"This pudding has no theme" (Winston Churchill?)

[Stephen Goranson]

Perhaps relevant:
The Victorians and After, 1830-1914 By Edith Clara Batho, Bonamy Dobrée, Guy
Chapman, 1938, p.77 (if I correctly pieced snippets):

A novel had to be, not a slice of life, but the whole pudding. Yet what a
pudding it was, stuffed full of plums, and if there was a good deal of dough
about it, this was easily swallowed. To abandon the metaphor, what made these
novels so palatable was not only the drama or the comedy, the thrill or the
laughter, but the expectation of ...Thus the novelists of the Edwardian period
were all aware of it though they often flouted it. Form, of course, is
inseparable from unity of theme. There is no theme in Dickens; there is no
theme in ...

Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson

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