The Silver-Fork Novels and Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham

Abstract

This paper examines the features commonly found in the Silver-Fork novels and why they attracted Victorian readers. It focuses on Pelham to illustrate the characteristics and popularity of this sub-genre. It also explores how Bulwer-Lytton, while following the Silver-Fork tradition, transfigures Pelham into a politically radical and socially liberal literary text which reveals his sympathy with the poor and rage against the unfairly privileged aristocracy.As a literary form that emerged in the middle of the 1820s, the Silver-Fork novels carefully provided their readers with itemized accounts of daily aristocratic life. And the enormous popularity of Silver-Fork novels was primarily due to the emulation of the upper class among the middle class. The information about the nobility was always appealing to the rising members of the middle class.Pelham is a fashionable novel in the Silver-Fork tradition. Despite the depiction of high life, however, Bulwer-Lytton never intended the novel to exalt high society. Pelham, presenting the world of fashionable extravagance frivolous, harmful, or distracting and revealing the corruption and sham of the upper class, became a literary ally of the political reformer in his struggle against the aristocracy.