Origins of the Regency Romance, Silver Fork Novels

[sartorias]

There were two things going on with silver fork novels: the unrepentant glorying in the wealth and exclusiveness of rank, and the stories of marriages. They were not always romantic by today's standards. Pelham, the granddaddy of them all (especially the 1828 edition, before Bulwer hyphenated his name and toned down his cheerfully impudent

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[sartorias]

I think the turning point was Georgette Heyer, who resurrected and reinvented the silver fork novel. The silver forkers were so old and trite by the 1920s that PG Wodehouse makes fun of them in one of his novels; Heyer in essence created a new Regency, inspired more by the silver fork novels of earlier years than by Austen, in the belief that blood will always tell, and the glorying in elitism and the consumerism available to the rich and powerful. Her heroines always marry up.

Pressed 'post' instead of enter. Anyway, it's Heyer who is at the root of the modern Regency Romance (and it's obvious in most of them to a greater or lesser degree), not Austen. Modern readers find Heyer's syntax and dialog easier to read, poised as it is between the actual period and now. (It's closer in rhythm, I think, to the novels of the twenties, and many of her heroes and heroines actually talk like Bright Young Things, only with Pierce Egan slang instead of twenties slang). Heyer gets in action, she gives the women far more freedom than women actually had, and her heroes admire mannish manners far more than happened in the period. But in the era of Coco Chanel, mannishness was considered sexy by the fashion leaders.

By mannishness I mean cutting their hair, wearing male dress, using male slang instead of female slang (Austen makes it very clear that females had their own slang), and claiming certain freedoms reserved to the male.

[sartorias]

I still didn't finish my thought re today's readers and modern Regency romances. I don't want to imply that they are in any way faulty. If readers like them, then readers like them. Would readers like the old stuff if they could get it?

Perhaps part of the answer is in their very inaccessibility. Though I've long been a champion for Gore's being republished, I don't know how well those long novels would do with today's readers. Regency romances are in part full of vampires and smugglers and the like because readers now tend to like action. In the old days, women (and a lot of men) didn't see action. Nor did they particularly want to: men with a craving for action could find their way to the navy or army.

The thing is, conversation was the order of the day. I suspect a lot of modern readers would find those old novels claustrophobic as there are long scenes of nothing but chat, and a lot of it is cram packed with French sophistications of the time, and references obscure to today's reader.

[sartorias]

These are good points. Though I think Heyer relies on Pierce Egan way more than people of the actual time did. For one thing, Egan appears to have made up a lot of his slang--I don't find a lot of it in period stuff, even things written for a "low" audience, and also, females didn't use it. They had their own slang. Heyer seems to have taken on the Bright Young Thing regard for the attraction of mannish ways, and frequently puts male slang in the mouths of her heroines--to the admiration of the heroes. (She apparently did made up one or two of her more famous slang terms, like "making a cake of oneself"--I recall mention somewhere years ago of her saying she found it in a letter, but to my understanding no one has ever located that letter. I could be wrong, of course, as it's been years since I tried to track all this stuff down.)

Yes--Regency Buck is an early one, and she did try to get Austen's style, though it's awkward, not elegant. I think her genius is in how she blended period with twenties cadences. (And outlooks) That makes her accessible to today's readers.

And yes, her research! We get loving details of clothing, whereas Austen's novels scarcely talk about it, relying on the reader to know all the details. I recall only one hero noticing what a female wears, when Edward comments on Fanny Price's gown in Mansfield, saying something unromatic like "I like that gown you have got on, with the spots."

[swan_tower]

Not that exact phrase, but the OED's earliest citation for "cake" as "a foolish or stupid fellow" is 1785, Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. I'd always heard that was the book Heyer got a lot of her slang from.

[sartorias]

Grose and Pierce Egan, yes. (And apparently Grose also made a lot of it up, or at least, his scholarship was mighty suspect.)

[swan_tower]

But at least he made it up before the Regency period, so people might have adopted it. :-) (And the OED does cite later uses of the term that aren't from Heyer, so at least a few people did.)

[sartorias]

Yep: no doubt. I just haven't seen it in any period stuff, so while it could have been used, it wasn't in daily use as she employs it.

There were also private slangs, of course: like 'sprack' among the most elite, which had a brief popularity, meaning 'cool'.