Abstract
The reform era witnessed an explosion of prose genres, many of which have been classified as sub-genres of the novel: the fashionable or silver fork novel, the Irish novel, the Scottish novel, the marine novel, the Newgate novel, the Chartist novel, the historical novel, prose collections of ‘sketches of life and character’ and so on. Literary texts produced in this period – especially some of the ‘sketches of life and character’ sort – tend to receive considerably less critical attention (if any) than the ‘great achievements of realistic fiction’ beginning with the industrial novel.¹ The reasons for this neglect are beyond the