack of inner life of characters, as well as for its unrestrained and supposedly superficial depiction of the material life of the aristocratic society. The school’s focus on the fashionable life had attracted the attacks of critics such as George Eliot, who considered it both immoral and shallow. With the advent of the Victorian era, the few silver fork novels that had the opportunity to be republished were significantly revised. Authors such as Catherine Gore and Benjamin Disraeli removed overly detailed descriptions of fashion — including clothing, fabrics, jewellery and accessories — as well as idle daily chatter among aristocrats, making the novels more compact, the plot more coherent, the characters more distinctive, and more in line with the new era’s realist requirements. Despite these efforts, the Silver Fork novel as a genre eventually disappeared from standard literary histories. This paper argues that the version differences represent two (failed) attempts by the silver fork novelists to work outside of the existing realism path, and the silver fork novel’s failure provides a microcosm of the development of Realism in the nineteenth century; meanwhile, the alternative realism of the Silver Fork novels is being echoed in the present day through new media: Regency-era themed films and TV series such as Bridgerton and the 2020 version of Emma.