It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon. The hero sinks upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; in the next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience with a comic song. We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike in danger, drawing forth her dagger to preserve the one at the cost of the other; and just as our expectations are
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Dickens’s ‘streaky bacon effect’ - a term Charles Dickens used to describe his plot construction technique of alternating serious, melodramatic, and tragic scenes with humorous, farcical, or comic relief scenes. He compared this to the alternating layers of fat and meat in a side of streaky bacon, a technique he said would create reader interest by providing both pathos and humor and by touching on themes in the main plot.
