Chapter 2 examines the silver-fork novels resistance to the growing influence of the Bildungsroman in nineteenth-century fiction. Reading Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham (1828) and Catherine Gore’s Cecil (1841), this chapter contends that silver-fork novelists turn to the older form of the picaresque to keep their focus on an urban panorama in which individuals are accorded no greater priority than the social landscapes through which they move. I argue that silver-fork novelists use the picaresque to represent the chaotic surface of metropolitan life. Into this fast-changing, diverse landscape, they set a dandiacal protagonist whose skills at observation and adaptability make him uniquely qualified to navigate the contemporary world. The dandy occupies a position analogous to that of the commodities with which his society teems: he functions as an object in circulation, defined less by internal traits than by the situations and sets of relations through which he moves.

Reading Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s Romance and Reality (1831) and Mary Shelley’s Lodore (1835), Chapter 1 contends that silver-fork novels give narrative form to a spectral contemporary world, capturing in their topical depictions the quotidian spectacle of crowds and commodities, and the transformations of time, space, identity, and social place that were unfolding in a society permeated by the fashion system. These novels follow the broad currents of public opinion, moving through panoramas of character sketches, conversational styles, topical issues and tastes, and among the shops and sights of metropolitan life, in an effort to model for their readers the acumen and understanding of contemporary manners essential to modern life.

This chapter elucidates the ways that biliousness, a new fashionable somatic disease of bile, developed out of, and was differentiated from, the older fashionable nervous disease of hypochondria or ‘Hypo’ in the long eighteenth century. Biliousness became not only fashionable in the late eighteenth century but also a mania in the Regency period. Tracing the rise and progress of biliousness, the chapter points to a crucial role played by colonial medicine of the peripheral Indies in forming fashionable bilious identities among people of the metropolitan centre, as well as a critical role that John Abernethy, a fashionable doctor of Regency London, took in making biliousness a mania of the time; his immensely popular writing ‘My Book’ attracted city dwellers, or ‘deskers’, whose livers were affected by mental anxiety. The chapter also argues that literature participated in forming a new type of invalid, the bilious sufferer in the culture of bile or biliousness. Drawing on the literary texts of silver-fork novelists Jane Austen and Thomas De Quincey, this chapter explores the emergence of the medico-literary culture of bile in the last decades of the long eighteenth century, which marks a crucial link between the eighteenth-century malady of ‘Hypo’ and the Victorian malady of dyspepsia.