SOURCE: “Subgenres of the Novel from 1830 to 1837: Silver-Fork Fiction,” in The Victorian Novel before Victoria: British Fiction during the Reign of William IV, 1830-1837, Macmillan Press, 1984, pp. 106-19.

In the following excerpt, Engel and King claim that Silver Fork fiction, while relatively short-lived and undistinguished as a sub-genre, formed the basis for the great satiric novels of the Victorian era.

Madame de Staël, a theorist of Romanticism during and after the French Revolution, lived in England for several years and offered a vivid critique of its society by comparing the English people to their cherished ale: ‘The top is all forth, the middle good, the bottom dregs.’²⁴ During the reign of William iv, the school of fiction devoted to the ‘froth’ was known variously as the ‘dandy’ school, the ‘silver-fork’ school and the school of the fashionable novel. Although the vogue for such fiction began with the...