The Novel of Fashion Redressed: Bulwer-Lytton's Pelham in a 19 th -Century Context

Abstract

The nineteenth-century novel of fashion isn't terribly fashionable these days. A fictional genre that dates in Britain from the late eigh teenth century, that dominated the literary marketplace in the 1820s and 30s under the epithet of the silver-fork school, and that remained popular through the nineteenth century in the various sub-genres to which it gave rise, the novel of fashion has been widely dismissed by both its nineteenth-century and more recent critics. Despite the dura tion of its popularity and the breadth of its appeal among then-con temporary readers, critics have disregarded the genre on the grounds of its folly, insipidity, and general irrelevance to the novel's develop ment in Britain.1 Seen to possess none of the prerequisites to literary value, fashionable literature is assumed to aspire mainly to novelty, popular appeal, and commercial success. Freighted with charges of overproduction, bad writing, and extravagant romance, fashionable novels are said to be interesting only insofar as they increase our understanding of those who react against them, especially of Thac keray (Tillotson 5). Perhaps most damning of all, the genre is seen to concern itself solely with the condition of the rich a point of focus that appears particularly inexcusable on the other side of the industrial fiction and bourgeois social realism that emerges immedi ately in its wake (Rosa 4). These various accusations are not without foundation: the novel