Fashionable novel

Fashionable novels, also called silver fork novels, were a 19th-century genre of English literature that depicted the lives of the upper class. They dominated the English literature market from the mid-1820s to the mid-1840s.Wu, Duncan. "A Companion to Romanticism". Blackwell (1998), [http://books.google.com/books?id=kJCHB0tqd1kC&pg=PA338&sig=tVQOsGlCqJI138q0H-Sn8COWsTg p338] . ISBN 0631218777.] They were often indiscreet, and on occasion "keys" would circulate that identified the real people on which the principal characters were based. Theodore Hook was a major writer of fashionable novels, and Henry Colburn was a major publisher.

References

Further reading

* Cronin, Richard. "Romantic Victorians: English Literature, 1824-1840". Macmillan (2002), chapter 4. ISBN 0333966163.