Gore, Catherine. Cecil; or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb. R. Bentley, 1845.
title-page
As the Edinburgh Review noticed, Cecil's launching as a coxcomb takes place in 1809, the year that Byron began writing Childe Harold, and his final moral awakening...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Meeke
Literary historian Edward Copeland
points out that the hero and the Wheelers are opposites in their relation to money, and also that Mrs Wheeler's death (in hospital of injuries received from falling downstairs while drunk)...
Literary responses
Catherine Gore
The Westminster Review said this novel was in itself a London Directory,
qtd. in
Vargo, Lisa. “Lodore and the Novel of Society”. Womens Writing, Vol.
6
, No. 3, 1999, pp. 425-40.
435
which could have brought its author sponsorship from shopkeepers mentioned, and ought in turn to pay advertising tax.
Vargo, Lisa. “Lodore and the Novel of Society”. Womens Writing, Vol.
Edward Copeland
writes that this novel combines aristocratic gossip, mistaken identities and gross newspaper falsifications that drive its plot for three volumes of romantic confusions.
Copeland, Edward. The Silver Fork Novel. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
178
Literary responses
Catherine Gore
Edward Copeland
has written that this novel catches the intense social anxiety that surrounded the passage of the Reform Bill, as La Silvestra defiantly overleaps the boundaries of class, and effortlessly deceives a bunch of...
Literary responses
Marguerite Gardiner Countess of Blessington
The London Court Journal and the London Literary Gazette agreed that this novel was even better than MB's Elderly Gentleman. The latter ascribed this to the niceties of feminine perception: the workings of the...
Literary responses
Lady Charlotte Bury
Edward Copeland
argues that this text, though designed to ride the wave of the new silver-fork novel, draws its influences from an earlier generation: Frances Burney
, Susan Ferrier
, and Richardson
's Sir Charles...
Literary responses
Lady Charlotte Bury
Edward Copeland
finds most interesting in these novellas the attention to money-earning, and the way the young people (morally so much preferable to their elders, whether aristocratic or rich bourgeois) are helped out by servants...
Literary responses
Lady Charlotte Bury
Edward Copeland
thinks that this is the most challenging of LCB
's novels because of the complex interrelationship, in Delamere, between aristocratic pastimes, the arts, and the Whig aristocracy. He sees the amateur theatricals as...
Literary responses
Catherine Gore
Edward Copeland
calls this Gore's most serious and ambitious novel, one that attempts the same social and historical reach as Thackeray
's Vanity Fair, as well as a self-conscious valediction to the silver fork novel.
Copeland, Edward. The Silver Fork Novel. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
209
Literary Setting
Eliza Parsons
This novel is part-epistolary (all the letters being in continuation from the Scottish Anna Sidney—who later becomes Lady Kilmorney—to her older friend Mrs Grenville), partly in dialogue, partly in the form of Anna's journal, and...
politics
Lady Charlotte Bury
Edward Copeland
remarks that her testimony in court, though damaging to her reputation in society, established her as a strong, public Whig proponent for the rest of her life.
Copeland, Edward. The Silver Fork Novel. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
184
Reception
Maria Edgeworth
Her lifetime literary earnings (which she meticulously recorded) totalled £11,062, eight shillings, and tenpence. She also recorded with relish her use of some of the money for foreign travel.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Clarendon, 1972.
492
Literary historian Edward Copeland
calls...
Reception
Catherine Gore
George IV
is supposed to have called this the best bred and most amusing novel published in his remembrance.
qtd. in
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2024, 22 vols. plus supplements.
The Edinburgh Review judged it a respectable specimen
qtd. in
Baird, Rebecca Lynne Russell. Catherine Frances Gore, the Silver-Fork School, and "Mothers and Daughters": True Views of Society in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain. Dissertation Thesis, University of Arkansas, May 1992.
114
of the genre of fashionable novel, and...
Reception
Catherine Gore
Charlotte Brontë
wrote to CG
to voice her admiration: not the echo of another mind—the pale reflection of a reflection—but the result of original observation, and faithful delineation from actual life.
qtd. in
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research, 1992.
129
Edward Copeland
finds...
Timeline
9 December 1826: The Literary Gazette printed a Key to Marianne...
Women writers item
9 December 1826
The Literary Gazette printed a Key to Marianne Spencer Hudson
's silver-fork novel, Almack's (titled after the well-known elite gentlemen's club of the same name), which had already reached its second edition this year. The...
Texts
Le Faye, Deirdre. “Chronology of Jane Austen’s Life”. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 1-11.
Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth. “Clarissas Cruelty: Modern Fables of Moral Authority in The History of a Young LadyClarissa and Her Readers: New Essays for the Clarissa Project, edited by Carol Houlihan Flynn and Edward Copeland, AMS Press, 1999, pp. 45-67.
Perry, Ruth. “Clarissa’s Daughters, or The History of Innocence Betrayed. How Women Writers Rewrote Richardson”. Clarissa and Her Readers: New Essays for the Clarissa Project, edited by Carol Houlihan Flynn and Edward Copeland, AMS Press, 1999, pp. 119-41.
McMaster, Juliet. “Class”. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 115-30.
Copeland, Edward. “Defoe and the London Wall: Mapped Perspectives”. Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol.
10
, No. 4, pp. 407-28.
Schwarz, Joan I. “Eighteenth-Century Abduction Law and Clarissa”. Clarissa and Her Readers, edited by Carol Houlihan Flynn and Edward Copeland, AMS Press, 1999, pp. 269-08.
Grundy, Isobel. “Jane Austen and literary traditions”. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 189-10.
Fergus, Jan. “The Professional Woman Writer”. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Copeland, Edward. The Silver Fork Novel. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Copeland, Edward. “Virgin Sacrifice: Elizabeth Bennet After Jane Austen”. Persuasions, Vol.
22
, 2000, pp. 156-74.
Copeland, Edward. Women Writing about Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790-1820. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
