<1>While the post-war Kitchen Sink drama is still meaningful shorthand to nonspecialist theatre goers today, the Silver Fork fiction of the 1820s and 1830s bears a signifier that has lost its referent to all but a tiny minority of novel...
more<1>While the post-war Kitchen Sink drama is still meaningful shorthand to nonspecialist theatre goers today, the Silver Fork fiction of the 1820s and 1830s bears a signifier that has lost its referent to all but a tiny minority of novel readers. The tag originated in an article which appeared in 1827 in the radical Examiner entitled 'The Dandy School'. Written by the great London journalist and critic William Hazlitt -though published anonymously, as was the convention -the piece launched a tirade against the snobbishness, frivolity and disingenuousness of what was then a bestselling genre, having been all the rage on the literary scene since 1824. The genre is probably best known today in the fields of Bibliography and History of the Book because of its identification with a particular publisher, Henry Colburn, whose successful strategies in selling the product he denominated 'fashionable' fiction pioneered what thenceforward became standard procedures in literary marketing and branding. Until the recent corrective effected by these important books by Edward Copeland and Cheryl A. Wilson, which boost a steady resurgence of interest in the genre since the late 1990s, most scholars in literary studies knew nothing more than the fact that these novels were once terrifically popular but now are not. <2>As the luxury cutlery item of the nickname suggests (satirically), the popular fiction it designates was obsessed with trivia of the table: think Come Dine With Me, but with Regency wigs, and a yet more sneering voiceover. The extent of its social codification by no means stopped at the dining room door, however. Silver Fork texts were marketed as
