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

Comments

[supergee]

Fascinating. I'm blogging this.

[monder]

Amazingly interesting! I'm one of those readers who came to reading so-called regencies, through picking up in a grocery store on vacation, and I've been slowly working my way backwards towards Austen and learning more about the original source of the form. I adore the comedies of manners and the witty conversations where much or nothing is said.

I find it interesting to come back to Austen and her era of literature now, as when I had her in school all the teachers I had except for one college professor hated her, and taught her in a way that made most of the students hate her, or at least end up indifferent.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts as now I've got many fun things to go chew on!

[sartorias]

:-)

[whswhs]

It occurred to me a while ago that Vanity Fair is a Regency novel . . . in the most literal sense: Its events occur during the Regency, with Waterloo being the scene of some of its major events. And when it was written, that was the historical (if recent) past. I would hesitate to call it a Regency romance, because its tenor is not romantic at all but satiric, and its heroine does not come to a happy end. But it's certainly a novel of the Regency about courtship and marriage, which rather fits your comments about the earliest ventures into the genre.

[sartorias]

Yep. As I said in the post over at BVC, I think (or somewhere) there's an interesting pattern here: how many 19th C novels of social commentary were set in the previous generation, or even previous two generations (i.e. before trains, when life was "simple") in order to model behavior as it should be, might be, could be. But wasn't. Those predictive aspects are invisible to the modern reader now, because what they predicted as a model came to pass (and then changed again), but basically, yes.

[whswhs]

That attitude was still around when Kipling wrote

"Confound Romance!"-And all unseen
Romance brought up the nine-fifteen.

And, of course, Kipling turned out to be right: To us now, nothing could be more romantic than those Victorian steam-powered trains (journeys on the Orient Express, which Wikipedia says had its first regular run in 1883, stopping in Vienna, though six years later the eastern terminus was Varna . . . I wonder if Jonathan Harker got to Transylvania on it?).

[sartorias]

Heh! I know--it's quite enlightening to read about coach travel in the pastoral novels, when owning one's carriage was a sign of prestige. The carriage rides are always pleasant, whereas when you read eighteenth century novels, carriage travel frequently features overturns, being stuck in mud, gross companions if one is traveling by post, etc.

[thistleingrey]

Ah! I'd been wondering about this, but I don't know enough (for either side of the sort of split between C18/19 and C20/21). I do remember thinking that Rosemary Edghill's Marquess of Barham seemed gleefully parodic, rather than the usual straight-up titled guy, but it was literally only the fifth contemporary-written romance I'd met.

My version of a wish-fulfillment-y novel would include scintillating conversation. :) It's harder to write that in a convincing as well as enjoyable way....

I don't comment at BVC anymore (under a variant of my legal nym). Either the software misplaces published comments occasionally, by vanishing them after they've been up for some hours, or someone has been deleting them (and not only mine, I think). *shrugs* Quicker for me just to skim everyone's posts via syndicated feed, anyway.

[sartorias]

The current host at BVC has sometimes made entire posts vanish, as well as comments. Not often. And the powers that be are seeking a new and more stable host. Apologies!

[starshipcat]

If they're looking for a hosting service, they might want to look into Hostgator. That's the hosting service where I have my own website, leighkimmel.com and my business websites on, and in the two and a half years I've had them, I've had great luck with them.

[cschells]

Super interesting discussion! Thanks for this!

[sartorias]

:-)