The novel begins with a great rhetorical figure.

The first four pages explain that vices rule society like epidemics.

Very general.

Robbery and murder have now been suppressed as barbaric crimes by "order and law", but instead lies and deception are the signs of an overripe civilization.

A little more concrete.

The victory over Napoleon in the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century irritated the souls of the English, made them exuberant, immoderate and wild.

Quite on time.

They started gambling, consuming and wasting their fortune.

So they went into debt and so turned to the hero of this novel.

Jürgen Kaube

Editor.

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Rarely has a novel hero been introduced since Homer with such a tracking shot falling on him from the highest heights and so in principle. Catherine Gore, doing it this way, had no philosophical intent at all. She only understood the techniques of creating tension. Between 1823 and 1858 she published more than seventy works: mostly novels and short stories, ten plays. Fourteen thousand copies of the “moneylender” have been sold in twelve years, a very respectable amount for the time. Since most of the readers bought themselves from lending libraries, their number was many times higher. Gore achieved his breakthrough on the English book market in 1841 with "Cecil or Adventure of a Gockels". A good title, because the portrayal of roosters - mostly male, but not only - cared a lot for her.Unfortunately, it is completely unknown in this country.

Silver fork novels tell of the world of the upper class

Her novels are assigned to the genre of the "Silver Fork Novel", a name that William Hazlitt had put into circulation in 1827 to poke fun at a literature that was more interested in what cutlery the better-off ate fish with than for their feelings and actions.

Thomas Carlyle's wonderful story of the “re-tailor-made tailor”, the “Sartor Resartus”, in which a German romantic professor works on a philosophy of clothes, perfected this mockery in 1838.

There were decades in which much thought was given to the difference between appearance and essence, as well as the excess of representation in social intercourse.

In the big city in particular, it was not easy to find out what was behind the big gigs.

Maybe it was all just a facade.

The silver fork novels, whose best-known authors included Edward Bulwer Lytton (“Pelham”) and Benjamin Disraeli (“The Young Duke”), told middle-class readers about the world of the upper class, about travel, luxury consumption and fashion. “What does my son know about dukes?” Disraeli's father is said to have asked, struck by a fantasy sparked by world trade, tourism and city life. One only had to know as much about dukes as the “Bunte” today, namely almost nothing. Because it was not about dukes per se, but about those for the audience. This and the detailed description of the world of goods made the genre suspect that it was a higher form of advertising. Hazlitt complained about too much "Macassar oil, cologne, Seltzer soda, Otto's rose extract and divine pomade" in the novels.