UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Fashionable Form: The Narrative Strategies of Silver-Fork Fiction, 1824-1848 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Josephine Richstad 2012 © Copyright by Josephine Richstad 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Fashionable Form: The Narrative Strategies of Silver-Fork Fiction, 1824-1848 by Josephine Richstad Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2012 Professor Jonathan Grossman, Chair Fashionable novels of the 1820s and 1830s pretended to offer an insider’s view of England’s fashionable exclusives. This dissertation unpacks the paradoxical structures of fashion on which the literary form was built in order to offer a new reading of the genre as articulating the representation of a fictional aristocratic subject position through acts at times of refusal and at others of abjuration or disavowal. At a time that saw the novel as offering middle-class interiority to all, the fashionable novel excluded everyone—including the very aristocrats it idolized—from representation. Four narrative strategies in the categories of authorship, description, plotting, and characterization together underlie the making of a fashionable novel. First, these anonymous novels erect the illusion of a fashionable author through narrative moves that reject professionalism by enacting a structure of valuation in which truth can be assessed only internally rather than through the marketplace. Second, objects in the novels resist incorporation into the narrative project, refusing a relationship of utility between people and things that suggests political power comes through exclusion rather than inclusion. Next, ii under the shadow of the First Reform Bill, calculated plot refusal becomes the only ethically sustainable option for the aristocrats whose natural exclusivity has been breached, and thus the fashionable novel writes the aristocrat (and itself) out of history. And finally, in these anti-plots, fashionable characters’ flatness posits a radically independent subjectivity in which characters who act as narrators explicitly refuse to render up their interiority. They instead posit the existence of an inimitable and unrepresentable self as an alternative to a growing emphasis on the representation, both political and narrative, of a knowable interiority. The formal relations articulated in these four chapters ultimately offer new historical insights: into literary history in relation to copyright, into the increasing commodification of things, into the aristocratic view of the First Reform Bill, and into the economic individualism so often identified as a hallmark of the novel. iii The dissertation of Josephine Sara Richstad is approved. Joe Bristow Helen Deutsch Irene Tucker Jonathan Grossman, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2012 iv For Joseph Heikoff v Table of Contents Introduction 1 I. What is Fashion 7 II. What is the Fashionable Novel 17 III. Fashionable Form 31 Chapter 1. The Professional Authorship of Fashionable Novels 35 I. Title Page 39 II. Authorial Abjuration 46 III. Idle Affectation, Authored 53 Chapter 2. A Matter of Time: Objects and Things in the Fashionable Novel 68 I. What is Fashionable 72 II. Independence 83 III. Independence in Dependence 97 IV. Non-Description 111 Chapter 3. The Tyranny of Fashion: Overplotting in Lady Charlotte Bury’s Exclusives 127 I. Fashionable Structure 129 II. Discontinuous Plots 146 III. Politics 164 Chapter 4. The Man Whom Clothes Do Not Make: Character in the Fashionable Novel 191 I. Reading Character 194 II. Independence 203 III. The Fear of the Copy 231 Coda 253 Bibliography 258 vi List of Figures Figure 1 Title page of T. H. Lister’s anonymously published Granby ......................................... 66 Figure 2 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, drawn for Fraser’s by Daniel Maclise ..................................... 67 Figure 3 Dresses illustrated in The Ladies’ Museum , April 1831 ................................................... 125 Figure 4 List of Frederica’s debts from Catherine Gore’s Pin-Money ........................................ 126 Figure 5 Table of characters from Lady Charlotte Bury’s Exclusives ......................................... 190 vii Acknowledgments: A dissertation is a collaborative project. I am first grateful to those who have helped fund my graduate study: the UCLA English department and graduate division; the UC Society of Fellows, and the Young Research Library. I would also like to thank the supportive intellectual community at UCLA: the students in my English 88 seminar, who bravely soldiered through two very long early nineteenth-century novels in order to reach the reward of Gossip Girl ; a supportive community of coevals, particularly Matt Dubord, Kate Bergren, Justine Pizzo, Alex Milsom, and Katherine Isokawa; and a generous and rigorous faculty, particularly my committee: Joe Bristow, Helen Deutsch, and, via the extended UC network, Irene Tucker. Special thanks to Jonathan Grossman: his practical support in moments of despair and triumph, his continued faith in my work, and his persistent, careful, and wholehearted reading of my work are both an academic and a personal inspiration. This would be a lesser work without his guidance. My family of birth, of course: my brother, whose courage inspires me; my parents, without whose many kinds of support I simply could never have finished; my sister, best roommate and best friend. Finally Aberdeen Sanchez, whose arrival midway through the dark wood of this dissertation considerably lightened the remainder of the journey; and Chris Sanchez, in whose company the best works of my life have begun. viii VITA FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS 2011-12 President’s Society of Fellows University of California 2011-12 Dissertation Year Fellowship Graduate Division University of California, Los Angeles 2010-11 Dissertation Fellowship English Department University of California, Los Angeles 2008-09 Research Mentorship Graduate Division University of California, Los Angeles 2008 Thayer Short-Term Research Fellowship Special Collections Young Research Library University of California, Los Angeles 2005-06 First-Year Fellowship Graduate Division University of California, Los Angeles 2004 B.A., English Columbia University PUBLICATIONS Richstad, Josephine. “Genre in Amber: Catherine Gore’s Hamiltons , 1834 and 1850.” Modern Philology : forthcoming. ix CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS “Narrative Panorama: Hannah More and the Garden of the Mind.” SCSECS, Eastern Tennessee State University, Asheville, NC, February 2012. “Style Does Not Make the Man: Fashionable Character,” Nineteenth-Century Group, University of California, Los Angeles, October 2011. “Fashioning the Fashionable Novel: Social Exclusivity and the Form of English Fiction, 1824–1848,” Nineteenth-Century Group, University of California, Los Angeles, March 2009. “Grating Lemons for Liberals: Politics of Revision in Catherine Gore’s Hamiltons, ” RMMLA, University of Nevada, Reno, October 2008. “Narrative authority at stake in Bram Stoker’s Dracula ,” 22 nd Annual Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Missouri, April 20, 2007. “Authority at stake in Bram Stoker’s Dracula ,” Nineteenth- Century Group, University of California, Los Angeles, October 31, 2006. x Introduction In Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1837-38), Kate Nickleby, after being fired from a fashionable dress shop, takes a position as lady’s companion to Mrs. Witterly, where one of her duties is to read aloud a novel entitled Lady Flabella : [T]he door of the boudoir (artfully concealed by rich hangings of silken damask, the hue of Italy’s firmament) was thrown open, and with noiseless tread two VALETS- DE-CHAMBRE, clad in sumptuous liveries of peach-blossom and gold, advanced into the room followed by a page in BAS DE SOIE—silk stockings—who, while they remained at some distance making the most graceful obeisances, advanced to the feet of his lovely mistress, and dropping on one knee presented, on a golden salver gorgeously chased, a scented BILLET. 1 This is quite obviously parody. Kate’s slightly prudish response to Mrs. Witterly’s blissful question if the passage is not “very soft” indicates as much: “‘Yes, I think it is,’ replied Kate, gently: ‘very soft.’”2 But compare the following passage from Sydney Owenson Morgan’s The Princess (1835), in a chapter called “The Dressing Room”: A déjeûné of French vermeil stood on a guéridon beside her; and her husband’s letter … was in her hands … A beautiful paroquet, perched on the back of her chair, solicited her attention by the reiterated demand of, “ Aimes-tu Coco? ” to which she replied, in tones almost passionate, “ Oui, je t’aime, mon petit Coco … then drawing her peignoir round her swan-like neck, and wrapping her fine form in a robe-de-chambre , 1 Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 359. 2 ibid 1 which the Duchess of Abrantes would have described with truth to be ‘ mousseline d’Inde, brodée au jour, double rose de Mai ,” she closed her heavy eyes. 3 Although the scenes and affect are different—Dickens’s page seems to take the place of Morgan’s parrot, for example—the materiality, French phrases, and hyperbolic description of these two passages are nearly indistinguishable. Were it not for Dickens’s translations of the French phrases, a sly jab at a supposedly unsophisticated audience, it would be difficult to determine which