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

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:06 AM -0400 7/17/07, Stephen Goranson wrote:
>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
>
Then there's the question of proof.  I wonder at
what point "The proof of the pudding is in the
eating" turned into the rather more opaque "The
proof is in the pudding"...

LH

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