Libertine Fiction, Forensic Fashion, and the Dandy’s Development in Edward Bulwer’s Pelham

Edward Bulwer’s Pelham (1828) is best known as a “silver fork” or “fashionable novel” and as the source of the Dandy’s Maxims, which Thomas Carlyle addresses in Sartor Resartus (1833–34; 1836). As such, Bulwer’s novel is understood as a specimen of elitist, formula fiction centred on a vapid, if amusing, dandy hero. Opening with an epigraph from George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676), Pelham orients itself through allusion and intertextuality to the satiric libertine past of the Restoration and eighteenth century even as it develops, through the established Regency form of silver fork fiction, the emerging forms of the Bildungsroman and the detective story. Approaching Pelham as a “libertine fiction,” we acknowledge its relation to the eighteenth century and develop a fuller appreciation of its generic identity. Pelham’s licentiousness, its freedom from rules, defines what is most novelistic in this truly experimental fiction.