A type of the triumphant monster, Death - too much starch in Dombey's pudding

Dickens was a master of the rhetoric of fiction. His range of modes and methods rivaled that of any writer who ever lived. I would guess that this was related to his gift for speech - that he was a great mimic, and could imitate anything. Speeches, sermons, advertising, journalism, the novels of everyone else. His range and control improved with experience.

Dombey and Son is full of magnificent passages that demonstrate his mastery. But something has gone wrong. The writing can be too thick, too worked up. Dickens has added too much starch to his pudding. He has whipped his cream to butter. He has whipped his egg whites to - what happens when one overwhips egg whites? Meine Frau tells me that they become lumpy. Yes, parts of Dombey and Son are lumpy. Dickens's Christmas story from the same year, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848), has the exact same problem. I found a few passages in that story almost incomprehensible. They were so very thick.

Should I quote extended rhetorically heated, dullish paragraphs to make my point? That'd be fun. Instead, I'll point to one odd feature of Dombey and Son that I don't remember seeing anywhere else in Dickens: his use of a refrain.

He does this three times, I think. I'll just stick with the first example, Chapter XX, "Mr. Dombey goes upon a Journey." Great chapter. It's full of excellent railroad detail. Once Mr. Dombey is actually on the train, we enter into his troubled thoughts (he has just suffered a great loss). The speed of the train somehow reminds him of his loss. The paragraph ends:

"The power that forced itself upon its iron way--its own--defiant of all paths and roads, piercing through the heart of every obstacle, and dragging living creatures of all classes, ages, and degrees behind it, was a type of the triumphant monster, Death."

There's some social criticism here (the railroad as an agent of destruction) aside from gloomy Dombey's thoughts. Comes back at the end of the novel, too. The personification of the railroad as Death is rhetorically extreme, but so far so good, although that's clearly not Mr. Dombey any more.

The next paragraph ends "like as in the track of the remorseless monster, Death!" The one after that ends with the exact same phrase. The next, with "and what else is there but such glimpses, in the track of the indomitable monster, Death!"

So four paragraphs in a row end almost identically, a poetic effect, as if the passage is a ballad. Or perhaps the proper comparison is with a sermon, the preacher hitting his point again and again.

I'm not so sure that this section, or the other two places in the novel that use the same device, all moments of keen mental stress for someone, are novelistically effective. They seem to end up a great distance away from the characters. They draw attention to their rhetorical effect, their artificiality. Did Dickens ever repeat this experiment?

I wonder if the move to the first person in David Copperfield was also a way to push back against the thickening of his style, a way to limit or control some of the rhetorical flights. We'll see. By Bleak House, if I remember correctly, he had the problem completely under control. That foggy opening passage, for example. Just the right amount of starch.

A South Seas book collection - like bologna, and Stilton

An antiquarian shows the island travellers his book collection:

"Upon gaining the vault, forth flew a score or two of bats, extinguishing the flambeau, and leaving us in darkness, like Belzoni deserted by his Arabs in the heart of a pyramid. The torch at last relumed, we entered a tomb-like excavation, at every step raising clouds of dust; and at last stood before long rows of musty, mummyish parcels, so dingy-red, and so rolled upon sticks, that they looked like stiff sausages of Bologna; but smelt like some fine old Stilton or Cheshire."

Mardi, Ch. 123

Much of what is wrong with Mardi is on display here ("relumed"), but I don't care. I want to look at those mummyish, sausagey, aromatic scrolls.

Some titles:

King Kroko, and the Fisher Girl
Sonnet on the Last Breath of an Ephemera
Grunts and Groans, by a Mad Boar
Pudding for the Pious
On the Best Gravy for Wild Boar's Meat
Three Recipes for Bottling New Arrack

Hmm, maybe I don't want to look at them. Maybe just those last two.

the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball

Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house, and a pastry cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered: flushed, but smiling proudly: with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.

A Christmas Carol, Chapter 3

Have a good holiday.