SOURCE: “The Dandiacal Body,” in The Silver-Fork School: Novels of Fashion Preceding Vanity Fair, Columbia University Press, 1936, pp. 15-54.

In the following essay, Rosa provides a general review of the focus of Silver Fork novels on light amusements of fashionable society—a focus which led to parodies of their superficiality.

The fashionable novel tells us, in effect, that the world is a place of make-believe and sham, and that nowhere is this so true as among the members of fashionable society. The deliciousness of its comedy increases in the very ratio in which it is faithful to all the outward trappings of that society. In striving for the utmost correspondence between fictional characters and the picture of the aristocracy drawn from Debrett's Peerage, the Court Journal, and the tailor's style book, it must be admitted that the novelists occasionally omitted the saving spark of life and humor, and...