Silver Fork Writers and Readers: Social Contexts of a Best Seller

Abstract

The original romances-arguably the first best sellers in the modern sense of the term and the remote ancestors of our perennial drugstore paperbacks-were the so-called silver fork or fashionable novels, which invaded the literary marketplace during the socially and politically volatile interim of the 1820s and 30s. While England witnessed the death of the last of the four Georges and debated the Reform Bill, such highly spiced titles as Th e Exclusives, The Divorced, The Victims of Society and The Diary of a Disennuyde poured from the presses, most of them under the imprint of a single enterprising promoter by the name of Henry Colburn.' Their fictional territory was the exclusive and self-enclosed world of aristocratic high society during the Regency and its prolonged aftermath. Their typical characters were the dandies, rakes and women of the world who populated the town houses and the country estates, congregating in Almack's assembly rooms on Wednesday evenings during the London Season, retreating to the select men's clubs that lined St. James's Street or to the Regent's private enclave at Carlton House. Their treatment of this specialized subject matter was appropriately mercurial, by turns supercilious or witty, disenchanted or exuberant. Benjamin Disraeli, who began his varied career under Colburn's aegis, encapsulates the patented ingredients of the vogue in his playfully self-reflexive receipt for writing a novel from The Young Duke (1829):