Fashionable novel

[1] They were often indiscreet, and on occasion "keys" would circulate that identified the real people on which the principal characters were based.

[1] Colburn particularly advertised fashionable novels as providing insight into aristocratic life by insiders.

[3] Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Benjamin Disraeli and Catherine Gore were other very popular writers of the genre.

[3] Thomas Carlyle wrote Sartor Resartus in critique of their minute detailing of clothing, and William Makepeace Thackeray satirized them in Vanity Fair and Pendennis.

[3] In Donna Leon's fourth Commissario Guido Brunetti novel, Death and Judgment, English professor Paola Brunetti describes silver-fork novels as "books written in the eighteenth century, when all that money poured into England from the colonies, and the fat wives of Yorkshire weavers had to be taught which fork to use.

Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli by Francis Grant . Disraeli was a notable writer of silver fork novels early in his career.
Catherine Gore was a prolific and bestselling author of the silver fork genre.