You gotta be patient to read books from before 1950 or so.
Memoirs and stuff were stuffy and wordy enough, but a lot of fiction was serialized in monthly newspapers and magazines, with authors paid by the word, and editing was basically not a thing.
So, because authors were paid by the word, and their writing was only cursorily reviewed at best, they would write unnecessarily long and wandering explanations for things, as it was in their own best financial interests. They would also spend no amount of time belaboring the obvious implications of every detail which they felt inclined to mention. This writing style is still evident in many self help books today, where a single point or idea is driven home with example after example and anecdote after anecdote. No doubt in order to illustrate the point to an audience which is largely incapable of making a leap of logic without supervision.
In truth, it reminds me a bit of the writing style of learning language models, as they also tend to favor output of quality thereof. Probably because similar subjective writing standards are in place to judge the quality of their output as were in place to judge the productivity of a 19th century author - to whit, quantity is a quality all of its own, and the individuals determining the quality of the output are not themselves professional writers.