FASHION, FASHIONABLE INTELLIGENCE, AND THE VICTORIAN NOVEL: THE VERSATILE CASE OFBLEAK HOUSE

Abstract

That an advertisement on fashionable clothing should reference a novel which ostensibly satirizes the world of fashion is not as striking as it seems. It points toward the affinity between clothes/body making and novel/book production, an affinity widely attested to in contemporary literature. An 1836 Court Magazine piece, for instance, puts it like this: FASHION in books may now be said to fluctuate as frequently as fashion in bonnets, and a monthly commentary on the changes in literary modes, might just as well be circulated as a periodical magazine of fashion in dress. We might express ourselves thus: – “One of the metropolitan publishers has introduced elegant novelties in the way of town prints, produced with small neat plates, judicious gatherings, and a becoming binding . . . .” (“The Vicissitudes of a Silver Tea-Pot” 68) For this writer and many others, book production and bonnet making can be talked about in very many of the same terms – modes, novelties, prints, plates – not the least because they are underwritten by the same language, or rather subjected to the same rule, of “FASHION.” Fashion – mostly but not always with a capitalized F and tautologically conceived of as that which makes it fashionable – has become such a paradigmatic driving force in modern England that anti-fashion functions as the shortest, most direct route to be in: an advertising strategy deployed by companies like Moses and Son in a rhetoric that makes full use of the fluidity of language to circulate everything back to the magnetic space constituted by polar opposites.