 He characterized them as having "under-bred tone" because while they purported to tell the lives of aristocrats, they were commonly written by the middle-class.Thomas Carlyle wrote "Sartor Resartus" in critique of their minute detailing of clothing, and William Makepeace Thackeray satirized them in "Vanity Fair" and "Pendennis".In Donna Leon's fourth Commissario Guido Brunetti novel, "Death and Judgment", English professor Paola Brunetti describes silver fork novels as "books written in the eighteenth century, when all that money poured into England from the colonies, and the fat wives of Yorkshire weavers had to be taught which fork to use."