Catherine Gore 1799(?)-1861
(Born Catherine Grace Frances Moody; also wrote under the pseudonyms CD., D.F.G., Mrs. Charles Gore, and Albany Poyntz) English novelist, dramatist, nonfiction writer, poet, and composer.
Gore was one of the most popular authors of the "fashionable novel," or "silver-fork novel," a romance genre popular from the mid-1820s to 1850. In her lifetime, Gore wrote more than sixty novels, dramas, and verse, most of them published anonymously; among her best-known novels are Mothers and Daughters: A Tale of the Year 1830 (1831), Mrs. Armytage; or, Female Domination (1836), and Cecil; or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb (1841). Like many silver-fork novelists, Gore wrote detailed depictions of the upper classes during the reign of George IV (1811 to 1830). She often portrayed dominant men and submissive women, who content themselves with subordinate positions in their marriages, homes, and families. Gore has been criticized for her inclusion of copious details involving scandals, gossip, etiquette, social gatherings, and fashion; she is singled out, however, for her sharp and realistic portrayal of upper-class life, as well as for her satirization of her aristocratic subjects. Among her most avid readers were middle-class women, with whom she often sympathized and who looked to her novels for instruction in such details as proper dress and behavior, and how to converse.
Although Gore was one of the most popular silver-fork novelists, little is known about her life—Gore herself concealed much about her origins. She is believed to have been born in East Retford, Nottinghamshire, in 1799, to a merchant-class family. After her father's death, the family moved to London, where Gore was educated primarily at home. She began writing novels, poetry, and short fiction in the 1820s. In 1823, she married army officer Charles Arthur Gore, who retired soon thereafter, and with whom she had ten children. After her marriage, Gore rose to prominence in the London high society that would serve as the subject for her most successful fashionable novels, beginning with Women as They Are; or, Manners of the Day in 1830. In 1832 the Gores moved to Paris, which again offered a rich setting for many of her novels; by then, Gore was supporting her family with her prolific writing. In the early 1830s, Gore also wrote several plays that were moderately successful—including The School for Coquettes (1831)—but none were nearly as popular as her books. In 1840, the Gores returned to England. The publication in 1841 of Gore's best-known novel, Cecil; or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb, caused a stir in high-class circles, but little commotion elsewhere; by then the popularity of the fashionable novel was waning. Gore was plagued by misfortune later in life, beginning with her husband's death in 1846. In addition, after receiving a substantial inheritance from a relative, Gore lost the money in a bank fraud in 1855. She was forced into retirement in 1858 by failing eyesight—an irony given her reputation as a sharp-eyed observer of the upper classes—and died on January 29, 1861, in Lyndhurst, Hampshire.
Although Women as They Are was Gore's first fashionable novel, Pin Money (1831) was her first success. The moral in Pin Money, as in many of her novels, is that the husband should be dominant while the wife remains submissive—and therefore closer to the "feminine ideal". In Pin Money, for example, the female protagonist voluntarily relinquishes control of her allowance to her husband after she nearly bankrupts herself with extravagant purchases. Manipulative women are punished in Mothers and Daughters: A Tale of the Year 1830—only the female character who marries for love achieves happiness, unlike the woman who attempts to raise her social standing through marriage. In Mrs. Armytage; or, Female Domination (1836), one of Gore's few nonfashionable novels, the author portrays the powerful, manipulative title character as "unnatural," stretching, as she does, the boundaries of her "proper" sphere of home and family. Gore's novels also demonstrate a wistfulness for the waning Regency era. In The Hamiltons; or, The New Era (1834), Gore tells of a married member of Parliament, who devotes all his energies to retaining his office. According to critics, Gore's depiction of the Tories' sole concentration on office-holding reveals her bias toward the Whig (or reform) party. In her best-known novel, Cecil; or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb, Gore also celebrated the London Regency era: the title character, a conceited and adventurous young man, enters London society, engages in several romantic liaisons, visits Europe with Byron, and obtains the family fortune, before eventually finding himself in the court of George IV.
In the preface to Pin Money, Gore stated her intent "to transfer the familiar narrative of [Jane] Austen to a higher sphere of society." Although the subject matter of the two authors is similar, Gore never attained the literary status of Austen. Gore herself, in fact, recognized the lack of literary value in her work, referring to her "sickly progenitor of fashionable novels," and once confiding to the editor of the Athenaeum: "I was a reader of rubbish long before I became a writer of it." Critics generally describe Gore's novels as caricature. Her stories tend to be largely superficial, with little character or plot development, and filled with "puffing," or the incessant name-dropping of shops and tradesmen that catered to the upper class. Her writing is also highly affected, according to critics, filled with an overabundance of foreign phrases, quotations, allusions, and polysyllabic words. For these shortcomings, Thackeray parodied her work in his "Novels by Eminent Hands" in 1847. Yet even Thackeray, like other critics, found room to praise her for her detailed observations of the manners and mores of upper-crust society, as well as for her ability, unlike other silver-fork novelists, to satirize her subjects with her sharp wit. Likewise, Charlotte Brontë praised The Hamiltons in a letter to Gore: "I found in its pages not the echo of another mind—the pale reflection of a reflection—but the result of original observation, and faithful delineation from actual life." Gore's work continues to be of interest from a historical perspective, as scholars acknowledge her as an accurate chronicler of fashionable society during the Regency period.
The Two Broken Hearts (verse) 1823
Hungarian Tales (short stories) 1829
Women as They Are; or, Manners of the Day (novel) 1830
Pin Money (novel) 1831
Mothers and Daughters: A Tale of the Year 1830 (novel) 1831
The School for Coquettes (drama) 1831
The Fair of May Fair (short stories) 1832; republished as The Miseries of Marriage; or, The Fair of May Fair 1834
The Sketch Book of Fashion (novel) 1833
The Hamiltons; or, The New Era (novel) 1834
The Diary of a Désennuyée (novel) 1836
Mrs. Armytage; or, Female Domination (novel) 1836
The Cabinet Minister (novel) 1839
The Dowager; or, The New School for Scandal (novel) 1840
Preferment; or, My Uncle the Earl (novel) 1840
Greville; or, A Season in Paris (novel) 1841
Cecil; or, The Adventures of a Coxcomb (novel) 1841
Cecil; a Peer (novel) 1841; republished as Ormington; or, Cecil: a Peer 1842
The Money-Lender (novel) 1843; republished as Abednego 1854
The Banker's Wife; or, Court and City (novel) 1843
Quid Pro Quo; or,...
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SOURCE: Review of Pin Money, in Westminster Review, Vol. 15, October, 1831, pp. 433-42.
[In the following review, the anonymous writer criticizes Pin Money for its puffing—its indiscriminate name-dropping of upper-class shops and tradesmen—but finds that the novel contains "exceedingly clever sketches of society."]
Pin Money is a novel which shews, in three volumes, the danger of a married lady's possessing four hundred a year independent of her husband. A person reasoning of these times in another age, might be led into a great mistake, by considering as an indication of the vast diffusion of wealth in this country, that it was thought a fit subject for a book, to guard the female sex against being led into the error of accepting an income. The manner in which this income is represented as being employed, will also strike the reasoner in question as a singular proof of the luxury of these days. The Pin Money of lady Rawleigh is laid out in a marble fountain for her flower-garden in the country, cost 70l; a horse in London, 80l; an opera-box for the alternate nights of a season, 150l; and loss at cards, some hundred or two; these exhaust the allowance; a fountain, a horse, an opera-box, and a gaming-debt. Beyond her Pin Money, lady Rawleigh, a model of every perfection, moral and personal, runs in debt about seven or eight hundred pounds in less than a year....
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SOURCE: "New Novels: Mrs. Gore's Greville; or, A Season in Paris, and Bulwer's Night and Morning" in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 8, March, 1841, pp. 186-91.
[In the excerpt below, Johnstone praises Greville; or, A Season in Paris for capturing the characteristic differences between the French and English aristocracies.]
The novel season of 1841 has opened brilliantly. Sir Edward Bulwer makes his bow to the public, after an absence of three years; Mrs. Gore her curtsy, after about the same number of months. The former occupies his original English ground, with no diminution of force and vigour, and with ripened experience of men and manners; the lady has changed the scene, with evident advantage to her readers, both as regards their amusement and information. Mrs. Gore, who has been domiciled in Paris for a good many years, now that she has left that gay capital for London, is exactly in the best imaginable position for painting Parisian society; while remoteness allows freedom of handling, and the original impressions remain fresh and sharp. Whatever the English may think of this new fiction, the French, and especially the Parisians, must be enchanted with her flattering and delicately discriminative portraiture. In taste, in manners, and even in truly refined epicureanism; in the genuine philosophy of luxurious enjoyment, Mrs. Gore places the noblesse and fashionables of...
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SOURCE: "Female Novelists," in New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 95, June, 1852, pp. 157-68.
[In the following overview of several of Gore's novels, Jacox—who contends that "the fashionable novel occupies but humble rank" among literary genres—nevertheless praises Gore for her "facile mastery of the materials with which she works."]
What constitutes a first-rate novel is a problem which might raise consternation in the senate-house of Cambridge; a problem knotty enough to stagger the entire corporation of wranglers, and strike the senior ops "all of a heap," and impel the junior ops (wooden spoon and all) to take refuge in suicide. When a plenary and all-satisfying definition has once been given, it will be time to append to the main proposition the accompanying "rider:" viz., whether the accomplishment of a first-rate novel is within the potential limits of female genius—whether it lies within or beyond the frontiers assigned to womanly capacity by psychological map-makers. If the ideal novel be as difficult of realisation as a first-class poem or play, we fear, both on à priori and à posteriori grounds, that the verdict will go against "the sex." Most of their wisest brethren, and some of their wisest selves—(we tremble, currente calamo, as we remember the existence of Mrs. Bloomer and the Emancipationists!)—emphatically support this view of the case. If the view...
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SOURCE: "A Ladies' Miscellany," in A Victorian Album: Some Lady Novelists of the Period, Columbia University Press, 1946, pp. 3-45.
[In the following excerpt, Stebbins finds Gore's novels "insipid, " criticizing their lack of plot development and well-drawn characters, and pointing out her tendency to over-indulge in foreign phrases and polysyllabic words.]
The always moral, always trite [Catherine] Gore (1800-1861) exerted royal authority over English readers by a combination of inflexible standards of behavior and a knowledge of aristocratic circles. Where she learned so much about the upper classes is a matter of conjecture; she was born into a mercantile family, but seems to have been the stepdaughter of a Dr. Nevinson; at twenty-three she married Lieutenant Charles Arthur Gore, who retired almost immediately from the army and subsequently assisted her in the writing of plays and novels. They lived some years in France and in Belgium, where he died in 1846. In the intervals of bearing him ten children, she had published a staggering number of volumes; before her own death at sixty-one, she had produced fifty-five works of fiction.
Miss Mitford had known her as a young girl and considered her a most brilliant conversationalist. She was undoubtedly an accomplished woman, an excellent musician, the composer of drawing-room songs. The outline of her life is bleak enough: she was left a...
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SOURCE: "The Writings of Catherine Gore," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. X, No. 1, Summer, 1976, pp. 404-23.
[In this excerpt, Anderson uses a feminist perspective to identify the "womanly ideology" present in both Gore's work and many present-day romance novels, and argues that is it this motif that is the source of their appeal to women of all classes.]
By the end of the eighteenth century woman's position in society was beginning to be discussed in Western Europe. The political revolutions in America and France, with their emphasis on individual rights; the romantic cult of sensibility, which stressed the value of emotions and the heart; the new concern with education, both religious and practical, all led to an interest in previously submerged groups within European society: slaves, Jews, peasants, and children, as well as women. Thus far, most of the scholarship on women in the first half of the nineteenth century has paid attention to women who achieved prominence in a society which believed women should not be socially conspicuous or women who created what would come to be called feminism. In the process, two important facts have been ignored. First, the vast majority of women in the period were not feminists, and to ignore these women is to devalue their lives as thoroughly as most historians have done to womankind since history began to be written. Second, it is often assumed that the...
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SOURCE: "Transmuting the Commonplace: A Problem of Style," in The Novelist and Mammon: Literary Responses to the World of Commerce in the Nineteenth Century, Clarendon Press, 1986, pp. 188-208.
[In the following excerpt, Russell examines Gore's novels of the 1840s, when she focused on financial issues, and finds her an objective and judicious observer of money in relation to mid-nineteenth-century society.']
Of all nineteenth-century novelists who turned their attention to the City and its doings, [Catherine] Gore was the most faithful to reality, and the best able to solve the problems of presentation caused by the demands of structure, setting, and style. Virtually forgotten today, her works were enormously popular in her own time: such disparate critics as George Eliot and George IV thought highly of her talents. Her success in depicting the financial scene was due partly to her innate ability, and partly to the nature of her formative years as a writer, which developed in her a broad view of society and its doings, and a certain wariness about the antipathetic literary tradition in the matter of the City inherited from the eighteenth century.
Born in 1799, she married in 1823 Captain Charles Arthur Gore, an officer in the 1st Life Guards, and from the time of her marriage pursued a career in writing and publishing. She was an excellent woman of business, though, as we have seen,...
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"Mrs. Gore." The Athenaeum, No. 1737 (9 February 1861): 196.
Obituary of Gore that presents some anecdotal biographical details and praises her work.
Colby, Vineta. "Manners, Morals, and Maneuvering Matrons: Mrs. Gore and the Fashionable Novel." In Yesterday's Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel, pp. 41-85. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974.
Argues that the silver-fork novelists—in particular, Gore—should not be dismissed as "mere hacks," but should instead be studied as "important chroniclers of their times."
Eliot, George. "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists." Westminster Review 10 (July and October 1856): 442-61.
General critique of the silver-fork school.
Engel, Elliot, and Margaret F. King. "Subgenres of the Novel from 1830 to 1837." In their The Victorian Novel Before Victoria: British Fiction during the Reign of William IV, 1830-37, pp. 87-134. London: The Macmillan Press Limited, 1984.
Discusses Gore's contribution to the silver-fork school, commenting on her literary style, characterization, and attention to detail.
Gettman, Royal A....
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