Paul Bryant's Reviews > The House of the Seven Gables

Back in the early 19th century the idea was to bung as many clauses as possible into your sentences – if you could interrupt yourself twelve times before the full stop, that was style. Mostly I enjoy the sclerosis of early Victorian prose, it’s like wading through barb-wired treacle but you knew what you were in for and like spelunking it can be an invigorating challenge.

But Nathaniel Hawthorne - really, this guy is too much. Here he is talking about a little kid who’s already bought some gingerbread from the shop and now he’s returned :

Phœbe, on entering the shop, beheld there the already familiar face of the little devourer—if we can reckon his mighty deeds aright—of Jim Crow, the elephant, the camel, the dromedaries, and the locomotive. Having expended his private fortune, on the two preceding days, in the purchase of the above unheard-of luxuries, the young gentleman’s present errand was on the part of his mother, in quest of three eggs and half a pound of raisins.

This is sickly simpering stuff indeed. “The little devourer”….”his mighty deeds”…”his private fortune”…”unheard-of luxuries”… he is beating this spoofiness to death, it dies horribly long before he gets to the half pound of raisins. He thinks he’s being kindly-funny when he’s being revolting. Well, of course, that was the taste in polite humour back then – patronising little children mercilessly. And he doesn’t stop laying it on with a trowel :

These articles Phœbe accordingly supplied, and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him.

We are taking the whole first page of chapter 8 to hack through all this arch blathering about a gingerbread whale and the fun stuff about Jonah and the red pathway. And he will not stop wringing every last morsel of hilarity from the small boy.

This remarkable urchin, in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, both in respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because he, as well as Time, after ingulfing thus much of creation, looked almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made.

Finally the kid leaves – phew, maybe we can get back on track now.

As the child went down the steps, a gentleman ascended them, and made his entrance into the shop.

Okay – a new character. Ah, wait – in 1850 that meant that you had to spend a page describing what he’s wearing because no one in those days knew what anything looked like.

It was the portly, and, had it possessed the advantage of a little more height, would have been the stately figure of a man considerably in the decline of life, dressed in a black suit of some thin stuff, resembling broadcloth as closely as possible. A gold-headed cane, of rare Oriental wood, added materially to the high respectability of his aspect, as did also a neckcloth of the utmost snowy purity, and the conscientious polish of his boots. His dark, square countenance, with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows, was naturally impressive, and would, perhaps, have been rather stern, had not the gentleman considerately taken upon himself to mitigate the harsh effect by a look of exceeding good-humor and benevolence. Owing, however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about the lower region of his face, the look was, perhaps, unctuous rather than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshly effulgence, not altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be. A susceptible observer, at any rate, might have regarded it as affording very little evidence of the general benignity of soul whereof it purported to be the outward reflection. And if the observer chanced to be ill-natured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably suspect that the smile on the gentleman’s face was a good deal akin to the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his boot-black, respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and preserve them.

My dear fellow goodreaders, this was page 116 and I could take it no more. Congratulations to the steelier readers who finished this novel with their sanity intact. I decamped for the austere pages of Wikipedia where I read the Plot Summary. And ugh, what thin gruel it was. All that for this?

The DNFs come thick and fast. Will I actually finish a novel this year?