When the narrator switches into first-person in this new sentence, I wonder if it’s really Collins speaking - especially when he mentions “the gentlemen who make a business and a living out of writing books”; Is this a stream of consciousness (similar to Woolf?)? Can it be measured quantifiably? To me, streams of consciousness, while sometimes inarguably clear, always have something to do with the readers and how they view themselves, a factor that seems so subjective and wildly varying from person to person.