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Comedy and Culture

England 1820-1900

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

1820-1845: The Anxieties of Sublimation, and Middle-Class Myths

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The triflers of any epoch are an invaluable evidence of the bent of the public mind. — Thomas Larue Peacock

I

The dominating fictional phenomenon in England during the 1820s and 1830s was the novel of high fashion and coxcombry that came to be known as the Silver Fork novel. Its origins could perhaps be traced to the late eighteenth-century novels on manners, but nothing of a literary nature could quite account for its sudden popularity. The fashionable novel reflected the volatile social change of the times and the excited interest in aristocratic mores. The appetite of the growing middleclass reading public for glimpses behind the boudoir doors of the upper crust and into the gaming rooms of Crockford's, The Cocoa Tree, and other famous exclusive clubs was so keen that it loosed an onrush of novels under such titles as The Diary of a Désennuée, Marriage of High Life, and Flirtation.

In retrospect, these novels, whose mission was to unfold the shocking and absolutely fascinating intrigues of high society, seem to be rich grounds for the comic. The topics — the self-conscious pretensions of the nouveau riche and the jaded aristocratic establishment — were ripe for satire, playfulness, and exaggeration. The characteristic protagonist of a Silver Fork novel was an ambitious young man with delicately exquisite features, carefully rehearsed wit, a smattering of useful knowledge carelessly displayed, and audacious pretensions. Disraeli epitomizes the qualities in his young beau, Charles Annesley:

But his manner was his magic. His natural and subdued nonchalance, so different from the assumed non-emotion of a mere dandy; his coldness of heart, which was hereditary, not acquired; his cautious courage, and his unadulterated self-love, had permitted him to mingle much with mankind without being too deeply involved in the play of their passions. ... Perhaps the great secret of his manner was his exquisite superciliousness, a quality which, of all, is the most difficult to manage.

Usually the younger son of a propertied family and therefore of limited prospects, the Silver Fork hero apprentices himself to a socially prominent dowager who schools him in the arts necessary to attract both attention and the infatuation of the bored wife of a wealthy earl. His story is only a thin pretext for the real attractions of such fiction, however — the firsthand glimpses of the amorous maneuverings that take place behind the façades of the great houses of London and the cynical insights into the machinations of politics at a time when social connections were the entrees to power. Though everything is presumably drawn from reality, nothing is genuine. Ton is all: the material is the quicksilver of light social comedy.

The most influential work of the genre, Edward Lytton Bulwer's Pelham, or the Adventures of a Gentleman (1828), begins with the promise of such comedy. Pelham disposes of his own youth in persiflage, convincing us that he is quite capable of retailing any horrid anecdote about his family. When he was a lad, for instance, his mother is said to have looked over her lists of engagements at the end of an unusually dull social season and, having "ascertained that she had none remaining worth staying for, agreed to elope with her new lover." In an excess of passion she got up at six o'clock in the morning to effect her escape. Discovering that she had left behind her favorite china monster and her French dog, however, she returned to fetch them. She appeared just as her husband had discovered her absence and was engaged in performing a ritual of his grief for the benefit of the servants ("he was always celebrated for his skill in private theatricals"). Although secretly anxious to be rid of her, Pelham's father was compelled for the sake of form to insist that his wife stay. Thus, Pelham mournfully reports, he was condemned to endure life with both a father and a mother.

A good beginning, certainly; it is precious, wicked, deceptively casual. But Bulwer suffers from the curious infirmity that beset almost all of the Silver Fork novelists: he does not have the nerve to treat his material comically. From the very beginning, the high-fashion writers apologized for the illusions and wit that made up the piquant sauce of their offerings. Robert Plumer Ward's Tremaine (1825), which along with Thomas Henry Lister's Granby (1826) established the vogue, opens on the defensive. Ward admits that his account of the boudoir crises and elaborate affectations of Regency high society may have played too loosely with morality. He hopes, though, that the reform of his rakish hero at the end of the novel serves as a "moral antidote" to all the colorful and social evils with which he has entertained us. He frets over his tone, wondering whether it "may appear extraordinary and little suited to the gravity of many of the subjects discussed." A mock "editor" asks rhetorically whether "the author was correct in his half-jesting, half-serious supposition that he was writing a treatise on moral philosophy, not a novel." Ward resolutely keeps himself astraddle the issue of whether his account of the beau monde should be morally didactic or amorally comic, and then worries about its effect on his audience.

And sure enough, before long, Bulwer's Pelham begins to fall into the tedious habit of mulling over the ethical questions we assumed he had long left behind him. He loses his engaging insolence, behaving less like the infamous puppy he was bred to be and more like a stiff hero from some eighteenth-century novel of moral uplift. To our dismay, we learn that we misconceived him all along: "Beneath all the carelessness of my exterior," he announces, "my mind was close, keen and inquiring; and under all the affectations of foppery, and the levity of manner, I veiled an ambition the most extensive in its objects, and a resolution" (179). Bulwer seems to have disguised the nature of his novel: what began as light, amoral, and comic, suddenly purports to be a study in character reform and the wages of frivolity. Yet in truth the novel becomes neither sort of book; rather, it oscillates between embellished vignettes of high society posturing and pedestrian solemnities about social responsibility. Like Ward, Bulwer refuses to settle on his own designs for his book and allows his tone to range all the way from satire to sentimentality.

According to Mrs. Catherine Gore, whose Cecil: or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb (1841) was probably the last great triumph of the vogue, the problem facing the Silver Fork novelist is to maintain one's nerve. "To make a good flippant writer," she announces ironically in her book's preface, "he must have acquired an easy versatility, a nice mixture of courage and caution, the one to startle his reader with some strange fantasy, the other to steer clear, while in his rapid course, of what may be dangerous." Mrs. Gore's prescription would seem to produce a novel of mixed literary manners; and in fact, Cecil, like Pelham, is a work of strangely varied comic and "serious" effects. Mrs. Gore is just near enough to the Victorian period, however, to favor a weightier moral than her predecessors. Cecil pays more dearly for his careless foppery, and we are rather moved by his genuine remorse when his impulsive determination to take his brother's only son on a furious ride through the forest results in the boy's accidental death. It is a moment fraught not only with significance but also with poignancy. It is a more telling indictment of superficiality and recklessness than we usually find in Silver Fork novels. But Mrs. Gore can no more keep the pitch than can Bulwer or Ward; no sooner does she become serious than she pulls herself up abruptly and launches into a set of fabulous adventures on the Continent, leaving behind all the pathos of Cecil's carelessness. Interestingly, Mrs. Gore brings Lord Byron into her novel as a character at this point. Byron was, after all, an appropriate presiding spirit for Silver Fork fiction because in both his life and his work he dramatized the agonies of ethical self-doubt and the joys of vaunting hedonism. Byron's self-mockery and his own conflation of posture and true nature emblemize the predicament of the English high-fashion novelists, who could be sure neither of their positions nor of their tone. "Tragedy, — comedy, — farce (what shall I call it?)" Mrs. Gore asks of the behavior of one of her characters. It is a good question.

Thus, it is almost logical that in Pelham, Bulwer grows so haplessly deaf to his own key that he must interrupt his narrative occasionally to remind the "sagacious reader" that some of his text is "writ in irony" and some in "earnest." Presumably his audience well understood that Pelham's extensive recitals of "maxims on dress" were not to be entirely accepted as the author's guidelines when they included such recommendations as "keep your mind free from all violent affectations at the hour of the toilet," and such observations as "there may be more pathos in the fall of a collar or curl of a lock, than the shallow think for." Yet Bulwer could never be sure and laced his subsequent editions with frequent disclaimers. And no wonder, for one of the lasting effects that Pelham had upon its time was to change the manner of dress. Bulwer's book is credited with influencing a major change in the color of men's evening clothes: from plum to black. Bulwer was obliged to state in the second edition of Pelham that "if mistaking the irony of Pelham, [young gentlemen and young clerks] went to the extreme of emulating the foibles which that hero attributed to himself — those were a thousand times more harmless ... than ... the mawkish sentimentalities of vice." But the clerks and young bucks found their new affectations rather pleasant. And the entanglement grew even more complex: Bulwer, a reserved and, to some, insolent young man, appeared to act the part of Pelham himself and was constrained for several years to deny publicly that he had made himself the heroes of his novels. When the youthful Benjamin Disraeli, who always carried off his self-expression with unchecked verve, appeared in canary waistcoats and velvet trousers, he half-facetiously claimed he did so in response to the spirit of Pelham. Bulwer thus found himself mocked by the fictions of his own tour de force.

The social novelists thus became ensnared in their social effects. Their own exploitation of the volatility of the times increased their attractiveness to certain rather impressionable or reckless souls. Henry Colburn, the most successful publisher of Silver Fork novels, indulged in shameless puffery, hinting in his blurbs that secrets of royal chambers were being disclosed and that his books were thinly fictionalized "portraits of living characters." As a matter of fact, this was often the case. Thomas Henry Lister's character Trebeck in Granby was so much like Beau Brummell that the latter swore "Lister must have known those who were intimate with me." Robert Plumer Ward was a lawyer and M.P. with numerous political and social connections that furnished real-life inspirations for his fictional scandals. Lady Charlotte Bury, author of A Marriage in High Life and The Lady of Fashion, was the daughter of the Duke of Argyll and lady-in-waiting to Caroline, the Princess of Wales; and one naturally assumes that the tidbits and general outlines of behavior in her novels were drawn from the most genuine of sources.

Novels like Pelham generated not only imitative behavior, but a chain reaction of "literary" events that took on their own cultural significance. For example, Bulwer was plagued with an inauthentic "second series" of Pelham that appeared in the disreputable journal The Age and created almost as great a rage as the original. Also, scandal sheets modeled after Silver Fork novels flourished with manufactured details and speculations about the prominent and notorious. When Disraeli finally presented an "inside" glimpse into the operations of these very cheap sheets in The Young Duke, we turn almost a full circle — fiction exposing the true nature of newspapers that imitate the novels that purport to expose real life.

Thomas Carlyle found the entire situation so disgusting that he identified "Dandyism" as one of the besetting ills of the age. Grumbling over the "moon-calves and monstrosities" that it inspired, he expressed a fear that they would take on life. "What is it that the Dandy asks? ... Solely, we may say, that you would recognize his existence: would admit him to be a living object." Hollow, a set of walking fine clothes, the literary dandy was not yet a reality, but he symbolized the modern difficulty in differentiating the false from the substantial in human nature. Carlyle used Pelham as his special whipping boy, and Bulwer, exasperated that he was being persistently misread, was hurt and perplexed that the philosopher could have so misconceived the intentions of his book.

To a certain extent, it was not a purely literary problem after all. The Byronesque oscillations in mood — the posing and affectation, the mixed hedonism and moralism — had an actual foundation in the life that the fashionable novels studied. Something was happening in the 1820s and 1830s that Silver Fork dandyism and recklessness was accurately reflecting. Bulwer, for all his casualness as a novelist, could be a perceptive social critic. In the highly influential study of national character England and the English (1833), Bulwer reflected on his times:

The novels of fashionable life illustrate feelings very deeply rooted, and productive of no common revolution. In proportion as the aristocracy had become social, and fashion allowed the members of the more mediocre classes a hope to outstep the boundaries of fortune, and be quasi-aristocrats themselves, people eagerly sought for representations of the manners which they aspired to imitate, and the circles to which it was not impossible to belong ... Hence the three years' run of fashionable novels was a shrewd sign of the times.

The social historian-critic Maurice Quinlan agrees with Bulwer that a "revolution in manners occurred during the first quarter of the century." He finds it permeating every social stratum. The causes were "an expanding population, the advent of the industrial system, and the consequent increase in national wealth [that] afforded opportunities for many enterprising individuals to improve their economic condition." "There is a continual ferment going on," Charles Greville noted in his memoirs, "and separate and unconnected causes of agitation and disquiet which create great alarm but which there seems to exist no power of checking or subduing."

The nature of the changes in manners as people began shifting their social positions was unusually frenetic during these decades. The peace after the Napoleonic Wars left the English in a euphoria that found a ready outlet in self-induced excitements. Extensive social adjustment was made necessary as urbanization and a certain amount of rural economic dislocation put people into new situations for which the old styles of life seemed inadequate. The adjustments were particularly noticeable within the middle class, which was increasing in proportion and in its own sense of respective wealth. Ward, musing over his unstable times, says, "Not that I think the world worse now than it has been for perhaps the last hundred years. The upper and lower classes I should say are certainly not so; I am not so sure of the middle." The contemporary critic R. H. Home finds a great deal that is excessive in Mrs. Gore's Cecil but allows that "she excels in the portraiture of the upper section of the middle class, just at the point of contact with the nobility, where their own distinguishing traits are modified by the peculiarities of their social position. ... All this external tumult, wrong-headed and hollow-hearted, proud, sensitive and irritable." Many in the middle class had suddenly come into wealth and into the opportunities for leisure, and it is they who turned to the aristocracy — and to literature about the aristocracy — to discover manners and modes of life that would somehow befit and signify their new stations. The very rapidity of rise in class, and the corresponding danger of sudden plunge in fortunes, exacerbated the social turmoil. Bulwer notes:

These mystic, shifting, and various shades of graduation; these shot-silk colours of society produce this effect: That people have no exact and fixed position — that by acquaintance alone they may rise to look down on their superiors — that while rank gained by intellect, or by interest, is open but to few, the rank that may be obtained by fashion seems delusively open to all. Hence, in the first place, that eternal vying with each other; that spirit of show; that lust of imitation which characterize our countrymen and countrywomen. ... As wealth procures the alliance and respect of novels, wealth is affected even where not possessed; and, as fashion, which is the creature of an aristocracy, can only be obtained by resembling the fashionable; hence, each person imitates his fellow.

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Excerpted from Comedy and Culture by Roger B. Henkle. Copyright © 1980 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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