Foreign Fortune Hunters in British ‘Silver Fork’ Novels

• Peter James Bowman

The comparative prosperity of the United Kingdom after the Napoleonic Wars tempted Continental fortune hunters to seek British brides, and their efforts are a theme in the period’s ‘Silver Fork’ novels of fashionable life. This cosmopolitan genre often presents foreign males as intrepid, urbane and attentive to women. If they are matrimonial speculators, however, these characteristics are seen differently – as recklessness, insincerity and importunity. Brief appearances of such adventurers provide comedy, but fuller portrayals are earnest and sombre. The callous opportunism of men who misrepresent their status and finances in making false professions of love, the susceptibility of young women to demonstrative admiration, and the folly and vanity of their families in guiding them towards marriage all receive a didactic handling that belies the reputation of Silver Fork fiction for frivolity. A coda to this topic is furnished by the caricature of a foreign fortune hunter in Thackeray’s Silver Fork parody “Lords and Liveries”.