The novel of English life and manners includes many subdivisions.  Among the writings of Miss Edgeworth, Miss Ferrier, Bulwer Lytton, Mr. Anthony Trollope, and others, are novels which deal to a greater or less extent with fashionable life.  A number of novelists, principally female, have confined their studies to the aristocratic classes.[209] But the so called fashionable novel is most often the composition of adventurers whose catch-penny productions aim at affording, to the middle or lower ranks, information concerning the habits of the aristocracy.  It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that fashionable life in these novels is such as it might appear to an imaginative kitchen-maid whose idea of up-stairs existence is founded on the gossip of servants.  When written by persons conversant with their subject, the fashionable novel forms a legitimate subdivision of the novel of life and manners.  But it is most often a noxious weed.  Its cultivators constantly make up for lack of talent by the excitement of immoral scenes, and give to their audience of sempstresses and grooms a most degraded view of aristocratic life.  Even when harmless in matter, its rank luxuriance fills up space much better occupied by the flowers of literature.

The eminent criminal novel is taken as a tonic by minds satiated with the vapidity of fashionable fiction.  From Lytton’s “Paul Clifford,” and Ainsworth’s “Jack Sheppard,” down to “Merciless Ben, the Hair-Lifter,” criminal narrative has been occupied with endowing burglars and murderers with the graces of gentlemen and the moral worth of Christian missionaries.  In its celebration of successful crime, and its representation under a heroic aspect of villains and blacklegs, no species of fiction is more false to nature or more injurious to youthful readers.

To such writers as George A. Lawrence and “Ouida” the world is indebted for the “Muscular Novel,” which combines all the worst elements of both fashionable and criminal narrative.  In “Guy Livingstone,” “Strathmore,” and a hundred similar fictions, the reader is introduced to men of extraordinary physical development, whose strength is proof against the wildest dissipation; to women of extraordinary beauty, whose charms are enhanced in proportion to their coarseness and lack of modesty.  Jack Sheppard, reposing on a velvet couch, smoking a perfumed cigarette, and worshipped by two or three ornaments of the demi-monde, is the type most admired by the muscular novelist.  Lawrence and “Ouida” have brought to their work a literary power which has given them considerable notoriety; and has placed them at the head of their particular school; but it is a school whose distinctive characteristics consist in extravagance, unhealthiness of tone, and falseness to nature.