Dressing Britain in words : social implications of Catherine Gore's vestimentary writing in her silver-fork novels

Abstract

Strongly but transiently sweeping the British readership in the first half of the nineteenth century, silver-fork novels of the 1820s to 1840s are often dismissed by contemporary and modern critics as an interregnum genre between Romantic and Victorian literature. Its existence in this literary chasm implies that the genre only carries minimal importance in literary history overall. In particular, Catherine Gore (1798-1861), who published more than seventy novels over three decades, has been either ignored or ridiculed by critics especially due to her unrelenting efforts to record the minutiae of British fashion, one aspect of which is the detailed and precise descriptions of dress. By analysing Gore’s novels as chronicles which offer a window into the splendid life of the British elite, this thesis traces the manifold socio-historical, cultural and literary functions which the portrayal of sartorial particularities in her silver-fork novels serves. The dissertation starts, in its Introduction, with an overview of the socio-historical and literary conditions of early nineteenth-century Britain to explain the swift rise of silver-fork novels and the long invisibility of the genre among both readers and scholars after its short-lived popularity, with only a modest revival of interest in recent scholarship. Branching out from the above contextualisation, the thesis then proceeds, in three chapters, to examine Gore’s sartorial writing in selected silver-fork novels published in the 1830s when the silver-fork genre held its strongest sway. Based on Raymond Williams’s proposition of the “structure of feeling” and the fashion frameworks offered by Roland Barthes and Francis Russell Hart, dress, in Chapter One, is shown to perform four narrative functions in Gore’s novels and is used by the author as a tool to create a “structure of feeling” and a reality effect. The follow-up analysis in Chapter Two which involves a comparative study of Gore’s vestimentary writing and fashion plates in contemporary periodicals argues that there existed a literary-commercial triangle among the author, the publisher and the reader in the early nineteenth-century literary marketplace. This triangular relationship contributed to the birth of professional authorship. In Chapter 3, the discussion rests on Thorstein Veblen’s notion of the “leisure class” and his socio-economic framework to explain the various consumer phenomena exhibited by Gore’s characters through their vestimentary consumption and behaviour. Ultimately, the interdisciplinary nature of this inquiry, which brings together rarely studied literary novels by an unjustly forgotten writer, dress, historical structures and socio-economic phenomena, highlights the value of silver-fork novels in the nineteenth century. Mine not only is a recovery project, but also one that encourages the multi-modal inclusion of dress, fashion frameworks, images, periodicals and socio-economic theories in the study of silver-fork fiction and literary studies in general. This is also an endeavour to transform the silver-fork novel from an orphaned genre in literary periodisation into an important fictional form which transcends temporal barriers and seeks opportunities for itself and for further literary scholarship.