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SILVER-FORKS AND THECOMMODITY TEXT: LADYMORGAN AND THE ATHENAEUMEllen Miller CaseyPublished online: 06 Aug 2009.

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SILVER-FORKS AND THE

COMMODITY TEXT: LADY

MORGAN AND THE ATHENAEUM

One way to understand such minor genres as silver-fork novels is to trace thereactions of their readers. The Athenaeum, founded in 1828, is especiallyvaluable for such a project, as it reviewed most of these novels and prided itself onits independence from publishers’ puffery. From the beginning, Athenaeumreviewers hoped for the end of fashionable novels, attacking them for theirquantity, their style, and their content. More importantly, they saw them as whatN. N. Feltes calls commodity texts, produced in response to the mass readingaudience.

Silver-fork novels dominated popular fiction in the 1820s and 1830s.Reviewers, epitomized here by those of the weekly review journal theAthenaeum, deplored this popularity. They attacked fashionable novels for theirnumerical dominance, vulgar style, and immoral content. These attacksprovide an often witty insight into Victorian literary standards. Moresignificantly, Athenaeum reviewers, especially Lady Sydney Owenson Morgan,made a convincing argument that silver-fork novels were examples of‘‘commodity texts’’, as defined by N. N. Feltes in Modes of Production ofVictorian Novels. Such texts were generated by professional authors for a newlyliterate mass reading audience and characterized by ‘‘virtually limitlessmultiplication’’. This process was not simply ‘‘petty-commodity production’’,a matter of publishers appealing to readers’ tastes to sell books, but an exampleof ‘‘the new capitalist mode of production’’ in which the audience was ‘‘madeby what makes the book’’.1

The negative response to ‘‘silver-fork’’ or ‘‘fashionable’’ novels runsthrough all the Athenaeum reviews. When it began publication in 1828, theAthenaeum was already entertaining ‘‘not a rash confidence, but a cheeringconviction, that the race of fashionable novels [was] extinct’’.2 Repeatedly, theAthenaeum proclaimed the death of the fashionable novel, declaring in 1833 that

Women’s Writing Vol. 16, No. 2 August 2009, pp. 253�262ISSN 0969-9082 print/ISSN 1747-5848 online – 2009 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09699080902978310

Ellen Miller Casey

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it was ‘‘exploded’’3, and in 1834 that the genre belonged ‘‘to the vituperatedclass’’.4 In 1836, it asserted that ‘‘this class has been thoroughly worked out.All its possible combinations have been exhausted, all its possible charactersdelineated.’’5 This certainty of extinction seemed a vain hope, for silver-forknovels continued their popularity for more than another decade, a factreluctantly acknowledged even by the Athenaeum. In 1835, a reviewer felt ‘‘asthough we were holding a levee’’ since there were five novels with aristocraticnames lined up for review.6 In 1841, Morgan listed silver-fork novels as one ofthe common types, along with religious, political, American, factory-boy, JackSheppard, and sea novels.7

While the fashionable novel was genuinely exhausted by the end of the1840s, an occasional one still turned up in the 1850s. One hears a note ofdesperation in Henry Fothergill Chorley’s 1851 announcement: ‘‘We have hadenough of palaces and of jails � of charming paupers and of cruel aristocrats �of dishes and of dances.’’8 The same desperate note appears in 1857 whenHorace Stebbing Roscoe St. John expresses surprise at David M’Culloch’s AlmaTheresa because he thinks extinct this kind of novel in which ‘‘all the dear girlsare married to excellent young lords and baronets’’.9 As late as 1856 EustaceMitford’s The Wilderness of the World appeared, full of ‘‘coronets, finegentlemen, and still finer ladies, court plumes, diamond necklaces, the PrinceRegent, masquerades, money-lenders, vindictive Italians, vicious tempered olddowagers, gay Lotharios’’.10

The critics longed for the death of fashionable novels for several reasons.For one, the form demonstrated what Feltes calls ‘‘limitless multiplication’’.There were simply too many such novels. Writers seemed to think that onlyfashionable people were fit subjects for novels11, and that every novel needed alord.12 The Reverend John Hobart Caunter complained that the town was‘‘almost surfeited’’ with such novels, and that writers seemed to imagine ‘‘thefashionable world to be the world at large, and that nothing out of it is worthyof a stroke of their pens’’. He dismissed this as a silly notion, ‘‘for there isalways far more worth recording in natural than in artificial life � which wetake fashionable life to be’’.13 Moreover, the fashionable novels repeated thesame characters and incidents. The reviewers complained about the ‘‘somethousand and one specimens*similar in form, aim, structure, dialogue,and finish’’.14 Over and over, fashionable novels multiplied their tales of‘‘dukes, silver-forks, kitchen stuff, mysteries, foundlings, murders, suicides,duelling’’.15

In addition to complaining about the number of fashionable novels,Athenaeum reviewers objected to their style. Silver-fork novels were blamed forcorrupting the language with ‘‘paltry affectations of phrase’’, ‘‘vulgar wordsimported from the club-house, or the kennel’’, and ‘‘flagrant outrages uponthe laws of universal grammar’’.16 The reviewers even assailed the style of

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Catherine Gore, whom they repeatedly praised as the best and cleverest of thesilver-fork novelists. They objected to Pin Money because ‘‘the style is artificialand stilted, with a most profuse scattering of hard words, compound words,and supernumerary adjectives’’.17 They dismissed Stokeshill-Place because it waswritten in ‘‘a style mannered in the excess of the freedom which she takes with‘the King’s English’’’.18 The style of silver-fork novels was so offensive that thereview of William Maginn’s Tales of Military Life suggested that their literaryoffences might be even greater than their moral transgressions, for ‘‘the tasteand feelings of the English public will revive, we trust, after a short time fromthe exhaustion which such sickly diet must infallibly occasion’’. It seemed lesslikely, however, that ‘‘the English language’’ would be as quick to ‘‘shake offthe villanous [sic] diseases with which [these novels] have infected it’’.19

Despite this comment, most reviewers objected less to the style than tothe content of fashionable novels. They attacked them for their ‘‘hackneyedaffectations’’20, their preoccupation with ‘‘Turkey carpets, and artificialflowers, and wax-candles’’21, their ‘‘fashionable gabble’’ and ‘‘fopperies ofexclusiveness’’22, and for their obsession with ‘‘the well-padded, curled,painted, and perfumed body of fashion’’.23 The objection to fashionable novels’superficiality is epitomized by the hope expressed by the reviewer of WilliamGodwin’s Cloudesley that Godwin’s work might reclaim the public taste fromits foolish and degrading idolatries, ‘‘when a host of gentlemen, with nomaterials save effrontery and the Court guide, undertake to teach the mob howthe great live, and the wise talk, in fashionable and political novels’’.24

Even the best of the fashionable novels were dismissed as superficial. Thereview of Pelham acclaimed Edward Bulwer-Lytton for doing well what othersdid ‘‘weakly and badly’’: giving a series of fashionable portraits without‘‘degenerating into tameness or insipidity’’. Because he could do so muchmore, however, the Athenaeum hoped that Bulwer-Lytton would soonrecognize the ‘‘folly’’ of writing such novels and turn instead to writingmore naturally, describing human character ‘‘without clothing it either infoppery or harlotry’’.25 This advice to Bulwer-Lytton indicates that thefundamental objection to the shallowness of silver-fork novels was a moralone: the artificial and superficial afflicted and cheapened the reader. Thesenovels had a ‘‘blighting influence of artificial manners, cynical egotism, andcorrupted morals’’.26 They pandered to the ‘‘prevalent itch for scandal’’ anddisplayed an incessant ‘‘heartlessness’’.27

But we ignore the depth of the Athenaeum’s analysis of these novels if weread its objections to them as based simply on number or style or morals. Itwas not only that too many novels portrayed guilty passion, which wasinappropriate for women to write or read.28 Rather, these novels bothreflected a dangerously superficial and immoral society and contributed to itsills. They were genuine commodity texts, a result of the new economic

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process of supply and demand which made tradesmen out of writers,customers out of readers, and manufactured objects out of creative works.This analysis runs through many of the Athenaeum reviews, and is mostthoroughly developed in those by Morgan.

At the most elementary level, authors and publishers produced silver-forknovels so that they could make money, dismissing as unimportant their appealto readers’ baser passions. The process by which the silver-fork novel became amoney machine was laid out in the 1829 review of Lady Charlotte Bury’s TheExclusives:

Some few years ago it occurred to an individual who had observed thepleasure that little people take in hearing about great people, and greatpeople in hearing about themselves, to indite that most frivolous ofearthly compositions, ‘‘A Fashionable Novel.’’ The attempt was profit-able, and the example speedily succeeded by a hydra host of imitations.Some of these were produced by the fashionables themselves, and someby the footmen of those fashionables; some by literary young gentlemen,who occupy fourth stories, in retired situations, and whose knowledge ofthe great world is acquired through the medium of Sunday promenades inHyde Park, and a rare visit to the Opera, when their finances permit thesacrifice of half a guinea. Each class of authors had its own peculiar merit.The first were the most scandalous; the second, the most refined; and thethird, the most grammatical.

The marketing of these fashionable novels provides a classic illustration of theworkings of the new capitalist economy. The review of Bury’s novel elaborateson the process: the novels were read ‘‘with avidity, and the happy consequencewas, that some persons of fashion paid their debts, some footmen retired on acompetency, and some gentlemen of the fourth story removed to the first, andset up a joint-stock cabriolet’’.29 This history attributes cleverness to the firstauthor of the fashionable novel and greed to the later ones. Greed on the partof writers, however, was not enough for the creation of a market. It alsoneeded readers who were interested in reading novels about ‘‘the fashionables’’and an effective system of trade ‘‘to puff them into fame’’.30 An importantelement of this system was the creation of ‘‘branded goods’’.31 The 1828review of Life in India implies that this process was already in place when itnotes that many titles which suggested the silver-fork genre were a ‘‘piousfraud’’ executed by publishers who exploited the popularity of the type.32

While it was hard to invent the fashionable novel, it was easy to imitate it.Since such novels required work but not genius or even talent, they came to bewritten by anyone: ‘‘demireps and black-legs, broken-down gamblers, roues,and half-pay dragoon officers, with a sprinkling of imbecile honourables and

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romantic spinsters’’.33 Even if these authors were talented, limiting themselvesto ‘‘imitating or counterfeiting’’ the work of others was ‘‘a dangerousstumbling-block’’ to the development of their talent.34 According to thereview of Pelham, these writers, ‘‘not being possessed of sufficient genius forthe composition of works of genuine imagination, have endeavoured to writethemselves into notice, by the use of means which the passions or inexperienceof their readers can alone render successful’’.35 In short, it was the interactionof a supply produced by authors and a demand created by readers thatfashioned the rage for silver-fork novels. This taste was formed not just bygreedy authors but ‘‘partly by a bad condition of society’’.36

This notion of a bad society being the cause of bad literature wasdeveloped in several important reviews by Morgan in 1839 and 1840. Herreviews of William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard, Catherine Gore’s TheDowager, and Daniel M’Carthy’s The Siege of Florence discourse at length onthe ‘‘relation of the author to his public’’, which shaped contemporaryliterature.37 Morgan anticipates Feltes’ notion that a commodity textinterpellates ‘‘a mass bourgeois audience’’38 when she argues that the Englishaudience has changed, that it is no longer made up of ‘‘the well-educatedman of the world, the philosopher, or the student’’.39 Unlike authors of thepast who formed their readers, contemporary writers ‘‘take their tone fromtheir readers, instead of giving it; and [ . . .] write down to the mediocrity ofthe purchasing multitude’’. Authors ‘‘must subordinate [their] own tastes tothose of [their] customers’’40 and follow rather than lead the public taste.41

This literary economy has made ‘‘tradesmen’’ of authors and ‘‘customers’’ ofreaders:

The power of producing without capital, peculiar to authorship, has, inthe overcrowded state of the markets for all other modes of industry,made literature a trade. The object of all trade is to produce much andfast; while the demand for books having descended to the masses, hasrendered an inferior literature not merely tolerable, but acceptable.42

This metaphor of author as tradesman is echoed in Isadore and/or FeliciaHemans’s review of Mrs Trollope’s Charles Chesterfield:

In the present state of things, the literary market is subjected to the samelaws of supply and demand which regulate the commercial world; thepublisher has just as strong a motive to study the intellectual wants of thepublic, as the merchant or tradesman to study its material wants.43

In her review of The Dowager, Morgan insists that the process of trade is areciprocal one. The ‘‘wider spread of literature’’ leads to a ‘‘demand for

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inferior articles’’, while ‘‘with the reduction in the value of the articledemanded, there co-exists an increase of effective demand’’. Because imitatingpopular forms spares him labor, the author becomes ‘‘a mere tradesman’’ andaccommodates himself to an audience of lower qualifications than the formerone. The arbiter of contemporary literature has become the publisher, who‘‘from the returns of his ledger [ . . .] collects with statistical accuracy the sortof book which is wanting’’ and dictates to authors how to appeal to their‘‘customers’’.

Since the publisher is interested in rapid sales, ‘‘an indifferent manuscriptpurchased at a low price, and driven through the market at a hard-gallop, ismore esteemed, than a valuable work whose purchase money is to be spreadover many editions’’. Writing requires no capital, so even minor talents canproduce novels. This means that ‘‘the market is effectually over-stocked; pricesfall, and the author who writes for bread [ . . .] is compelled to work withgreater rapidity, and to substitute the number, for the inherent excellence ofhis works’’. This supply of cheap books, in turn, begets in the reader ‘‘adiseased passion for novelty’’ and the habit of ‘‘reading without judgment’’.44

Morgan returns to this argument in her review of M’Carthy’s The Siege ofFlorence. She argues that the increased demand for books forces rapidproduction; this in turn leads to exhaustion of the author’s imagination andof the public’s sensitivity. If a work of genius does arise, ‘‘a host of innovators’’multiply its forms and fritter away its beauties ‘‘in endless repetitions, each,for the most part, differing from its predecessor, only in the inferiority of itsexecution. The new form is no sooner recognised, than it is worn to a thread.’’Here, Morgan replaces the metaphor of manufacturing with that of trade, butshe recognizes the same ‘‘virtually limitless multiplication’’ of the capitalisteconomy of production and consumption which Feltes identifies. The baddrives out the good, and even if a great work appears, the satiated public‘‘responds not to the stimulus, and receives with indifference excellencieswhich formerly would have obtained signal success’’. The public demands‘‘literary dram-drinking’’, so authors and publishers ‘‘work the illegal still’’.45

In her review of Jack Sheppard, Morgan suggests that not only the silver-fork novel but also the Newgate novel emerged from this interpellation ofreaders by authors and publishers. She notes that many reviewers link the riseof the Newgate novel to ‘‘a natural and inevitable reaction of the public mindupon the fashion of the so-called silver-fork school’’. These critics suggest that‘‘the public, satiated with vapid and languid insipidity, turned with a morbidappetite in search of strong excitement, to the coarse manners and vulgarcrimes of low life’’. Morgan, however, rejects this idea. Rather, she insists thatboth the silver-fork novels of fashion and the Newgate novels of low lifeemerge from the same cause: the state of contemporary society.

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She identifies modern England’s ‘‘two leading feelings’’: ‘‘the desire forwealth as the instrument of this world’s pleasures, and a fretful, gloomy, anddesponding uneasiness about the path to happiness in the next’’. Both thesefeelings, of greed and of gloom, grow out of ‘‘an increased artificiality of sociallife, an estrangement from nature, and a consequent merging of allindividualities in one common character, cold, monotonous, superficial,polished (it may be), but hard and hollow’’.46 This enervated state of societyhas led to the corruption of both authors and readers. It turns writers intotradesmen and leads readers to desire unhealthy food. Those who arepreoccupied by business and politics*middle- and upper-class readers*lookto fiction for light amusement, as a source ‘‘of pastime and repose’’. In short,they read silver-fork novels. On the other hand, ‘‘the severity of the strugglefor existence’’ blunts the sensibilities of lower-class readers and provokes inthem a desire for strong sensations. They read Newgate novels.47 In bothcases, the demand of the readers for inferior literature is reciprocally related tothe supply of such texts marketed by publishers and authors. Supply feedsdemand, which in turn makes it profitable to increase the supply. This processhas led to two opposite kinds of fiction: the superficial and frivolous on the onehand, and the exceptional and violent on the other; that is, to silver-fork andNewgate novels.48

Most Athenaeum reviewers attacked silver-fork novels for their number,style, and immorality, and many recognized and deplored the commodificationof literature which they represented. Lady Morgan was the most articulate atspelling out this latter argument. She insisted that a people’s literature‘‘embraces no less than the whole round of their moral existence, and throws astrong light on their institutions, their habits, their present capabilities, andtheir future prospects’’.49 She also maintained that the job of the critic is toanalyse the social rather than the individual causes of change. This insistenceextends her Athenaeum reviews of silver-fork novels from simple recommenda-tions for reading to profound analyses of her society and the commodity textswhich it produced.

Notes

1 N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (1986; Chicago: U ofChicago P, 1989) xi, 7�10.

2 Rev. of Life in India; or the English at Calcutta, [By Mary Campbell or AnneCatherine Monkland], Athenaeum 53 (29 Oct. 1828): 832. The Athenaeumwebsite (Bhttp://athenaeum.soi.city.ac.uk/home.html�) identifies re-viewers whose names are noted in the editors’ marked copies of theAthenaeum. When available, these names have been indicated.

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3 Rev. of Aurungzebe; or, A Table of Alraschid, by John Ainslie, Athenaeum 311(12 Oct. 1833): 677.

4 Rev. of Dacre: A Novel, ed. Countess of Morley [Frances Parker], Athenaeum349 (5 July 1834): 497�98.

5 Rev. of Mrs Armytage; or Female Domination, by the Authoress of Mothers andDaughters [Catherine Grace Frances Gore (nee Moody)], Athenaeum 454 (9July 1836): 482�83 (483).

6 Rev. of Plantagenet, Athenaeum 403 (13 July 1835): 541.7 [Sydney Owenson Morgan], rev. of The Old English Gentleman, by John Mills,

Athenaeum 732 (6 Nov. 1841): 853.8 [Henry Fothergill Chorley], rev. of The First Angel: A Novel, Athenaeum 1214

(1 Feb. 1851): 129.9 [Horace Stebbing Roscoe St. John], rev. of Alma Theresa, by David

M’Culloch, Athenaeum 1538 (18 Apr. 1857): 500.10 [Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury], rev. of The Wilderness of the World: A Novel, by

Eustace Mitford, Athenaeum 1489 (10 May 1856): 584.11 [John Hobart Caunter], rev. of At Home and Abroad; or Memoirs of Emily de

Cardonnell, by the Author of Rome in the Nineteenth Century, &c. [CharlotteAnne Eaton (nee Waldie)], Athenaeum 179 (2 Apr. 1831): 209.

12 Rev. of The Merchant’s Daughter, by the Author of The Heiress, Agnes Serle, &c.[Ellen Pickering], Athenaeum 477 (17 Dec. 1836): 883.

13 John Hobart Caunter, rev. of Glen-Moubray: A Tale, Athenaeum 205 (1 Oct.1831): 631.

14 Rev. of The Woman of the World, by the Authoress of The Diary of a Desennuyee[Catherine Grace Frances Gore (nee Moody)], Athenaeum 558 (7 July 1838):473.

15 Rev. of Village Belles; a Novel, [by Anne Manning], Athenaeum 299 (10 July1833): 471.

16 Rev. of Tales of Military Life, by the Author of The Military Sketch Book[William Maginn], Athenaeum 77 (15 Apr. 1829): 229.

17 Rev. of Pin Money: A Novel, by the Authoress of The Manners of the Day[Catherine Grace Frances Gore (nee Moody)], Athenaeum 189 (11 June1831): 377.

18 Rev. of Stokeshill-Place; or, The Man of Business, by the Author of Mrs Armytage,Mothers and Daughters, &c. [Catherine Grace Frances Gore (nee Moody)],Athenaeum 511 (12 Aug. 1837): 579.

19 Rev. of Tales of Military Life 229.20 [Andrew Picken], rev. of Chartley, the Fatalist, [by James Dalton], Athenaeum

156 (23 Oct. 1830): 662.21 Rev. of The Sea Kings in England: An Historical Romance of the Time of Alfred, by

the Author of The Fall of Nineveh [Edwin Atherstone], Athenaeum 161 (27Nov. 1830): 738.

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22 [William Pitt Scargill], rev. of The Hamiltons; or, The New Era, by the Authorof Mothers and Daughters [Catherine Grace Frances Gore (nee Moody)],Athenaeum 333 (15 Mar. 1834): 202.

23 Rev. of The Fair of Mayfair, [by Catherine Grace Frances Gore (nee Moody)],Athenaeum 236 (5 May 1832): 287.

24 Rev. of Cloudesley: A Tale, by the Author of Caleb Williams [William Godwin],Athenaeum 125 (20 Mar. 1830): 162.

25 Rev. of Pelham; or The Adventures of a Gentleman, [by Edward George EarleLytton Bulwer-Lytton], Athenaeum 29 (14 May 1828): 451�52.

26 Rev. of The Three Eras of Woman’s Life, by Elizabeth Elton Smith, Athenaeum453 (2 July 1836): 461�62 (462).

27 Rev. of Mrs Armytage 482.28 Rev. of The Disinherited, and The Ensnared, by the Authoress of Flirtation

[Charlotte Susan Maria Bury (nee Campbell)], Athenaeum 350 (12 July 1834):518�19.

29 Rev. of The Exclusives, [by Charlotte Susan Maria Bury (nee Campbell)],Athenaeum 112 (16 Dec. 1829): 782.

30 Rev. of The Sketch Book of Fashion, by the Author of Mothers and Daughters[Catherine Grace Frances Gore (nee Moody)], Athenaeum 278 (23 Feb.1833): 116.

31 Feltes 83�84.32 Rev. of Life in India 832.33 [Andrew Picken], rev. of Basil Barrington and his Friends, [by Robert Pierce

Gillies], Athenaeum 154 (9 Oct. 1830): 625�26.34 Rev. of The Three Eras of Woman’s Life 461.35 Rev. of Pelham 451.36 Rev. of Pelham 451.37 [Sydney Owenson Morgan], rev. of Jack Sheppard: A Romance, [by William

Harrison Ainsworth], Athenaeum 626 (26 Oct. 1839): 803�05 (803).38 Feltes 9.39 [Sydney Owenson Morgan], rev. of The Dowager; or, The New School for

Scandal, by Mrs [Catherine Grace Frances] Gore [nee Moody], Athenaeum678 (14 Nov. 1840): 899.

40 [Morgan], rev. of Jack Sheppard 803.41 [Morgan], rev. of The Dowager 899.42 [Morgan], rev. of Jack Sheppard 804.43 [Isadore and/or Felicia Hemans], rev. of Charles Chesterfield; or, The Adventures

of a Youth of Genius, by Mrs [Frances] Trollope [nee Milton], Athenaeum 726(25 Sept. 1841): 740.

44 [Morgan], rev. of The Dowager 899.45 [Sydney Owenson Morgan], rev. of The Siege of Florence, by Daniel

M’Carthy, Athenaeum 683 (30 Nov. 1840): 944�46 (944).46 [Morgan], rev. of Jack Sheppard 803�04.47 [Morgan], rev. of The Dowager 899.

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48 [Morgan], rev. of The Siege of Florence 944�45.49 [Morgan], rev. of The Dowager 899.

Ellen Miller Casey received her BS in English from Loyola University, Chicago,

her MA from the University of Iowa, and her PhD from the University of

Wisconsin�Madison, USA. She is professor of English and director of the Honors

Program at the University of Scranton. She has published widely on the

reception of Victorian fiction, including that of American novels, Charles

Dickens, women authors, and the sensation novel. Address: English Department,

University of Scranton, Scranton, PA 18510, USA. [email: CaseyE1@scranton.edu]

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