I’m slowly making my way through Michael Slater’s biography of Charles Dickens at the moment, and at one point I came across a reference to Dickens’ fellow author Catherine Gore. I had not heard of Gore before. She was a prolific writer of what become known as ‘silver-fork‘ novels. The ever-reliable Wikipedia tells me that silver-fork novels:

“dominated the English literature market from the mid-1820s to the mid-1840s. They were often indiscreet, and on occasion “keys” would circulate that identified the real people on which the principal characters were based. Their emphasis on the relations of the sexes and on marital relationships presaged later development in the novel.”

The novels focus on the lives of the aristocracy and the manners of the high society, in particular that of the Regency period.

Other writers in the genre included Theodore Hook, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Benjamin Disraeli, Lady Blessington and Lady Bury. Bulwer-Lytton is principally remembered for coining phrases such as “the great unwashed” and “the pen is mightier than the sword“, as well as the famously bad opening line “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals.”

The purpose of this entry, which I am eventually getting to, is that until I fell down this particular internet rabbit-hole I had never heard of this genre of English fiction. Perhaps I should have but I suspect this is not just my blind-spot. Its novelists are to all intents and purposes no longer read; the vast popularity of their novels is forgotten and few of the books are still published (although they are readily available online, of course). Which made me wonder – will any of the popular genres of the early twenty-first century be completely forgotten in a couple of hundred years? Not just the books and the authors, but the whole category of works into which they fall? Will Young Adult literature still be considered a meaningful classification? Science Fiction? Real-life Crime?

The other question that occurred to me was – what other popular genres of literature have been forgotten? Now that is a rabbit-hole you could spend a long time down!

Finally, if you were wondering whether ‘silver-fork’ literature would be worth resurrecting, here’s a short summary of one of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novels, Zanoni:

“Zanoni, a timeless Rosicrucian brother, cannot fall in love without losing his power of immortality; but he does fall in love with Viola Pisani, a promising young opera singer from Naples, the daughter of Pisani, a misunderstood Italian violinist. An English gentleman named Glyndon loves Viola as well, but is indecisive about proposing marriage, and then renounces his love to pursue occult study. The story develops in the days of the French Revolution in 1789. Zanoni has lived since the Chaldean civilisation. His master Mejnor warns him against a love affair but Zanoni does not heed.”

Silver-fork novels