Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Lauren Gillingham (review)

Reviewed by: Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Lauren Gillingham Clayton Carlyle Tarr (bio) Lauren Gillingham. Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel. Cambridge UP, 2023. Pp. vii + 310. 110. 00. ISBN 978-1-009-29655-7 (hb). Lauren Gillingham's Fashionable Fictions tackles a series of understudied and perhaps misunderstood nineteenth-century literary genres: the silver-fork novel, the Newgate novel, and the sensation novel. These genres, which constitute the book's three parts, "unfolded apart from history's grand narratives of causality" (2), rejecting the forms that have structured critical assessments of the nineteenth-century novel, namely the Bildungsroman. By having their "finger on the pulse of the age" (3), they also reflected a "heightened sense of the evanescence of modernity and the cycle of novelty and obsolescence which produces it" (17). This sense of temporality resembles the mode of fashion, which, "poised on the cusp of the future" (10), reflects and models "the arbitrariness of change" (14). Fashionable Fictions, Gillingham summarizes, "examines the way in which the internalization of principles of novelty and obsolescence into the structures of individual identity and social organization prompts the development of narrative forms commensurate with the fashion system's spectacular, ephemeral significations" (35). Another strand of the book's argument follows the figure of the "demotic celebrity, " the everyman (or criminal in End Page 411 the Newgate novel) elevated to fame through circumstances untethered from morality. Throughout Fashionable Fictions, Gillingham does expert work weaving together multiple ideas, signposting relevant connections, and establishing an alternative development of the nineteenth-century novel. Part I spotlights silver-fork novels, which "embodied the temporality of the contemporary" (32). Chapter one argues that the genre's authors "synchronize their narratives with the temporality of fashion in an effort to conceptualize contemporary experience in a form that corresponds to the movements of modernity" (53). In particular, they "conceived of history on a new model, " contrasting Romantic-era writers such as Walter Scott, to reflect "the quotidian temporality transforming nineteenth-century Britain" (61). In chapter two, Gillingham locates an "alternative conception of individuality" in silver-fork novels through a "tethering to the social" (92), which rejected the Bildungsroman's "painful process of learning" (107) by revitalizing eighteenth-century forms such as the picaresque. Part I makes a strong case for the significance of silver-fork texts to the development of the nineteenth-century novel, showing how the genre exploited seemingly outdated forms and resisted the hegemony of the growth narrative to represent the fleeting, chaotic experience of modern life. Part II focuses on the "demotic celebrity, " wherein the "insignificant individual emerges spectacularly from the crowd" and "permeates everyday lives" (22). Chapter three explores how characters in Newgate novels achieve this status through "the kind of adaptability and perpetual restyling that a generalized fashion system universalizes" (131). Chapter four, which may be of most interest to readers of Dickens Quarterly, emphasizes Charles Dickens's "point-by-point repudiation of the model of demotic celebrity that the Newgate school developed through the 1830s" (190). Gillingham examines both Barnaby Rudge (1841) and David Copperfield (1850), the former of which, in one of the book's most intriguing claims, functions as "the hinge that links the demotic celebrity of the Newgate school to Victorian realist fiction and the sincere bourgeois subject that stands at its heart" (190). In both novels, Dickens "fashions a new model of celebrity hero for a mass-mediated age" (232). Gillingham's close readings in this chapter are particularly robust, and Dickens scholars should welcome a reconsideration of Barnaby Rudge as a crucial transitional text. Part III, which highlights the "hypercurrency" of sensation novels, contains one chapter. Here, the book might feel incomplete. Although the final chapter takes on the rather expansive genre of sensation fiction, it only examines two novels by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. It goes without saying that Braddon is a monumental figure in the genre – and the Victorian novel at large – but it seems a bit odd that Wilkie Collins is almost entirely absent from Gillingham's study, mentioned only once in passing. As one 1864 End Page 412 reviewer remarked, Braddon was the. . .