"His footing in society is no longer dependent upon the caprice of a drawing-room. It is the security of that intellectual power which forces the world to bend the knee. The poor, dreamy boy, self-taught, self-aided, had risen into power. He wields a pen. And the pen in our age weighs heavier in the social scale than a sword of a Norman baron."
Mrs. Gore lived at a time when the introduction of machinery and the establishment of large factories was producing a new type of man: men like Burtonshaw in The Hamiltons: "A practical, matter-of-fact individual, with plenty of money and plenty of intellect; the sort of human power-loom one would back to work wonders against a dawdling old spinning-jenny like Lord Tottenham."
A critic in the Westminster Review wrote in 1832 as follows:
"The wealthy merchant or money-dealer is represented, perhaps for the first time in fiction, as a man of true dignity, self-respect, education, and thorough integrity, agreeable in manners, refined in tastes, and content with, if not proud of, his position in society."
Mrs. Gore was called by her contemporaries the novelist of the new era.
She was also interested in the great ethical questions of life. She did not write of the love of youthful heroes and more youthful heroines. She often traced the consequences of sin on character and destiny. In The Heir of Selwood, she is as stern a moralist in tracing the effects of vice as George Eliot. The Banker's Wife, the scene of which is laid among the merchants of London, is a serious study of the sorrows of a life devoted to outward show. The picture of the banker among his guests, whose wealth, unknown to them, he has squandered, reminds one of the days before the final overthrow of Dombey and Son.
Mrs. Gore was a woman of genius. With the stern principles of the puritan, and feelings as republican as the mountain-born Swiss, she was never controversial. She saw the absurdities of certain hollow pretensions of society, but her good-humoured raillery offended no one. If her two hundred volumes could be weeded of their verbiage by some devotee of literature, and reduced to ten or fifteen, they would be not only entertaining reading, but would throw strong lights upon the élite of London in the days when hair-oils, pomades, and strong perfumes were the distinguishing marks of the Quality.
Mrs. Gore owed her place in English letters to native wit and ability; Mrs. Bray owed hers to hard study and painstaking endeavour. She was one of the few women who followed the style of writing brought to perfection by Sir Walter Scott.
Mrs. Bray became imbued with the historic spirit early in life. Her first husband was Charles Stothard, the author of Monumental Effigies of Great Britain, with whom she travelled through Brittany, Normandy and Flanders. While he made careful drawings of the ruins of castles and abbeys, she read Froissart's Chronicles, visited the places which he has described, and traced out among the people any surviving customs which he has recorded.