"The Novelist of a New Era": Deepening the Sketch of Catherine Gore

During the 1830s and 1840s, Catherine Gore achieved more visibility and sold more books than any other writer in the popular marketplace. According to Matthew Whiting Rosa, Gore was such a commercial success that, by 1845, publishers put her name on the title pages of books with which she was only remotely connected (143). Gore was considered by her contemporaries "the novelist of a new era" and was admired for her wit, her "fluent ease and sparkle of style," and her ability to "unmask hypocrisy" (Whitmore 224–25).¹ Gore was not only a best-selling novelist—she wrote over sixty novels, most of which were sold in three-volume sets—but also a poet, a music lyricist, a historian, and an award-winning playwright. During her eight-year residency in Paris, Gore wrote travel narratives, historical romances, silver fork novels—for which she is most noted—and a rose manual, The Book of Roses, or The Rose Fancier's Manual (1838), which is considered a classic today by rose enthusiasts.²

Such productivity and popularity helped build Gore's reputation in the literary marketplace during her lifetime but contributed to its near extinction in the minds of readers and literary critics after her death; by the end of the nineteenth century, her books were out of circulation and her name, "Mrs. Gore," a shadowy reminder of a low point, an ebb, in the history of letters. According to Richard Cronin, literature produced between 1824 and 1840 has not been affiliated with a period at all but rather exists in a lacuna between the "real" literature written by the imaginative and sublimely inspired Romantics and the sentimental and realism-bound Victorians (2). The keepers of the literary canon turned up their noses at novels, such as Gore's, that might be colourful and witty but were too superficial to satisfy a reading public increasingly interested in the complexities of the human heart and mind, those essences of self that, if properly channelled, could serve the good of society.

Today, however, the silver fork novel is no longer deemed superficial and silly by nineteenth-century scholars, as is best evidenced by the publication, in 2012, of two full-length books on the genre (by Cambridge and by Pickering and Chatto) and an entire issue devoted to it in Women's Writing in 2009. Scholars find the silver fork to be a rich textual field for studying readership patterns, middle-class fantasy, the burgeoning literary marketplace, and the fraught relationships between Victorian writers and their predecessors. As Edward Copeland clarifies, George Eliot does not pillory the silver fork novel in her essay "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" (1856) but rather those works written during the 1850s, ten to twenty years after the rage for "fashionable novels" had subsided. The novels of Benjamin Disraeli, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Lady Blessington, and Gore were not "mindless" at all, according to Copeland, but were imbued with the reformist spirit of the 1830s and contributed to the "renegotiation of traditional systems of power, including … shifts in social relationships and status" (2). Gore, among others, participated in this spirit of change by opening up the world of the aristocracy to the reading public to expose the foibles, scandals, and heartaches operating inside, not so much to demonize high life as to make vivid the domestic problems its members faced and attempted to work through with various degrees of inadequacy. While Charles Dickens's writings helped to preserve the street life and enterprising culture of nineteenth-century London, Gore's preserved the intrigues and banter of the rich and famous by escorting her readers through the hallways, ballrooms, and boudoirs of private London houses, offering commentary and subtle critique along the way.

Yet while the silver fork novel has been revived as a genre worthy of scholarly attention, Gore herself has not been studied in any concentrated manner; there are no biographies of her, no full-length studies, and few in-depth analyses of her fiction (but many references to the parodies of her work by Dickens and William Makepeace...