Maybe this was pointed out and I missed it but ... anyone who went to Sunday School -- even if functionally illiterate -- would recognize "as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth" as an allusion to Noah and the Flood. I wonder how many of them caught that.
(Dickens himself must have been quoting from memory, since the KJV reads slightly differently: "he waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry." (Genesis 8:13)
That confused me at first - I don't think Dickens is referring to Noah's flood, but to the parting of the seas and the land on the third day of Creation in Genesis 1:9-10:
"And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.”
He's saying there's so much mud that it's as if the seas have just withdrawn from the land, which is why he wouldn't be surprised to see a dinosaur. It's as if the Earth had just been created.
Oh, good. I thought it referred to that too. I was beginning to wonder if my reading skills were somewhat lacking. But it's a hard passage, especially if you don't know city streets used to be muddy, and that cities were dirty, and that it rains a lot in London and that pollution (in those days from factories) turned everything black, and contributed to fog. As for the Megalosaurus, Dickens is referring to the Bible and the unrelated subject of dinosaurs--he is also confused here, and the reader needs to know what 19th century non-scientists knew about the fantastic beasts imagined from a few bones. It is a difficult novel: one character gets smallpox (which is never named). I'm not ashamed I had to look online to find out what was going on.
And you shouldn't be ashamed to look up anything. The students in the study were prompted to look up anything they didn't understand. Most just chose not to do so. This shows that they will likely fail to even attempt to understand any difficult text they come across during their further studies. I believe about half of the subjects even said they would use SparkNotes if a book such as Bleak House were assigned to them. Just to be clear, all the subjects were English majors.
I don't think this is right, because the parting of the seas occurs on day 3 whereas animals were created on day 6, and upon the parting of the sea the land is dry, but that would make little sense since Dickens then talks about the large amounts of mud. However, on Noah's ark there was a couple of every animal (Megalosaurus included presumably), and after the withdrawal of water, when Noah lands he frees all animals, who would be walking on the land still muddy.
He’s not conflating the Ark’s contents and Megalosaurs.
The Megalosaur was the first dinosaur, only named in 1841, eleven years prior to this passage. He’s demonstrating erudition as a status marker. His assertion: I have read the latest scientific papers.
I think it is an oblique reference to aged epochs, with Genesis 8:13, the emergence of the land from the sea and the bones of the dinosaurs all very old. He elides the contradictions between Biblical assertions and the exact, new science of archaeology.
It is a testament to his brilliance that he comes across as lambent rather than a dillettente.
This is a good point. My reading of Dickens' openings is that he was faced with a blank piece of paper and a deadline. Just get it going and let the ideas and the characters and the story come. I don't think he's sweating the details here. Reading the comments, I've found there's more in that paragraph than I ever noticed, referencing both the creation (or rebirth if you insist) of the world and the death of the sun—eternity in other words, and it is about this very long court case.
I think it's a much harder passage for readers today than Dickens' contemporaries because they don't know what London was like in the mid 19th century, and Megalosaurus is much less well known now than the stars of the Jurassic Park movies. And the usual meaning of "wonderful" has changed from "surprising" to "very good." It takes a conscious effort to get his intention. Besides, I think an editor today would say, "I know you had to write that to get the juices flowing, but let's cut it and get to the action." (Perhaps the wrong decision, as it is such a fascinating and rewarding paragraph.)
Well I’m assuming that Dickens’ belief is that dinosaurs weren’t saved on the Ark. But you’re right that animals weren’t created until a few days later. I still think it makes more sense as a reference to the Biblical creation - Genesis 1 doesn’t say the land was dry right after the creation of the seas, but the account of the flood does. I don’t know exactly how the Victorians at that time reconciled geology with the Bible or how Dickens interpreted that, though.
It would make sense that Dickens wanted to show off that he was up-to-date with the latest scientific discoveries, so "now that we know that dinosaurs existed, Noah must have brough them on that Ark as well, and there would have bene dinosaurs roaming the Earth after the flood". Back then they didn't have carbon dating and not much was known about the actual age of the planet, so there was still a debate as to when the dinosaurs died. It would have been reasonable to assume that they died no more than a few thousand years before.
At this point they knew that the Earth was millions of years old - the idea of uniformitarianism (gradual change as opposed to catastrophism to explain different geological layers etc) had been introduced in 1830. Dickens actualy wrote an article called 'OUR PHANTOM SHIP ON AN ANTEDILU-
And note that it's "antediluvian", so he imagines dinosaurs as existing before Noah's flood, which supports my idea that the reference to the waters withdrawing is to Genesis 1.
This is how I took it. It's not an accident that he starts with this – just as Genesis begins with God creating the world with speech, Dickens is conjuring the world of the novel.
In conjunction with the megaolosaurus, it could also be a reference to the Neptunist ideas that were previously popular in geology. Either way, I agree that it’s saying the earth is as muddy as if it were newly created, and there’s something quite charming in juxtaposing a biblical flood with a dinosaur.
It says "dry" land not once but twice in that Genesis passage. Nothing even close to mud. Genesis is just poof magic. Air, water, land, just like it is today. No mud.
Making mud into a biblical reference is a stretch and an over-analysis.
English majors and "intellectuals" will want to find biblical references where they don't honestly exist. That does not mean the refs are really there. That just means English majors are really desperate to say something that sounds clever, but which there is very marginal evidence for.
Thanks for this. I knew I was missing a reference with that just born from the land phrase. My heathen self is generally well informed but *very* not familiar with the Bible, estorboso not as a 19th century British writer would assume!
I’m actually surprised at all the comments saying young Americans (especially these students in Kansas) aren’t familiar with Biblical references. I’m an atheist but you get a lot of exposure to the Bible in school in the UK - I guess that’s not allowed in the US but it’s still 60% Christian, I would have thought a lot of students go to Sunday schools or church.
Yeah, it's funny that Christians want the Bible in school but definitely not the way secular people would want it to be. Idve really enjoyed being taught how to read the text critically as a book written by people and not the perfect word of God. Also, it'd've been great in history classes because of how belief in it has influenced political decisions and international events.
Remember it's split by class. The type of people who do close reading are generally not the serious Christians. And high schoolers are barely reading full length novels in school anymore, much less the Bible, regardless of separation of church and state!
I was wondering there, the biblical subtext is so at odds with the dinosaur reference I figured he might actually be referencing a Victorian conception of a primordial ocean from which life sprung - a form of synthesis of biblical and scientific thought.
Claude agrees that the image was there in Victorian times and cites Tennyson (among other but the others are mostly later and would postdate Bleak House) but my questions might have been leading.
Yeah I don't think he's necessarily taking the beginning of Genesis completely literally, he's thinking about a primordial swamp millions of years ago.
One thing that struck me when I started reading older literature was the frequency of biblical allusions with the implication that the author expected the reader to understand them. In The Little Princess, decidedly aimed at children, the main character befriends a rat living in the attic and names him after an obscure biblical patriarch. Wouldn't get that in YA today!
In my undergraduate English program I was usually the only student who understood Biblical references. THAT'S why students aren't understanding metaphors (or, some of the reason anyway). They don't have the reference points.
It’s not just biblical references, the same applies to mythology that was once well known as well as folk tales.
In a conversation with a recent Stanford grad, I said I was going into my Rip Van Winkle mode. He had no idea who that was or what I was implying. A great deal of “common knowledge” has disappeared.
I can’t imagine any of them sitting down to read someone like Borges. They have little to bring to the conversation.
This is an interesting comment. Maybe they should require a course on the Bible as a prerequisite for the English major. The way that physics majors are required to take calculus, despite the fact that it's technically math, not physics. It's not reasonable to assume that students today would come to college familiar with the Bible, simply because a far smaller share of the student body are practicing Christians. If you're going to major in mechanical engineering, then whatever. If you're going to major in English, though, then being able to pick up on Biblical references would be a good idea.
I took a Bible in Western Culture course. It was fascinating for me. I'm not religious, so this was the first time I was exposed to critical analysis of the text without any religious connotations. I learned so much about different eras of Christianity, which made American and world history make so much more sense. In my opinion, many Christians, especially fundamentalists, are being blocked from understanding the Bible in crucial ways, and it's tough to witness. But everyone is entitled to their own belief
Even listening to heavy metal from the 70s and the 80s -- I have an Iron Maiden megafan in my household -- makes it clear that a working knowledge of Biblical themes, ideas and personalities was a normal part of literacy and artistry of all types until very recently.
Iron Maiden is an English group. I grew up in England during the same period as them and my primary school had quite a big Religious Education (RE) component, mostly Christian. Even tho that was not my religion, I was very familiar with biblical content. My school prize one year (aged 10) was a Dickens novel.
I had to explain the Trinity to a lapsed Catholic recently. This was a grad school writing workshop English graduate. No one understands or remembers common concepts, stories, or themes from the Bible anymore really. Doesn’t shock me anymore, except that it’s the most influential piece of literature in the modern Western canon.
I was brought up in an essentially atheistic household; my horrified grandparents bought my sister and me a wonderful series of Bible comic books. If they are right about the afterlife, I hope they know that was a gift that has paid dividends for years. Being able to recognize all the big Bible stories is important to basic literacy; I tracked down those comic books for my own kid and paid a pretty penny for them (they are no longer in print). My kid read them over and over, just as I did growing up. They are really well done.
Did the study attempt to distinguish between the students who could not read the text and those who were not capable of understanding it? Whole language reading instruction rendered a great many people unable to read things that they could understand if read to them.
The subjects read the passage aloud themselves, and then gave their modern rendition of it. You would have to listen to a recording to be sure ++ but the way the transcript presents it they seem to have done an acceptable version of looking at the marks on paper and producing a tolerable rendition in spoken English.
These were mostly white kids from colleges in Kentucky that were all English majors if I remember correctly. They all took an assessment test to prove they could read. The expectation was that many words or idioms may require a little research by the subjects. The majority of them just flat-out refused to look up words they didn't know despite being prompted by the tester to use supplied resources or their phone and to take as much time as they needed. Only 4 of the students displayed proficiency in looking up and ultimately understanding the literal meaning of the provided text. The difference seemed to be that most of the students would just guess without checking, and as they read, the poor guesses added up until they no longer could follow the material. Still, many of them claimed they'd have no problem if the book were assigned to them in class because they's just use SparkNotes! There's a link to the study in the blog post. It wasn't too long a read. But it's pretty hard to read if you think current college students at average colleges are going to be contributing to American dominance the next 20 years
I heard an art history professor talk approximately FIFTEEN YEARS AGO about how, when she started her career in the 1950s, she could glide through lectures because everyone already knew at least the bare-bones basic biblical references: Noah, Moses, David and Goliath, etc., but over the years she found herself having to stop and explain every single thing. By the 90s she had created a kiddie-level handout for the students to read beforehand. I doubt they would bother to read it now.
I think that “anyone would recognize…” is our high-IQ bias showing through again, unfortunately. Any of *us* who went to Sunday School would recognise it, but most will have sat through those lessons and not retained them.
I was pulled out of public school by my mother after failing the 6th grade for not doing my homework.
I was then "home schooled" rather poorly (handed the books and told to educate myself... at a time when I was my mother's spoiled golden child) and did barely anything before getting my GED in 2001.
People can't tell the difference.
A friend of mine with an engineering degree didn't guess that, and thought I'd graduated high school/possibly had some college under my belt.
NOBODY guesses that fact, including the one manager who said "Oh, that explains a few things about the way you act. You remind me of a couple home school kids in my neighborhood." after I told him.
THAT is how bad schools are nowadays.
Half an ounce of common sense and some intellectual curiosity is enough to be on the same level as graduates when needing to function in the real world.
It's still the Bible, insomuch as a "Western Canon" can be said to exist. We live in the ruins of Christendom & it's short-lived replacement "the West".
Couldn't give you one from the modern liberal canon, which I think is your real question.
There's no particular reason to associate it with Noah's flood, rather than with the creation, or indeed with a normal flood of which England had lots. Any of those is allowable, and having more of them on tap enriches your reading experience. It's semiotically rich!
The temptation to locate the true hidden meaning of a text like Dickens is misplaced. Joyce, sure. Dickens, no.
Only the withdrawing of the seas at the creation really makes sense in the context of the passage. Why would the narrator be unsurprised to meet a living dinosaur after a normal English flood? And in a Victorian context, I don't think the narrator would expect to meet a dinosaur *after* Noah's flood.
No, this is an incredibly clear reference to the fact that the biblical flood was believed to have killed the dinosaurs. It's not trying to find a hidden meaning at all - it just requires lots of context.
That's inconsistent with the text: if the waters refer to the great flood that killed the dinosaurs, then you wouldn't find a “Megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill” after “the waters had but newly retired”.
Right, but Dickens writes “and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus”. The “not” here, meaning post-flood there wouldn’t be dinosaurs, indicates that Dickens is referring to a biblical flood.
Edit — Unless you take “wonderful” in a sense of astonishment, in which case “not” indicates the dinosaur is expected and the creation-read of this scene wins.
Fair enough, Dickens was probably thinking specifically of Buckland or some follow-on.
But the larger point remains, Dickens wasn't interested in requiring you to know Buckland's specific theories to make sense of this passage. He wasn't a riddler. A reader who grew up in Lincolnshire could make a lot of sense of the passage, even if the Megalasaur reference passed them by.
even if it's not a Flood reference it should be obvious to anyone who's seen a flood, or a creek drying up, or a riverbank shift, or a quarry cut. River undercuts often expose dinosaur bones as well so that ties in. If it was raining earlier it could be implied that the rain has just retired (stopped working/raining) as well. Lot of ways to interpret it which makes it interesting.
He means that it's as if the waters have just been separated from the land, as per Genesis 1:9-10. It's nothing to do with dinosaur bones being exposed by a flood. The point is that the ground is so muddy that it's as if the Earth had just been created (according to the account in Genesis) so the narrator wouldn't be surprised to see a dinosaur (although according to Genesis, animals were created a few days later).
That interpretation doesn't makes sense. The narrator is saying it's as if the flood just ended - "as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth". If the flood referenced is Noah's flood that was believed to have killed the dinosaurs, why would the narrator *not* be surprised to see a *living* dinosaur? ("it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, waddling" etc.)
I initially thought of Noah's flood, but the reference is to the creation of the Earth earlier in Genesis. The narrator is saying that there's so much mud, it's as if the Earth has just been formed ("Then God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so.") so it *wouldn't* be surprising to meet an antediluvian creature like a Megalosaurus.
There's some weird version of the theory that Noah did save the dinos, but then they died immediately after. But he would only have saved two?
But ultimately Dickens is just saying "it was muddy" and wasn't particularly concerned with his metaphors and references making particular sense. He's just setting a scene which Orwell reminds us is more or less what makes Dickens Dickens
I had read it being that the city was in such a chaotic state that seeing such a creature would not cause one to pause, rather than it being like the earth had literally been created, although that could be an interpretation if you picked up the KJV allusion.
It also makes me wonder if the Doctor Who episode Deep breath was making a reference to bleak house and making the
I had read it being that the city was in such a chaotic state that seeing such a creature would not cause one to pause, rather than it being like the earth had literally been created, although that could be an interpretation if you picked up the KJV allusion.
It also makes me wonder if the Doctor Who episode Deep breath was making a reference to bleak house and making the
I don't know why the waters receding would be better, since the dinosaurs did not exist in he narrative at the time, but it's also irrelevant given that it was figurative language drawing a general scene.
And for the discussion, the contours of the biblical reference are less critical here than the fact that students who are unfamiliar with the references would be confused about what waters receding had to do with a dinosaur - the name of which they didn't recognize, since it's not a typical reference today, but which would have been very familiar to British readers at the time, since it was discovered in Oxfordshire a decade or two before the book was published.
I mean, if they had to recite the King James Bible if Sunday school, come on…what red blooded American child has any concept that “retired” can mean anything other than “stop working”?
When I read "red-blooded American child", I think of that as a positive appellation. It connects back to previous generations. Red-blooded American (White, 'Heritage American' in the Buchanan Right sense) absolutely should read books from a half-century, century, centuries ago.
It was ironic, and do please go to hell for coming in here and speaking to me before revealing the fact that you consider only white Americans “red-blooded.” Get back to your inbred hole and learn to spell the names of your own freak leaders.
I never went to Sunday school, have been an atheist all my life, but have sufficient knowledge of the Bible to recognise a reference to the Flood. But I was educated in England where we were regularly exposed to the Bible school assemblies (the head of state is also the head of the established church after all)
The ground being muddy when a flood recedes is not specific to the biblical flood.
That comes with the reference to dinosaurs - a connection that would maybe be a lot more familiar to a well-read victorian than anyone born in the 21st C.
Water retiring “from the face of the earth” is specifically a quote from Genesis 8:13.
He elides a Biblical citation as unnecessary. He’s not so vulgar as to suggest that it’s now God time: he’s just saying it was mucky and indistinct, as it might have been long ago.
He then demonstrates his erudition through a set of allusions in turns to things from long ago: well established religious images and recent science of archaeology.
Until 1841, Megalosaur bones would have been referred to as dragon remains. Bleak House was released in 1852.
But at the same time, a lot of the population was completely illiterate when Bleak House came out. Base level literacy in terms of being able to read a sign has gone up, but maybe being able to read a complex text has gone down (because novels aren’t a mainstream form of entertainment any more, although you’d think English students would be used to reading them).
With this comment, dear fellow, I do believe that you "win the internet" today.
When my laughter finally ceased, it also occurred to me that I strained a ligament in the pectoral region, so droll was your observation. In a possibly apocryphal tale, it was said that the legendary Bruce Lee was required to register his hands with the police as "lethal weapons."
If you continue in this vein, you may be compelled to register your wit with the authorities, in similar fashion to the late Mr. Lee.
apropos of nothing Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw is a wonderful trifle that takes Victorian social mores as biological realities, with dragons. I'll dislike her books often but come back to her because I can rely on there being some thought behind them
Apparently with some dude named Michaelmas with whiskers like a cat.
I suspect some of this is genuinely language problems, because I'll sometimes get confused this way reading a complicated literary text in Spanish. At some point, there are too many unfamiliar words or expressions and you're just kind of at sea about what is going on in..
Novels of this era would open with these dazzling displays of very dense and complex prose as a show of technical mastery. I doubt Bleak House reads like this the whole way through. That being said, I'm a little disheartened that the kids didn't pick up that all Dickens is saying is that it's raining and there's a ton of mud everywhere. I'd be curious to see this study done on 30+ ACT scorers
He's also drawing a picture of the evils of industrial society: the soot as big as snowflakes; the death of the sun; the tens of thousands of foot passengers. And this is sharply contrasted with the fussily antique opening sentence about Michaelmas term and the Lord Chancellor in Lincoln's Inn Hall. He's setting up a “Dialectic of Enlightenment” contrast around the obsolete stuffiness of an arcane legal system that had nonetheless persisted into modernity. The fog is itself also a metaphor for the impenetrable stuffiness of the legal system.
Spoiler alert bro. I've actually not read the novel and know nothing about it except that it opens with a paragraph about a shitty day in London. I've only read Two Cities and struggled to finish it. If I'm going to slog through an older text that makes some demands on the reader, especially as regards historical references and Brit terms, then the book needs to be at least funny. Tristram Shandy is a good example
Everything I said can be gleaned from the first few paragraphs: I've not read the whole book either! I find Dickens very boring lol. But the experiment had them read the first seven paragraphs, so I read them too, in order to experience what the test subjects read so that I could more fairly judge the difficulty of the text. As you intimate, the text was easier for me as a) I am British so know what a Lord Chancellor is and where Holborn Hill is, and b) I went to Oxford where we still refer to Michaelmas Term. You can find Bleak House here to do the same if you'd like: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1023/pg1023-images.html. Bleak House is a fairly comic novel by Dickens' standards, fwiw.
Ok it's a depressingly accurate description of probate court
Edit: I'd also add that the complexity drops off rather quickly and we get to Dickens simply setting the scene rather than poetically writing about fog etc
Btw, most of the respondents did identify that “Dickens is saying is that it's raining and there's a ton of mud everywhere”. Read the section starting with the sentence, “The most common [reading tactic] was oversimplifying—that is, reducing the details of a complex sentence to a generic statement.” for the authors' comments on and examples of that phenomenon.
It’s a great read and pays off in the end. Worth persisting. The BBC adaptation with Trevor West, Gillian Anderson and Charles Dance is one of the best books to TV productions.
Yes, that TV adaptation was so very good, I could imagine Dickens himself applauding it. It also took me to the book, for the first time, and it is now my number one Dickens ("pipping" Great Expectations to the post). But I would not expect a young reader (especially an American undergraduate) to find it easy to appreciate, without the assistance of a good teacher with knowledge of the social conditions and the class and gender issues of Victorian England.
It’s a fair point that ‘old’ literature cannot be read in isolation of learning something about the social context. Part of our English lit lessons at school were really social history lessons, before we got to the text. Or rather, in long diversions from the text with a wonderful teacher who enjoyed going off piste.
Bleak House is actually pretty funny, as are a lot of other works that Dickens wrote (David Copperfield comes to mind). I think it takes a while to get into the rhythm of the writing style but it eventually becomes easier to read. I say this with a grain of salt though; I grew up reading Shakespeare in high school and so for me, that was dense text that required a lot more brain power so Dickens came off easier to digest lol.
The thing about Dickens, as well as Shakespeare, in my opinion, is that there are so many more meanings in what's said than what appears on the surface.
I expect other Brits will jump in here, but ‘Michaelmas’ and Lord Chancellor were not antique terms in Dickens’ day and nor are they now. Our courts (and some schools) still use the terms, and the political head of our judicial system is still the Lord Chancellor. And eccentric senior judges are sometimes sporting whiskers, but perhaps not as luxurious as in the mid 19th century. Hence why British schoolkids have no problem reading Dickens - they assume it is an account of contemporary London.
"The evils of industrial society"??? No, he's just laying out the environment. "soot as big as snowflakes" --> It's cold, so people have fires going in their fireplaces. "the death of the sun" --> It's England; it's rainy and overcast; you simply can't see the sun through the dense cloud cover. The rest about the stuffiness of the legal system, maybe, but with how badly you mussed these descriptions, I'm leery to follow along with that interpretation.
You don't get soot like that just from little wood fireplaces. The subsequent paragraphs make clear that it's not just cloudy: he's talking about the infamous pea-soupers of industrial smog caused by mass coal-burning. For example, in the second paragraph, Dickens writes, “fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.” Yes, he is absolutely talking about industrialisation. You could have been clued in to this even from the first paragraph by the strength of the description: “the death of the sun” is not something that one would say of an English sky when it is merely cloudy and raining. I am English: no one here would bewail the death of the sun just because it's overcast.
The problem of smoke from coal-burning and industrialisation was a very hot topic at the time of Bleak House's original 1852 publication. Within the next few years there would be two Smoke Nuisance Abatement Acts (1853 and 1856) passed in a futile effort to clean up the notorious smogs. You can read the text of the 1853 act here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/16-17/128/pdfs/ukpga_18530128_en.pdf. Its full title was “An Act to abate the Nuisance arising from the Smoke of Furnaces in the Metropolis, and from Steam Vessels above London Bridge.” It's not about little household wood fires! Parliament didn't pass those acts just to stop it from raining and being cloudy: the problem was industrialisation (“furnaces and steam vessels”), it was choking the city, and everyone knew it.
And Dickens, the great social reformer, has taken this problem of which everyone at the time knew—the literal choking of the city by smoke pollution produced by industrial elites—and brilliantly analogised it to the problem he wishes to tackle in Bleak House—the spiritual choking of the city by regulatory pollution produced by legal elites.
Wood fires (if you're not using modern treated low-smoke wood) do produce quite a lot of soot. I grew up living in some mountain cabins where our only heating were wood stoves; the chimneys need periodic cleaning out, besides the frequent removal of ashes from the stoves themselves. Yes, coal fires (which the common folk in the 1800s also used – not just "big industry") produce more soot, enough to have made "chimney sweep" a viable occupation. To make up some numbers, 200,000 homes each burning 100 lbs. of coal per year would match 10 factories each burning 1000 tons of coal per year, so even if these are unbalanced and inaccurate (very likely, as they're made-up), they show how condemning "coal-burning industries" without addressing the public's homes would have gotten at only part of the problem.
And then there's the issue of the types of coal, bituminous and anthracite. Bituminous is cheaper and abundant, so it's more likely to have been used by common folk. Anthracite burns more cleanly and produces more heat, but it's also more expensive and less common, so its use would have been higher in factory furnaces (their owners could afford it) and steam ships (which have tighter space requirements).
Overall, I guess my point is that even if Dickens (et al.) were misguidedly complaining about and vilifying "industrialization" as even just the main source of environmental and social ills, his description here in _Bleak House_ would not necessarily be more than a verbal painting of the environment he wished his readers to imagine.
Dickens and William Blake were just two English writers who bemoaned the effects of industrialization on the environment of London and English urban life.
It is also setting up the atmosphere of the novel: the characters' inability to discern each other's pasts and motives and the sense of prevailing stasis and their inability to escape the multigenerational fate imposed on them. Of which the interminable court case is the most visible representation.
Sure, but a) most of these students have been doing this for three or four years by now, they should be able to do it themselves, b) these students are the ones who will be leading classroom discussions in a year's time and they can't do it, and c) you shouldn't need to have a classroom discussion to know that Dickens wasn't writing about dinosaurs walking around London.
Sample size of one, and I understood it all easily minus "Michaelmas term", which could have been a few different things but was ultimately easily dismissed as not very relevant. In hindsight, it's easy to relate to Christmas via the "mas" suffix.
I also caught myself wondering where humanity was in its understanding of dinosaurs at the time of Dickens. Was it commonly assumed that they lived at the time of the Biblical flood?
It doesn't relate to Christmas. -mas is for "Mass" and Michaelmas is the Mass of St Michael, ie his feast day, and thus by reference the term that starts on or around 29 September.
And Christmas is the Mass of Christ; so your interlocutor correctly gathers that Michaelmas is some other sort of major seasonal festival, although this hasn't been the case for hundreds of years, outside of Waldorf schools.
At first I was pretty sympathetic to the students- this is a pretty dense and archaic way of writing, with a bunch of unfamiliar terms and sentences with no verbs. I can’t really tell what’s going on in any detail, other than that he is showing some kind of gloomy and chilly hellscape (really trying not to use the word ‘bleak’) in the context of a court case (Lord Chancellor). But then I saw they could use their phones and google what Michaelmas is etc, and I became much less sympathetic.
or figure out from the next sentance that it is currently november
Also does that sentance not drive home how Dickens absolutely *could* be conscise he just chooses not to lol. "Implacable November weather" I might just start using that phrase.
It relates to christmas in the sense that they are both dates and thats the important part of the clause. So if encounter the term Michaelmas and conclude "thats some kind of date", then you pretty much understood all you need to know about that clause. November is mentioned in the next sentence so knowing the exact date isn't necessary.
The clause is saying that the first term (Michaelmas Term) of the English legal year has recently ended and the senior courts are currently in recess, which is fairly relevant to the work of the head of the judiciary (the Lord Chancellor).
The Court of Chancery was dissolved in 1873 so I am not sure if it followed the legal year or if it sat through the recesses. If the latter then the passage means that now the other courts were in recess the Lord Chancellor was now presiding over the Court of Chancery as it sat at the Old Hall of Lincoln's Inn.
I think he was being straightforward and just using what would have been fairly familiar terminology to the audiences of the time (as least in the UK and its colonies). The audiences of the day would have consumed more detailed news reporting (whether directly through reading newspapers or listening to others reading aloud - such readings are depicted in some of Dickens's own novels), including coverage of the courts, so these terms would have been more familiar.
And many these phrases effectively have the same meaning, e.g. the Michaelmas Term in the autumn, because so many overlapped between the institutions. Who was it who criticised the way too many in the legal profession have gone "from quad to quad to quad" (i.e. public school to Oxbridge to Inns of Court, all using the term "quad" for a courtyard)?
Palaeontologist, Buckland, the Megalosaurus man, was publishing his findings during Dickens' time, and did at some point believe in various flood theories. But I don't think it was a common assumption, rather than them just being ancient. Dinosaurs were like THE hot topic in Victorian England while Dickens is writing Bleak House - to the point that the Megalosaurus in Bleak House is the first mention of a dinosaur in popular lit. (Great pub quiz knowledge)
Mr. Venus from Our Mutual Friend, is based on Sir Richard Owen (coined Dinosauria) - Dickens was certainly into his science.
Nonetheless I somewhat doubt Dickens was a Biblical literalist. He remained a nominal Anglican for eminently practical and traditional reasons, and a conservative one at that despite brief flirtations with Unitarianism. But in private he displayed a good deal of skepticism towards Christianity, especially the Old Testament to which most biblical literalism is directed. This sentiment, as well as his praise of the allegorical moral force of the New Testament suggest someone who was open to the findings of the geologists and physcists of the day.
I was guessing that the megalosaurus reference might have been a nod to some pop culture meme that the readers of the day would have been familiar with.
Of the metaphors in the seven paragraphs, the megalosaur metaphor seems out of place to me otherwise.
Yes, Victorians were fascinated with dinosaurs, lots of talks and exhibits based on new discoveries - and they would have found the image of the giant ancient creature in modern (at the time) Holborn very amusing. What shocked me was finding out that the references to indoor fog in the courtroom were not (only) figurative, they really couldn't see the ceiling on bad pollution days.
On a visit from the Antipodes, I remember walking through North London and as I meandered (perhaps even waddling like an elephantine lizard) towards the train station I realised that I was experiencing Sleet. From my position of sodden misery, I experienced the joy of feeling like I was in a Dicken's novel-it helped a little.
The reference to the Megalosaurus was Dickens saying that London was so muddy and foggy that he imagined it to be a prehistoric environment that a dinosaur would be more comfortable in than a modern human. Dickens was also buddies with a paleontologist back when far less was known about dinosaurs than now.
Maybe I'm lacking some reading comprehension but I understood "As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth"
to indicate that it was especially dry. If the waters retire from the face of the earth, it must be dry no? Or is the point that the waters have decided to retire from the face of the earth and have decided to become mud instead?
But of course dryness wouldn't lead to mud, and all the fog and the November weather also indicates that it's wet so I must be misunderstanding this sentence.
*Newly* retired: imagine a conventional flood (not even one of Biblical scale) covered a field several metres deep, then the water was siphoned or drained off. The ground would still be muddy, waterlogged. It might take weeks even in warm weather for the ground to dry.
It's one of the English Quarter Days, so the Academic/Legal term that begins with it takes its name. In Scotland, the Autumn Quarter Day is Martinmas, so the Ancient Universities of Scotland use that instead.
blows my mind that college English majors would have so much trouble. I'm a fkn Chemist. I don't particularly like Dickens and I haven't read anything by him since 10th grade English. Maybe because I do read a *lot* I have the vocabulary, I forget for example *when* Michaelmas is, but the passage explicitly tells us it's November. I know what a megalodon was because I used to be an 8 year old boy. The Genesis reference is clear to me, which sets up the whole premise of there being a megalodon waddling down the street (because we're in prehistory). That's probably the most difficult reference to get... I might expect a bunch of white kids from KS to have read some of the Bible? That's like not reading Shakespeare. As an English major.
Today's students are VERY unlikely to be literate in the Bible. Oh, sure, a few of the more common stories (particularly those that might have been seen on TV - particularly those in cartoon format).
I like the 8 year old reference. Imagine how amazing dinosaurs would have been to people of every age when they'd just been discovered. This in a society where everyone was already collecting beetles and butterflies. There was apparently a dinosaur exhibition at Crystal Palace at this time which was unsurprisingly quite popular.
The Victorians loved everything to do with dinosaurs and when the Natural History Museum was opened in London, the dinosaurs were front and centre (literally, in the great entrance hall). Millions of excited British kids have passed through that Hall since and experienced the thrill of meeting "Dippy" the Diplodocus (she's now retired from the Hall, but tours the country).
Also a chemist (of the pharmaceutical kind) who last studied English at a similar age and I had few issues understanding the text. But again I read a lot, not just novels but non-fiction, broadsheet papers, long form journalism, etc
Although it's not hugely relevant to the study, it's worth noting that Dickens published Bleak House in 20 illustrated episodes, in a considerably more accessible format than a 900 page novel.
And at a time when readers would have been at least fluent in Michaelmas term, Lord Chancellor, and quite familiar with the soot. I read the text and could visualize the street corner quite vividly, but I’ve seen a lot of period films.
And many would likely have had this read to them in a group settings (like after dinner entertainment) so could have asked questions if they were confused.
Others pointed out that this opening may be especially florid as a way to show off and catch the reader's attention, and the following prose is more conventional. I wonder if the opening of Episode Two is equally ornate.
The irony being that a single paragraph of this is now most likely to loose the reader's attention and send them running for another book (or, let's be honest, TikTok)
I studied “Tale of Two Cities” in high school. The English teacher spent two classes walking us through the first chapter: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …”
Most of the novel wasn’t that dense. A list of lists! But really going into it and understanding it is necessary to understand the background of revolutionary Paris.
Dickens creates these horribly complex introductory chapters because he expects his readers to trudge through them. They are necessary to understand the rest of the novel.
There’s a lot here that’s culturally dependent. “The end of Michaelmas term” is like saying “the beginning of Christmas break.” It brings to mind snow and snowball fights and church services and time with family you haven’t seen in a while.
You aren’t going to get that from looking up “Michaelmas term” in a dictionary to Wikipedia.
If this was an actual novel, I would hope annotations were available.
You find the same thing in modern novels - especially literary novels. A couple of examples: Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, or more recently The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk.
These are textbook examples of what George Orwell would call bad writing. It fits right above the overly wordy Communist propaganda and under the corporate speak.
I consider myself very well-read and though not an English major, my study of literature (HS and college) was decent. I think the test with this passage was a bit unfair in the sense that in a good classroom setting, the teacher would have given some kind of introduction to the text. And as someone said above, these books often start out obscure or complicated, but the novel itself is not so bad. I remember trying to read something in English Lit—I think it wasReturn of the Native— and plodding through chapter 1 (at least I think it was Return), over and over.. no Google back then. Whatever. I’ll never get thru this, etc etc x Once I ‘gave up’ on chapter 1 though, reading the novel was fine.
The test wasn't to see how the students performed in a classroom setting though. It was to see if college english majors had developed a very relevant skill that they should have developed in high school. If they need the introduction from a teacher every time they read a book, i am not sure they should be majoring in english!
Dickens got paid by the word , I was told , which was the explanation for his verbose descriptions of place, time, and characters- a similar example to the passage in Bleak House, would be the opening paragraph of “A Christmas Carol”, where he describes in excruciatingly verbose detail exactly how dead Jacob Marley was.
I doubt that the same students would be able to accurately parse A Christmas Carol- which in my experience was one of Dickens “easier” reads.
For a historical comparison, I. A. Richards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._A._Richards) did a similar exercise a century ago back in the 1920s with his Cambridge students (rather than "two regional Kansas universities"), with poems: _Practical Criticism_ https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.179256 They were also really bad! So it may be a comfort to know that it's hard to tell if 'Tiktok ruined these students' because most students have always been terrible at understanding literature...
If you actually read the linked book [do so; it’s short], this in fact shows how much has changed. Read the quotations from the 1920s students (and others: some subjects were laypeople) and you will immediately realise that their engagement and erudition is off the scale of the 2015 study. The most eloquent of the 2015 study’s “proficient writers” would have been at best merely average in the 1920s study.
The students disagree wildly in their emotional and aesthetic reactions and of course they miss things, as one will. Poetry is deliberately cryptic and allusive, and the students were several centuries past some writers tested, not a mere century and a half. But there is no equivalent of “[Sixteen seconds of breathing, chair creaking. Then she whispers, I’m just gonna skip that.]”, let alone of thinking that an advocate with great whiskers is a Studio Ghibli-esque anthropomorphic cat, or that dinosaurs were walking around Victorian London. Richards’ chief criticisms are that his students are sometimes overly pedantic or insufficiently imaginative, sometimes too dogmatic about their own prejudices and preconceptions, sometimes too caught up in their subjective aesthetic feelings. Never though does he charge them with such heinous inanity, and never are they so incapable of expressing themselves.
It is perhaps true that for a hundred years each generation has despaired of the inability of the next—but perhaps each was right so to do!
How fast can you read? I'm afraid reading 392 pages would take me two or more full days, and I could only devote a measly 5 minutes to find and skim the beginning of part two. I don't think I am that slow of a reader, given that I scored on the 99th+ percentile on the SAT, but I am definitely not capable of reading the book in one sitting or something.
That being said, I agree that "their engagement and erudition is off the scale of the 2015 study." I was just about to edit my comment to say that it doesn't appear (from the very few excerpts I skimmed) that the 1920s students didn't understand the material. Rather, they just were not engaging appropriately with the text, letting their emotional and educational preconceptions interfere with their analyses.
> Rather, they just were not engaging appropriately with the text, letting their emotional and educational preconceptions interfere with their analyses.
Which is, of course, a good way to not read... And this addresses the cope that it's "just too antiquated and historical and from an entirely other country". The kids in c. 1925 were a lot closer to Dickens than in 2015. But even these elite English kids at Cambridge, steeped in England and English literature, at a time when, what, <5% of kids went to any college?, who are being graded in a course with responses written over a long time, rather than participating in a study, are still doing pretty badly in terms of 'engaging appropriately with the text', given that these are generally what one would consider not terribly difficult. He's not asking them read poems in the original Latin or Greece, or decrypt metaphysical poets' work! So, it's a highly relevant datapoint, since obviously you're not going to find any studies from 1900 asking Kansas students about _Bleak House_.
About 1.5% of people got a degree in the UK in 1920-somewhat different from today. Even if there were some aristocratic but dim, the majority were likely a long way to the right of the curve. Imagine the calibre of the scholarship kids. Would have been a pretty tough pack to run with
Last night I read all of Parts 1 and 2, and enough of Part 3 to be satisfied that it was mostly just recapitulating in condensed form the insights from Parts 2. I do read fairly fast, but also the pages are quite small and there is a lot of white space owing to so much of the content being quotes.
Seems reasonable to compare the examiners' opinions of the students as stated in the 2 works. But the activity of criticism and the activity of checking one's own comprehension are vastly different. (Adler's How to Read a Book describes this at length.) In the 1920s, students might have reflexively held themselves to a high standard even when being asked to do the less rigorous task of criticism. (Remember, criticism is only rigorous if the preceding step of comprehension is, and that wasn't directly tested in the 1920s work.) I wouldn't be surprised if 2020s students responded fluently to a criticism task because criticism is basically a reflexive reaction to all media now. Martin Amis satirized the undergraduate reflex to criticize thoughtlessly in The Rachel Papers, and that was 1973!
The ones found on "Part Two: Documentation"? The responses I skimmed seem vastly superior, though I do sorta see what you're getting at. Moreover, it's unclear to me whether they are excerpts of larger responses. For example, this response, one of the better ones, strikes me as pretty reasonable:
1*182. Good on the whole, though it is doubtful if life really seems longer to the good than to the wicked or to the merely passive.
The lines are worth reading twice because they really do express something instead of just drivelling on like those of number II.
It is for this poem (copied and pasted badly here):
Life’s more than breath and the quick roimd of blood.
’Tis a great spirit and a busy heart ;
The coward and the small in soul scarce do live.
One generous feeling, one great thought, one deed
Of good, ere night, would make life longer seem
Than if each year might number a thousand days
Spent as is this by nations of mankind.
We live in deeds, not years ; in thoughts, not breaths ;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
I'm inclined to be very sympathetic to the students here. Those paragraphs may as well be in a different language, they're filled with words no-one uses anymore, or which are being used in ways these kids have never seen before (if you haven't encountered "whiskers" or "wonderful" in these contexts before you won't think to look them up in the dictionary just in case) and it's entirely reasonable for college students not to have learned the words for 19th century phenomena they will never encounter in their own lives (horse blinkers, Michaelmas). Even the fact they had a dictionary isn't the catch-all excuse you want it to be because if they have no incentive to get these questions right they won't be motivated to do twenty minutes of linguistic archaeology to answer these questions.
I fully expect the underlying point, that college student literacy has collapsed, is true, but I think the people who designed this test failed to build it in a way that it could possibly prove or disprove their hypotheses.
At this level of difficulty, reading a text like this is a test of subject matter knowledge and reasoning ability, not literacy or English language skills.
I used to get poor marks in French listening, speaking, and writing, but ace reading comprehension, because I had general knowledge and the ability to reason well with incomplete information. It wasn't reflective of my French skills when I overperformed in one of four French tests.
I would be more hospitable to this argument if they weren't English majors. They are quite literally studying the English language and English literary canon.
Well, they're actually going to have been studying left wing activism if the stories about English Lit courses are true these days. I daresay they'd ace reading comprehension on a text about modern critical theory that would be completely opaque to many supposedly more advanced readers...
Even understanding where the boundaries are of the dinosaur figure-of-speech requires knowing exactly how people at the time reconciled excavation of dinosaur bones with biblical flood stories.
If you *don't* know that, there aren't many ways the imagery is likely to click as intended. And there isn't any particular reason an English major should know that.
This test would be more suited to a history major than an English one.
If you want to test an English major's comprehension of complex contemporary prose, just write some.
Feel free to provide the proper boundaries to the figure of speech without reference to biblical flood stories.
The way I read it was "it was so muddy that you could think the biblical flood had just drained out recently enough that--should it have failed to drown all dinosaurs--you could plausibly expect to find one still waddling around".
Which to me seems both funny and evocative. As far as figurative language goes quite good and pleasing.
I don’t think you have to know “wonderful” can mean “unbelievable” to figure out that there’s no real dinosaur in this paragraph. The example students are clearly unaware of what actually reading even is.
Exactly. The concern isn't that they don't understand every word, it's that they can't even recognize literal vs metaphorical language. On top of that, it seems like they don't have good BS detectors (for lack of a better term). If you read a paragraph and think it says two guys met a dinosaur, you should conclude "maybe I didn't read this correctly" instead of continuing on.
I would still suggest that part of a good education is to be able to visualise the time before our own, when indeed horses had blinkers and the streets were full of mud. Otherwise we live only in the present tense - as it were.
Yes. We read old books to understand about life as it was in various times before we were alive. We read old books to discover ways of thinking that are no longer current. In the process, we learn different ways of using language and how language has changed over time. That is, we become educated.
Maybe the students would've had an easier time with an annotated edition, which highlighted & translated some of the archaic language. The problem is these students are the ones who we would expect to produce such an edition.
I don't think anyone is looking to second-year undergrads to produce those editions. Maybe twenty years down the line. I think that I had terrible reading ability when I was twenty. Doesn't mean I couldn't have improved a decade later.
I barely read any books above the reading level of Reddit and Percy Jackson before I took my ACTs and I received a 35-36 on all reading scores without studying whatsoever, on 5 hours of sleep. Many of these terms can be understood by their vicinities, their definitions at-least partially inferred. I have an IQ of 145-150. I hate the fact that I have to postface these verbal concessions to obviate morons, but I will include it nonetheless - this does also mean there are men much more mentally powerful than me. There is a hierarchy to all things, I don't mean to brag or be arrogant, but this is simply how it is.
Certainly, (some of) these kids could eventually pick up some semblance of literacy. It would also take much longer for them than it would for certain blessed individuals.
IQ has been declining across the Western world since the 19th century due to dysgenic fertility(where the less intelligent are outbreeding the more intelligent):
It should not be surprising that people today cannot read those Victorian era books, they're made by and for smarter men. The wokes and controlled opposition conservatives will blame culture or education, but the problem lies in genetics—it is always genetics.
Thank you, I was going to bring up some of the same points and add that there's not only a difference in temporal context (19th century) but spacial as well (Dickens was English but the students are American). I think you covered it well, the students aren't functionally illiterate in the English language as a whole but a particular kind of English. That's unfortunate but not disastrous in my mind.
I would say we have failures beginning in very early grades in American education. Back in fourth grade, my son had read LOTR, in full. He was so inspired by it, that he began writing stories of his own and invented his own language "just like Tolkien did, mom." He had stacks of papers under his bed with elaborate script and fonts he produced, by hand.
State testing time came around and I was informed by his teacher that he would likely get the lowest score (1 out of 4) and require additional "supports" for reading and writing. I sat dumbfounded knowing what he was doing at home. When I told her what he was reading and writing, she said, and I quote: "well, that kind of reading isn't what we focus on. We are teaching readers for the future who will be able to decipher technical manuals. Think of assembling a grill." Again, dumbfounded (my husband, when I told him the story said, "has that teacher every looked at a LEGO manual? I think he'll be fine).
Anyway, they no longer focus on simply exposing kids to good literature. It's all about "technical reading and writing." We withdrew him from public school and sent him to a classical school the next year. Best thing we ever did.
I'm also inclined to be sympathetic to these students. Like, if you don't know to look up "advocate," you're not going to look it up and find that it's a law title! I also don't think this study's methodology was a good test of the participants' literacy at all. I was just imagining myself as one of them, and I definitely would not do well in literary analysis under the scrutiny of researchers...
I didn't know "advocate" was an actual title, & I could gather what his role was (esp. once clued into the fact this is a court proceeding).
I don't understand the knee-jerk reflex to defend manifestly terrible reading abilities & cultural familiarity. College Majors should be beyond competent at this, even facing difficult texts.
It’s not a “knee-jerk reaction” for me. Indeed, I was pretty shocked by their interpretations as well while reading this. But I thought about my own reading ability at 20, when I was in community college and taking English classes. I also thought about how I would personally do while reading in front of researchers and having to tell them what it meant on the fly. And I concluded that I definitely would have done better reading it on my own, and likely so would have these students.
"Reading" involves handling unfamiliar words describing unfamiliar situations. Reading doesn't just mean instruction manuals or simple food recipes. Figurative language and unfamiliar references and allusions are part of the basic task. That's why we make students read novels.
Reread my argument? I agree with you, but I think when you stack enough of those on top of each other it becomes a quantitatively different exercise. It becomes pure logic puzzle.
Being able to make inferences based on the surrounding context versus figuring out what the hell the context is in the first place.
It seems really difficult to read it aloud and then reword it immediately on the fly. I don’t think I’d have any issue doing that in writing, but if I needed to do it orally, the transcript would make me look pretty dumb.
YES! I think this study’s methodology and its own analysis of its findings is very flawed. It’s assumed to uncover these students’ raw reading ability. But it really shows their reading ability of a harder text (than they’re likely used to reading) while under the scrutiny of researchers (who end up LAUGHING at them). Most of us would look pretty dumb under those circumstances, when we’d likely do much better reading it on our own.
When I took Eng Lit at 17 🇬🇧, it was supposed that we’d read the set texts (Austen, Chaucer, Shakey) in the preceding summer holiday. We didn’t, we went to the beach.
In my case, thankfully Martin Shaw had made a Macbeth movie, which gave enough info in an hour and a half to get the general gist and a few details for colour.
Then Branagh made a number in the late 80s through 90s that gave an easy intro into the canon.
My wife and I have a long-standing debate about whether literacy levels really are as poor as I tell her they are. So after reading the full paper I got her to take the test, as administered by me. [She is very tolerant of my eccentricities lol.] She is decades out of college and didn't do English Literature past high school anyway, so not exactly primed for success like these students ought to have been. She took a while over it but was able to fully explain what was going on and recognise pretty much all of the metaphors and allusions. (She didn't recognise the Genesis allusion about the waters retiring because she has no Christian background at all, but understood that it was a metaphor anyway.) I didn't assist her during the test or give her feedback about how she was doing. It was interesting to compare her performance to the subjects in the paper. I would place her at about the 8th or 9th percentile, i.e. in the group who were able to understand the text proficiently but took a while over it. She is now more convinced that literacy levels are in fact as poor as I have been telling her. Always do your own research, kids!
Ha yes. I work as a statistician and in practice we always count everything down from the top because that's what clients care about. But you're technically correct and as everyone knows that is the best kind of correct.
Oddly enough, at 64 and a math major, I only ran into "decile" quite recently. Or I did years ago and forgot it with most of what I learned in college.
I grew up in a completely areligious household and even I would have recognized the biblical reference because, at one time, our culture shared a foundation based on Judeo-Christian texts. You didn't have to read the classics. You could find biblical references in everything from Agatha Christie murder mysteries to short stories to magazine articles. There has been a concerted effort to eliminate this shared culture and to even offer "trigger warnings" for language that the modern ear might find offensive.
Agreed. The attempt to eradicate Christianity from culture has been deliberate, usually pushed by a particular type of person—the same type of person who insisted on ahistorically diluting the term “Christian” to “Judaeo-Christian”, in fact.
Are you in the US, though? Here in the Yookay there has been very little public Christianity in the culture for many decades. I know the references mainly because I was one of the few of my Millennial generation to be raised as a practising Christian; there are even fewer now. Only 6% of Britons are practising Christians, and most of them are elderly.
I am in the US. Yes, we have a more robust public Christianity here and there does seem to be a bit of a revival (please, God, may it be real). I am a Catholic and I thought I heard that the diocese of London had several hundred people come into the Church this past Easter. I imagine importing so many from non-Christian countries is not helping the situation in the UK.
The Catholic Diocese of Westminster has five million people in it though. Several hundred is small beans.
And in fact mass immigration is hugely propping up British Christianity. Pews are now disproportionately filled with Africans in particular, and to a lesser extent Latinos and Goans.
As well, which will be a big part of the several hundred new converts, Muslim illegal immigrants are encouraged by immigration NGOs to officially (but not actually) convert to Christianity. If they do, it becomes illegal for the Yookay government to send them home because they would be at risk of persecution for apostasy. They then live their life as normal as a Muslim unless the authorities come for them, in which case they say they are a Christian who can't be deported.
The fact that the study participants were from two (anonymized apparently) Kansas universities made me think of Dr. John Senior, who ran the famous University of Kansas Integrated Humanities Program in the 70s, where students spent two years reading "the Great Books." It was eventually shut down as a disproportionate percentage of students were converting to Catholicism, though no explicit evidence of proselytizing was ever uncovered.
He also found that students were having trouble reading the "Great Books," and hypothesized that encouraging kids in their youth to read "The Good Books," (e.g. Aesop's Fables, Three Musketeers), as a prerequisite would assist them in reading the "Great Books" (such as Plato and Aristotle). Dr. John Senior's "Thousand Good Books List" is available online with a quick google (not sure if I'm allowed to link it). Interestingly enough, it contains plenty of Dickens, and "Bleak House" is on the list for "Youth 16-20."
Very important missing link in education & culture generally. Transformers & Zelda et al. really are important stepping stones to grasping higher culture; the quality of popular matters.
I'd be interested to hear how appreciating Transformers and Zelda could be a stepping stone to grasping, say Plato and Aristotle (I enjoyed both the former, and while I've sampled both the latter I don't claim any expertise). John Senior himself would have vehemently disagreed though, and articulated some form of "Lindy" principle in his selections in his "Thousand Good Books" article:
"Contemporary works can be appreciated and enjoyed but not very properly judged, and just as a principle must stand outside what follows from it (as a point to a line), so a cultural standard must be established from some time at least as distant as our grandparents’. For us today the cut-off point is World War I before which cars and the electric light had not yet come to dominate our lives and the experience of nature had not been distorted by speed and the destruction of shadows. There is a serious question—with arguments on both sides surely—as to whether there can be any culture at all in a mechanized society."
I honestly think a number of the books on his 1000 Good Books list are not actually that “good”. Quite a few, especially on the part of the list for younger children, don’t really meet the “living books” standard (to borrow Charlotte Mason’s term).
And using World War I as the cutoff eliminates, just to name two authors I think young people SHOULD read, both Tolkien and Lewis.
I really appreciate John Senior’s work but as a book list, I do find it lacking in a lot of ways.
Learning how to analyze a text or other form of media is one skill. Applying it to a set of books is a second skill (or at least an application of the first skill). You can develop the first skill on any set of media, low or high.
John Senior proposed the 1000 Good Books in around 1980, decades before the advent of the internet (I noticed my own reading comprehension went down once most of what I read was online). I doubt many students today could comprehend The Three Musketeers if this is how they fared with Dickens. Even the comments on this post are dispiriting. So many people describing Dickens’s modern English as “archaic”.
I remember reading Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales and found them a real slog. As if the great story and characters I was imagining were being purposefully obfuscated by the writer. Conversely, reading Scott Fitzgerald, Chandler and Steinbeck, I found myself at ease with language that seemed very contemporary to me although it came from a time when my grandparents were in their pomp.
Cooper is a bit of a slog, but I made my son read "The Last of the Mohicans" when we homeschooled him in high school and he really enjoyed it. Though wordy, he liked the dense prose and the brain work out. He said his peers would never be able to get through it.
Quite so. I have read several of Dickens's novels and found the language perfectly understandable, if occasionally florid. I perhaps encountered two or three words I had never seen. I distinctly remember learning the word 'pursy' to describe Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield.
Florid is the perfect word. I've read several of his books now and what I am most struck by is his sense of humor. I didn't expect to chuckle as much as I do when reading his stories (which may just reveal that I had no knowledge of Dickens prior to reading him).
Something I didn't realize until I actually started reading the study: it was recently published, but the experiment itself is ten years old now - these college students were assessed in 2015!
This leaves me with two main questions. First, can anyone shed light on why there was so much delay? Nine years from experiment to publication is appalling, but I'm not really familiar with the norms of the field.
Second, how should the timing make us update our understanding of the study? Does the fact that this experiment was done in 2015 mean that things are even worse now? Or does it mean that the recent "the students are not okay after COVID" zeitgeist is over-emphasizing the recency of the change?
“Does the fact that this experiment was done in 2015 mean that things are even worse now? Or does it mean that the recent "the students are not okay after COVID" zeitgeist is over-emphasizing the recency of the change?”
I had this same reaction, this same study would likely look much, much worse today. Although I wonder if phone use to look things up would lead these kids to use AI and get better summaries then they themselves could write?
This may not help the totally incompetent readers, but for the semi-competent readers, I wonder if there is a bias in the study from just never engaging with text with archaic language? When I started reading a text that was written in Middle English, it was very difficult, as I had never read such language before. Within 20-40 pages, I got used to the style and even some of the vocabulary, and have been able to read through the rest of the book. Even when I had to break from the book for a period of time, picking it back up was easier than picking it up for the first time. This is similar to my experience reading classics for the first time (the first was much harder than the second, so on and so forth).
That might be. I have a love/hate relationship with Dickens. He has an incredible gift for setting scenes and conversations, but I finish a chapter and almost feel that nothing has happened. I have recently started reading Tale of Two Cities, and if I set it down for a week, I have to back up a chapter or two to remember what's been happening.
I learned some Japanese in the Navy, enough for tourist conversations, to ask directions (never ask where something is; the answer will involve going past the barber ship, turn right at such and so a bridge, go past the Piggly Wiggly, and I don't know all those words; instead, point in the likely direction and ask if your destination is in that direction. You can tell by the tone of their answer how close you are, they will point somewhere, and you thank them profusely, go that way, and ask someone else).
After I got out, I spent two years in a reading / writing class, got up to about 500 characters (you need 1850 to graduate high school), and could not learn more without spending several hours a night. A famous book from the late 1800s, "waga hai wa neko de aru" ("we are a cat", that's the Queen Victoria royal we), took me about an hour per page, and by the time I finished, I could not remember how the page had started. That's almost how I feel about Dickens.
Reading that first paragraph, I did not know what Michaelmas Term was, but it said November and was cold and muddy, so it didn't really matter. I know Lord Chancellor is some local mucky muck, a mayor maybe, and again, it didn't really matter. Foggy round his head threw me, but not the general image. I find much of the fun of reading things like that lies in not looking things up, but just reading and keeping them in the back of your mind. Eventually they'll tie or or not, and if not, it didn't matter.
Re: my comment above about them being secretaries 50 years ago, I'd be very curious to see how these students would do with something like the Thorn Birds (popular literature released in 1977); I'm guessing they're still going to do badly but I do think some of the language is just too far for most readers.
Think I actually have a copy in my basement thanks to cleaning out my mother-in-laws basement. Since like most books, I can’t sell or it give it away, I might read it.
It's very relevant to this passage, although it's only archaism to Americans. A British specialist of English literature will likely already know about the Inns of Court and the legal usage of "Michaelmas term," both of which still exist in the present day. There is no reason for an American to be acquainted with these terms, even an American college student who has just been exposed to a rigorous American literature curriculum and read Hawthorne, Melville, Du Bois, et al.
If these American students failed to critically question their own comprehension and double-check deceptively simple-looking terms like "Lincoln’s Inn," it would be completely natural for them to see the phrase "a large advocate with great whiskers" and think Dickens is making some sort of joke about a cat advocating for some cause. Once the terminology is established it will be much easier for them to read and enjoy the book. This is where Bleak House in particular overlaps with Chaucer.
However, in this article we can see these "Competent Readers" are tired with being confused by this mass of unfamiliar terms and want to go to SparkNotes to have the secrets of the passage explained to them, which they explain is their usual tactic. This is the real problem being identified by the study's authors. LLMs make this immeasurably worse, of course.
Well, they won’t even get these things explained on SparkNotes or by an LLM, since the particularities of the jokes about dinosaurs and whiskers are so small scale.
Not a specialist in English Literature, but as a Brit I know about Michelmas Term as this language is still used by Cambridge and Oxford and the Inns of Court as all barristers still belong to an inn. Maybe giving the students a passage from American literature from a similar time would be less confusing?
But many of the students are English Education majors who will be teaching Dickens themselves on the curriculum in just a few years' time! Their window for being given easy texts to parse has passed.
Presumably they won’t be teaching Dickens though, if his prose is too difficult for 95% of English Education majors. It might seem simple to you and me, but perhaps that doesn’t mean very much.
You might as well fault them for being unable to parse Faulkner or Milton or Joyce. It could just be that owing to time and national differences, Dickens has joined them in the Very Hard Literature category. Great if you can read it! But not actually important for anything you might be doing professionally or personally.
They will be teaching Salinger and Fitzgerald and Wharton, and it would be more productive to judge them on that basis.
I’m not terribly impressed by this study. The majority of the authors’ complaints come down to a lack of cultural familiarity with the London of 200 years ago. The English language is broad, and while I’d expect English majors to understand wide slices of it, it’s not astonishing that they haven’t come across Dickens, his world, or his old meanings of modern words before. The tendency to skim over the unfamiliar bits and retroactively connect the dots as one continues reading later chapters is basically fine as far as I’m concerned - 7 paragraphs might not be enough to infer what a “chancery” is, but it’ll be obvious after a few more pages.
Their inability to recognize simile and metaphor is a greater sin, but it’s also dependent on understanding the object level. Which again will come with exposure. Stopping every few lines to google a word might speed up the understanding of the literal meaning of the passage, but it also destroys the understanding of the meter and atmosphere of the text. Which is more important? I don’t think it’s an obvious answer.
Yeah, it would have been better with a different passage, or maybe a different passage in addition to this.
One particular problem with this passage is that it refers to things like Lincoln’s Inn and Temple Bar. Even a very good reader who doesn’t know these terms might miss that these are specific institutions and places and might assume eg Lincoln’s Inn is a place Dickens invented for the story, in which case it is reasonable to assume that it is an inn like a hotel.
American lawyers don’t wear horse hair wigs or silk gowns
If you talk to someone about the West Wing and the Oval Office to someone who has never heard these terms, they won’t get that you are referring to politics.
Homeschooler here. We read aloud every school day from Dickens and much other literature. We discussed. In addition, they were required to read a lot and write a lot. It’s disconcerting that commenters are missing the humor. This is a funny passage!
The brightest of my Uni English profs thundered all term on a single point - if we students did not have an ease with the contents of the King James Bible, the vast majority of English literature produced over the last 500 years would be impermeably closed to us. I was a godless heathen then, and while I’ve evolved somewhat as a practising Pastafarian now, by his God he was right. Bible study as literature cypher was the key to unlocking meaning beyond compare in my adult reading - and interestingly, aided immensely to additional pleasures experiencing classical music, art and architecture.
As everything current stands on the shoulders of everything that’s come before it, to get today, ya gotta have got yesterday. It’s work, but I like it!
"[Sixteen seconds of breathing, chair creaking. Then she whispers, I’m just gonna skip that.]"
From the rare file of "lines from studies that could be dropped into a horror script with no changes"
Although I will note (as I did in late comment about Mass Literacy Isn't post)...a lot of this is selection effects. I'm guessing one of the KRUs is Pittsburg State, where the authors teach. Pittsburg State seems to have an acceptance rate in the high 80s-low 90s, and an average SAT of 920-1180. I'm going to guess it's on the low end of that spectrum. This is exactly what you would expect from making dumb people do intellectually demanding work.
The Good News is the Academic Apocalypse kicking in as we speak solves some of this problem, because the regional universities will be shut down due to lack of bodies. The bad news is the plan seems to be to just send these people to flagships and then give them master's degrees.
ETA: from the study:
"When we asked our subjects to name British and American authors and/or works of the nineteenth-century, 48 percent of those from KRU2 and 52 percent of those from KRU1 could recall at most only one author or title on their own. The majority also could not access any detail on the information they recalled; they could mention the Industrial Revolution, for example, but could not define what it was. These results suggest that the majority of the subjects in our study were not transferring the literary texts or information from previous classes into their long-term memories."
That last passage you cite, about not knowing what the Industrial Revolution is, made me question the methodology of the study tbh. How much of this phenomenon is that the students were lazily doing this study at a bare minimum level purely to get their payment for doing so? It left me uncertain how much is pure mental incapacity and how much of it is laziness.
I’ve met a 30 year old MIT/Stanford grad, native-born American, who could not correctly produce the decade of either the American Revolutionary War or the Civil War. I promise, they have absolutely no idea what the Industrial Revolution is at the satellite schools in Kansas.
Obviously we can't rule out that students were just blowing through the study to get the reward; that doesn't seem to be the impression from the quoted excerpts of their answers, but they also might not have quoted from those people either because it doesn't make the point they want.
My knowledge of the English education system is incomplete and mostly derived from Midsomer Murders, but it's worth noting these kids aren't Oxbridge material. Frankly, they aren't even grammar school material; Wikipedia comparison suggests they were probably good (not great) comprehensive school students). Brief Wiki survey suggests Pittsburg State and Post-1992 universities are decent comparisons.
I can actually believe the thing about the Industrial Revolution, because I strongly suspect that these students didn't pay much attention in history class in HS, thus knew enough for the exam to know that the Industrial Revolution was a thing, but not really what it was. The modal student in the program is a solidly middle class (enough to be interested in literature and reading, anyway) girl (2/3rds of the sample was female) who is comfortable enough to believe in "following her dreams and passions" and loves to read *(NB I'd love to know what the results of asking them to name a 19th century author if you removed Jane Austen as an answer), but isn't very smart and isn't actually very good at reading (because they aren't very smart). I can 100% picture these gals not caring enough about history to class to bother investing in what the Industrial Revolution was. 50 years ago, they would go to typing school and we would just let these women be secretaries until they caught some junior executive's eye and get married; now we cruelly let them think they can go places with their English lit degree from a 3rd tier state university and send them to teach literature that they can't understand to idiots who also can't understand it.
Oh agreed 100%—and I love your very recognisable pen portrait of the typical subject. I'm a researcher now so I'm always very sceptical of methodologies, especially by academics (they are nearly all lazy and inept). But even if there's some degree of methodological problem here (which there surely will be), the overall trend is clear. It just might not be quite as high as an 88% incompetence rate, is all.
Even though I'm fairly sure I'm better than most of the students listed here, the depressing part is reading the comments and seeing people post insights that escaped me. This is my best to write down just my own observations:
I had to google "michaelmas term" and "Lincoln's Inn Hall" but first is the fall university term, and second basically a courthouse. So, the fall term is over and it's now gloomy winter; a judge sits in court (I assume in opulence), so that frames the coming paragraphs of squalor as the haves/haves not thing that Dickens likes to do.
The dinosaur is figurative. It's so rainy and so muddy and the streets are so swamped that it wouldn't be surprising to see a dinosaur waddling up them. This was the era of thinking dinosaurs all lived in swamps, so that tracks. I failed to catch the Biblical allusion ("waters but newly retired...") until the comments here.
The filth of human industry is everywhere, oppressive. It was raining, but now the "snow" is filth from the factories. The streets are so crowded it's difficult to move, and if you do find a place to stand you'll be jostled out of it. And it's so dark and gloomy it's impossible to tell if it's daytime or nighttime. The impression all this gives is one of squalor.
All of this filth "accumulating at compound interest" takes us back to the imagery of the financial/legal system, which ties it back to the first paragraph. The overall impression is one of squeezing oppression. This world was arranged this way by powerful men.
Almost all the references to law in that passage are culturally specific to England or otherwise technical, so it doesn’t surprise me American readers didn’t get it was about lawyers.
A large part of the problem seems to be the death of the humanities as a discipline. It's mostly a dumping ground now, a place where people whose parents push them through getting a degree go. There's no interest in a degree as technical certification, & the university as a rigorous academic training is generations dead.
The liberal arts are a rotting corpse, stumbling around as a leftist zombie.
This is just dumbass. An academic laggard is not going to take up a concentration in which you have to read big, fat every week. The rotting corpse is the general public that's dead to high literacy and the arts, not the saving remnant that maintains them.
"Big, fat" books, I presume? Please cite a college syllabus from the last decade which has students reading novels at a rate of every 1-2 weeks, even 1 a month. Bonus points for state colleges.
I honestly do not know, all I know is that when I was half-assedly going to college in the 1970s I never took English classes because it meant that all your reading was going to be the class reading, and I wanted to spend my time reading science fiction. My recollection is that they were doing a different book each week of the term and the were fairly hefty books.
“What I remember from being young in the 1970’s . . .”
Stop doing that. The world of the ‘70’s was dead before the turn of the millennium. It is now a half-century gone. The difference is as great as the difference from 1900 to 1950, if not greater. For the sake of everyone’s sanity, you have to accept what you knew of the world is as unrecognizable to younger generations as their world is to you.
I was the only engineering major in my Literary London class in undergrad, everyone else was English majors. I was the only one in the class who read Bleak House, which was assigned (and had assigned papers due on it).
I was floored when I found out none of them had read it; most of them hadn't even attempted it. I asked them, "Why did you major in English if you don't love reading?" They either said they didn't want to take math courses or they had relatives who were teachers and they thought they could do that.
That was fourteen years ago and I'm still disappointed in those students when I think about it. Bleak House is my favourite of Dickens' books, and I like Dickens!
Anecdotally, nearly every engineering and comp-sci student I’ve encountered in my English and Philosophy classes has been borderline illiterate. So your experience may be something of an exception here.
Oh, all other engineering majors I knew were functionally illiterate, absolutely.
I would have loved to be an English major, but I knew I needed, as my dad always said, "a J-O-B." So I majored in electrical engineering and minored in English. (My dad was an engineer and my mom was an English major. Their kids are four electrical engineers and an IT manager, all of whom are readers, writers, and speech givers. We're definitely an unusual family!)
So Bleak House is a fantasy novel about dinosaurs living in C19 London? Very cool, maybe I will read it.
Maybe this was pointed out and I missed it but ... anyone who went to Sunday School -- even if functionally illiterate -- would recognize "as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth" as an allusion to Noah and the Flood. I wonder how many of them caught that.
(Dickens himself must have been quoting from memory, since the KJV reads slightly differently: "he waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry." (Genesis 8:13)
That confused me at first - I don't think Dickens is referring to Noah's flood, but to the parting of the seas and the land on the third day of Creation in Genesis 1:9-10:
"And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.”
He's saying there's so much mud that it's as if the seas have just withdrawn from the land, which is why he wouldn't be surprised to see a dinosaur. It's as if the Earth had just been created.
Oh, good. I thought it referred to that too. I was beginning to wonder if my reading skills were somewhat lacking. But it's a hard passage, especially if you don't know city streets used to be muddy, and that cities were dirty, and that it rains a lot in London and that pollution (in those days from factories) turned everything black, and contributed to fog. As for the Megalosaurus, Dickens is referring to the Bible and the unrelated subject of dinosaurs--he is also confused here, and the reader needs to know what 19th century non-scientists knew about the fantastic beasts imagined from a few bones. It is a difficult novel: one character gets smallpox (which is never named). I'm not ashamed I had to look online to find out what was going on.
Not just mud, horse manure. Don't want to disgust the lady novel readers.
And you shouldn't be ashamed to look up anything. The students in the study were prompted to look up anything they didn't understand. Most just chose not to do so. This shows that they will likely fail to even attempt to understand any difficult text they come across during their further studies. I believe about half of the subjects even said they would use SparkNotes if a book such as Bleak House were assigned to them. Just to be clear, all the subjects were English majors.
I don't think this is right, because the parting of the seas occurs on day 3 whereas animals were created on day 6, and upon the parting of the sea the land is dry, but that would make little sense since Dickens then talks about the large amounts of mud. However, on Noah's ark there was a couple of every animal (Megalosaurus included presumably), and after the withdrawal of water, when Noah lands he frees all animals, who would be walking on the land still muddy.
He’s not conflating the Ark’s contents and Megalosaurs.
The Megalosaur was the first dinosaur, only named in 1841, eleven years prior to this passage. He’s demonstrating erudition as a status marker. His assertion: I have read the latest scientific papers.
I think it is an oblique reference to aged epochs, with Genesis 8:13, the emergence of the land from the sea and the bones of the dinosaurs all very old. He elides the contradictions between Biblical assertions and the exact, new science of archaeology.
It is a testament to his brilliance that he comes across as lambent rather than a dillettente.
I don't think you'd need to be that erudite to know about Megalosaurs - there were apparently drawings of them in the newspapers of the day: https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/dickens-and-the-dinosaur.html
Oooh!
Thanks for this context!
It changes things to: “I read the newspaper.” Which, still a statement in 1852, but less supercilious.
This is a good point. My reading of Dickens' openings is that he was faced with a blank piece of paper and a deadline. Just get it going and let the ideas and the characters and the story come. I don't think he's sweating the details here. Reading the comments, I've found there's more in that paragraph than I ever noticed, referencing both the creation (or rebirth if you insist) of the world and the death of the sun—eternity in other words, and it is about this very long court case.
I think it's a much harder passage for readers today than Dickens' contemporaries because they don't know what London was like in the mid 19th century, and Megalosaurus is much less well known now than the stars of the Jurassic Park movies. And the usual meaning of "wonderful" has changed from "surprising" to "very good." It takes a conscious effort to get his intention. Besides, I think an editor today would say, "I know you had to write that to get the juices flowing, but let's cut it and get to the action." (Perhaps the wrong decision, as it is such a fascinating and rewarding paragraph.)
Well I’m assuming that Dickens’ belief is that dinosaurs weren’t saved on the Ark. But you’re right that animals weren’t created until a few days later. I still think it makes more sense as a reference to the Biblical creation - Genesis 1 doesn’t say the land was dry right after the creation of the seas, but the account of the flood does. I don’t know exactly how the Victorians at that time reconciled geology with the Bible or how Dickens interpreted that, though.
Dickens was a non-literalist about the bible, especially the earlier books of the Old Testament.
It would make sense that Dickens wanted to show off that he was up-to-date with the latest scientific discoveries, so "now that we know that dinosaurs existed, Noah must have brough them on that Ark as well, and there would have bene dinosaurs roaming the Earth after the flood". Back then they didn't have carbon dating and not much was known about the actual age of the planet, so there was still a debate as to when the dinosaurs died. It would have been reasonable to assume that they died no more than a few thousand years before.
At this point they knew that the Earth was millions of years old - the idea of uniformitarianism (gradual change as opposed to catastrophism to explain different geological layers etc) had been introduced in 1830. Dickens actualy wrote an article called 'OUR PHANTOM SHIP ON AN ANTEDILU-
VIAN CRUISE' where he imagines going back in time millions of years to see a Megalosaurus! https://www.djo.org.uk/media/downloads/articles/1204_Our%20Phantom%20Ship%20on%20an%20Antediluvian%20Cruise%20[vi].pdf
And note that it's "antediluvian", so he imagines dinosaurs as existing before Noah's flood, which supports my idea that the reference to the waters withdrawing is to Genesis 1.
This is how I took it. It's not an accident that he starts with this – just as Genesis begins with God creating the world with speech, Dickens is conjuring the world of the novel.
In conjunction with the megaolosaurus, it could also be a reference to the Neptunist ideas that were previously popular in geology. Either way, I agree that it’s saying the earth is as muddy as if it were newly created, and there’s something quite charming in juxtaposing a biblical flood with a dinosaur.
It says "dry" land not once but twice in that Genesis passage. Nothing even close to mud. Genesis is just poof magic. Air, water, land, just like it is today. No mud.
Making mud into a biblical reference is a stretch and an over-analysis.
English majors and "intellectuals" will want to find biblical references where they don't honestly exist. That does not mean the refs are really there. That just means English majors are really desperate to say something that sounds clever, but which there is very marginal evidence for.
Thanks for this. I knew I was missing a reference with that just born from the land phrase. My heathen self is generally well informed but *very* not familiar with the Bible, estorboso not as a 19th century British writer would assume!
I’m actually surprised at all the comments saying young Americans (especially these students in Kansas) aren’t familiar with Biblical references. I’m an atheist but you get a lot of exposure to the Bible in school in the UK - I guess that’s not allowed in the US but it’s still 60% Christian, I would have thought a lot of students go to Sunday schools or church.
Yeah, it's funny that Christians want the Bible in school but definitely not the way secular people would want it to be. Idve really enjoyed being taught how to read the text critically as a book written by people and not the perfect word of God. Also, it'd've been great in history classes because of how belief in it has influenced political decisions and international events.
Remember it's split by class. The type of people who do close reading are generally not the serious Christians. And high schoolers are barely reading full length novels in school anymore, much less the Bible, regardless of separation of church and state!
THIS!
Huh, I totally also thought it was about the flood, but that makes sense too. Either way it's a fun metaphor for primeval amounts of mud.
I was wondering there, the biblical subtext is so at odds with the dinosaur reference I figured he might actually be referencing a Victorian conception of a primordial ocean from which life sprung - a form of synthesis of biblical and scientific thought.
Claude agrees that the image was there in Victorian times and cites Tennyson (among other but the others are mostly later and would postdate Bleak House) but my questions might have been leading.
Yeah I don't think he's necessarily taking the beginning of Genesis completely literally, he's thinking about a primordial swamp millions of years ago.
One thing that struck me when I started reading older literature was the frequency of biblical allusions with the implication that the author expected the reader to understand them. In The Little Princess, decidedly aimed at children, the main character befriends a rat living in the attic and names him after an obscure biblical patriarch. Wouldn't get that in YA today!
In my undergraduate English program I was usually the only student who understood Biblical references. THAT'S why students aren't understanding metaphors (or, some of the reason anyway). They don't have the reference points.
It’s not just biblical references, the same applies to mythology that was once well known as well as folk tales.
In a conversation with a recent Stanford grad, I said I was going into my Rip Van Winkle mode. He had no idea who that was or what I was implying. A great deal of “common knowledge” has disappeared.
I can’t imagine any of them sitting down to read someone like Borges. They have little to bring to the conversation.
This is an interesting comment. Maybe they should require a course on the Bible as a prerequisite for the English major. The way that physics majors are required to take calculus, despite the fact that it's technically math, not physics. It's not reasonable to assume that students today would come to college familiar with the Bible, simply because a far smaller share of the student body are practicing Christians. If you're going to major in mechanical engineering, then whatever. If you're going to major in English, though, then being able to pick up on Biblical references would be a good idea.
I took a Bible in Western Culture course. It was fascinating for me. I'm not religious, so this was the first time I was exposed to critical analysis of the text without any religious connotations. I learned so much about different eras of Christianity, which made American and world history make so much more sense. In my opinion, many Christians, especially fundamentalists, are being blocked from understanding the Bible in crucial ways, and it's tough to witness. But everyone is entitled to their own belief
Even listening to heavy metal from the 70s and the 80s -- I have an Iron Maiden megafan in my household -- makes it clear that a working knowledge of Biblical themes, ideas and personalities was a normal part of literacy and artistry of all types until very recently.
Iron Maiden is an English group. I grew up in England during the same period as them and my primary school had quite a big Religious Education (RE) component, mostly Christian. Even tho that was not my religion, I was very familiar with biblical content. My school prize one year (aged 10) was a Dickens novel.
I had to explain the Trinity to a lapsed Catholic recently. This was a grad school writing workshop English graduate. No one understands or remembers common concepts, stories, or themes from the Bible anymore really. Doesn’t shock me anymore, except that it’s the most influential piece of literature in the modern Western canon.
I was talking with a 28 year old and she had no idea what I meant when I made a reference to the emperor having no clothes.
I was brought up in an essentially atheistic household; my horrified grandparents bought my sister and me a wonderful series of Bible comic books. If they are right about the afterlife, I hope they know that was a gift that has paid dividends for years. Being able to recognize all the big Bible stories is important to basic literacy; I tracked down those comic books for my own kid and paid a pretty penny for them (they are no longer in print). My kid read them over and over, just as I did growing up. They are really well done.
I had them too.
Same here! And miss their lack of easy availability.
What are they called? Or are yours for sale?
I got them nearly a decade ago for $100. Insanely pricey now, someone should reissue. Iva Hoth is a terrific artist and the narrative is cracking.
https://www.amazon.com/Picture-Bible-volumes-slipcase-Beginning/dp/0891910751
Actually she is not the artist but the writer. Both elements so well done.
There are single volume editions available on Amazon at much better prices. Select the “Hardcover”. More unwieldy, though.
Did the study attempt to distinguish between the students who could not read the text and those who were not capable of understanding it? Whole language reading instruction rendered a great many people unable to read things that they could understand if read to them.
The subjects read the passage aloud themselves, and then gave their modern rendition of it. You would have to listen to a recording to be sure ++ but the way the transcript presents it they seem to have done an acceptable version of looking at the marks on paper and producing a tolerable rendition in spoken English.
It's after that that the trouble began...
There still seems to be a gap between reading the words and hearing them.
These were mostly white kids from colleges in Kentucky that were all English majors if I remember correctly. They all took an assessment test to prove they could read. The expectation was that many words or idioms may require a little research by the subjects. The majority of them just flat-out refused to look up words they didn't know despite being prompted by the tester to use supplied resources or their phone and to take as much time as they needed. Only 4 of the students displayed proficiency in looking up and ultimately understanding the literal meaning of the provided text. The difference seemed to be that most of the students would just guess without checking, and as they read, the poor guesses added up until they no longer could follow the material. Still, many of them claimed they'd have no problem if the book were assigned to them in class because they's just use SparkNotes! There's a link to the study in the blog post. It wasn't too long a read. But it's pretty hard to read if you think current college students at average colleges are going to be contributing to American dominance the next 20 years
I heard an art history professor talk approximately FIFTEEN YEARS AGO about how, when she started her career in the 1950s, she could glide through lectures because everyone already knew at least the bare-bones basic biblical references: Noah, Moses, David and Goliath, etc., but over the years she found herself having to stop and explain every single thing. By the 90s she had created a kiddie-level handout for the students to read beforehand. I doubt they would bother to read it now.
"Like, do you have a TikTok or a YouTube Short that says all this? I just can't be bothered if it takes more than three minutes!"
I think that “anyone would recognize…” is our high-IQ bias showing through again, unfortunately. Any of *us* who went to Sunday School would recognise it, but most will have sat through those lessons and not retained them.
I was pulled out of public school by my mother after failing the 6th grade for not doing my homework.
I was then "home schooled" rather poorly (handed the books and told to educate myself... at a time when I was my mother's spoiled golden child) and did barely anything before getting my GED in 2001.
People can't tell the difference.
A friend of mine with an engineering degree didn't guess that, and thought I'd graduated high school/possibly had some college under my belt.
NOBODY guesses that fact, including the one manager who said "Oh, that explains a few things about the way you act. You remind me of a couple home school kids in my neighborhood." after I told him.
THAT is how bad schools are nowadays.
Half an ounce of common sense and some intellectual curiosity is enough to be on the same level as graduates when needing to function in the real world.
The Bible was the central text of the Western Canon at least since the printing press & Luther - perhaps earlier, I don't know. It's not now.
Is there even a central text of the Western Canon anymore?
The Lord of the Rings books and Star Wars movies. Not joking.
Probably Harry Potter as well, if that's the case.
AKA The Book of Mormon
It's still the Bible, insomuch as a "Western Canon" can be said to exist. We live in the ruins of Christendom & it's short-lived replacement "the West".
Couldn't give you one from the modern liberal canon, which I think is your real question.
There's no particular reason to associate it with Noah's flood, rather than with the creation, or indeed with a normal flood of which England had lots. Any of those is allowable, and having more of them on tap enriches your reading experience. It's semiotically rich!
The temptation to locate the true hidden meaning of a text like Dickens is misplaced. Joyce, sure. Dickens, no.
Only the withdrawing of the seas at the creation really makes sense in the context of the passage. Why would the narrator be unsurprised to meet a living dinosaur after a normal English flood? And in a Victorian context, I don't think the narrator would expect to meet a dinosaur *after* Noah's flood.
“Wonderful” here means surprising or astonishing. So he’s saying it would *not* be surprising to meet a dinosaur.
I’m concerned that this is so difficult for people.
No, this is an incredibly clear reference to the fact that the biblical flood was believed to have killed the dinosaurs. It's not trying to find a hidden meaning at all - it just requires lots of context.
That's inconsistent with the text: if the waters refer to the great flood that killed the dinosaurs, then you wouldn't find a “Megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill” after “the waters had but newly retired”.
Right, but Dickens writes “and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus”. The “not” here, meaning post-flood there wouldn’t be dinosaurs, indicates that Dickens is referring to a biblical flood.
Edit — Unless you take “wonderful” in a sense of astonishment, in which case “not” indicates the dinosaur is expected and the creation-read of this scene wins.
I think the scene only makes sense if you do take "wonderful" in the non-obvious-to-moderns sense of "surprising".
Fair enough, Dickens was probably thinking specifically of Buckland or some follow-on.
But the larger point remains, Dickens wasn't interested in requiring you to know Buckland's specific theories to make sense of this passage. He wasn't a riddler. A reader who grew up in Lincolnshire could make a lot of sense of the passage, even if the Megalasaur reference passed them by.
He is quoting Genesis 8, but not the KJV.
He’s quoting the Septuagint. Genesis 8:13 reads:
ἐξέλιπεν τὸ ὕδωρ ἀπὸ προσώπου τῆς γῆς
Literally: “the water had dried up from the face of the earth”
even if it's not a Flood reference it should be obvious to anyone who's seen a flood, or a creek drying up, or a riverbank shift, or a quarry cut. River undercuts often expose dinosaur bones as well so that ties in. If it was raining earlier it could be implied that the rain has just retired (stopped working/raining) as well. Lot of ways to interpret it which makes it interesting.
He means that it's as if the waters have just been separated from the land, as per Genesis 1:9-10. It's nothing to do with dinosaur bones being exposed by a flood. The point is that the ground is so muddy that it's as if the Earth had just been created (according to the account in Genesis) so the narrator wouldn't be surprised to see a dinosaur (although according to Genesis, animals were created a few days later).
As I said in another comment, it's a clear reference to the fact that the biblical flood was believed to have killed the dinosaurs.
https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-english-majors-cant-read/comment/119054245
That interpretation doesn't makes sense. The narrator is saying it's as if the flood just ended - "as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth". If the flood referenced is Noah's flood that was believed to have killed the dinosaurs, why would the narrator *not* be surprised to see a *living* dinosaur? ("it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, waddling" etc.)
I initially thought of Noah's flood, but the reference is to the creation of the Earth earlier in Genesis. The narrator is saying that there's so much mud, it's as if the Earth has just been formed ("Then God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear”; and it was so.") so it *wouldn't* be surprising to meet an antediluvian creature like a Megalosaurus.
There's some weird version of the theory that Noah did save the dinos, but then they died immediately after. But he would only have saved two?
But ultimately Dickens is just saying "it was muddy" and wasn't particularly concerned with his metaphors and references making particular sense. He's just setting a scene which Orwell reminds us is more or less what makes Dickens Dickens
I had read it being that the city was in such a chaotic state that seeing such a creature would not cause one to pause, rather than it being like the earth had literally been created, although that could be an interpretation if you picked up the KJV allusion.
It also makes me wonder if the Doctor Who episode Deep breath was making a reference to bleak house and making the
Metaphor literal.
I had read it being that the city was in such a chaotic state that seeing such a creature would not cause one to pause, rather than it being like the earth had literally been created, although that could be an interpretation if you picked up the KJV allusion.
It also makes me wonder if the Doctor Who episode Deep breath was making a reference to bleak house and making the
Metaphor literal.
I don't know why the waters receding would be better, since the dinosaurs did not exist in he narrative at the time, but it's also irrelevant given that it was figurative language drawing a general scene.
And for the discussion, the contours of the biblical reference are less critical here than the fact that students who are unfamiliar with the references would be confused about what waters receding had to do with a dinosaur - the name of which they didn't recognize, since it's not a typical reference today, but which would have been very familiar to British readers at the time, since it was discovered in Oxfordshire a decade or two before the book was published.
I mean, if they had to recite the King James Bible if Sunday school, come on…what red blooded American child has any concept that “retired” can mean anything other than “stop working”?
One that reads books from before the last 5 decades.
Er, yes, that’s quite my point.
When I read "red-blooded American child", I think of that as a positive appellation. It connects back to previous generations. Red-blooded American (White, 'Heritage American' in the Buchanan Right sense) absolutely should read books from a half-century, century, centuries ago.
Minor spelling error, why live . . ?!
It was ironic, and do please go to hell for coming in here and speaking to me before revealing the fact that you consider only white Americans “red-blooded.” Get back to your inbred hole and learn to spell the names of your own freak leaders.
I never went to Sunday school, have been an atheist all my life, but have sufficient knowledge of the Bible to recognise a reference to the Flood. But I was educated in England where we were regularly exposed to the Bible school assemblies (the head of state is also the head of the established church after all)
I didn't get that, I tried to relate it to modern geology.
Who thinks Dickens was quoting here? Rather, he was alluding to.
Or perhaps Dickens wasn’t quoting literally, but merely alluding to the Flood.
The ground being muddy when a flood recedes is not specific to the biblical flood.
That comes with the reference to dinosaurs - a connection that would maybe be a lot more familiar to a well-read victorian than anyone born in the 21st C.
Water retiring “from the face of the earth” is specifically a quote from Genesis 8:13.
He elides a Biblical citation as unnecessary. He’s not so vulgar as to suggest that it’s now God time: he’s just saying it was mucky and indistinct, as it might have been long ago.
He then demonstrates his erudition through a set of allusions in turns to things from long ago: well established religious images and recent science of archaeology.
Until 1841, Megalosaur bones would have been referred to as dragon remains. Bleak House was released in 1852.
Dickens was aimed at and consumed by the general public not 5% of the population. Devolution.
But at the same time, a lot of the population was completely illiterate when Bleak House came out. Base level literacy in terms of being able to read a sign has gone up, but maybe being able to read a complex text has gone down (because novels aren’t a mainstream form of entertainment any more, although you’d think English students would be used to reading them).
He wrote in the idiom of people living in his time, which is now somewhat archaic and less accessible to many of us who don’t read old books for fun.
Hear! Hear! His writing was serialized in the newspaper. Everyone read it.
Of those who COULD read—need some statistics here.
Dickens was popular and often read aloud to groups so more than just the literate would have consumed this.
Also, highfalutin oratory was popular entertainment.
Dinosaurs and sentient cats! I think I saw the cartoon.
If you want a novel featuring large reptiles in 19th century London, you should check out Naomi Novick's Temeraire books.
I wish I had the attention span to do this rewrite LMAO
With this comment, dear fellow, I do believe that you "win the internet" today.
When my laughter finally ceased, it also occurred to me that I strained a ligament in the pectoral region, so droll was your observation. In a possibly apocryphal tale, it was said that the legendary Bruce Lee was required to register his hands with the police as "lethal weapons."
If you continue in this vein, you may be compelled to register your wit with the authorities, in similar fashion to the late Mr. Lee.
apropos of nothing Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw is a wonderful trifle that takes Victorian social mores as biological realities, with dragons. I'll dislike her books often but come back to her because I can rely on there being some thought behind them
S-tier comment
AAAAAAAH hahahaha My favorite interpretation!
Want to take bets on how many of them would understand what C19 means?
“C4 is a powerful explosive, so C19 must be REALLY powerful!”
Apparently with some dude named Michaelmas with whiskers like a cat.
I suspect some of this is genuinely language problems, because I'll sometimes get confused this way reading a complicated literary text in Spanish. At some point, there are too many unfamiliar words or expressions and you're just kind of at sea about what is going on in..
Novels of this era would open with these dazzling displays of very dense and complex prose as a show of technical mastery. I doubt Bleak House reads like this the whole way through. That being said, I'm a little disheartened that the kids didn't pick up that all Dickens is saying is that it's raining and there's a ton of mud everywhere. I'd be curious to see this study done on 30+ ACT scorers
He's also drawing a picture of the evils of industrial society: the soot as big as snowflakes; the death of the sun; the tens of thousands of foot passengers. And this is sharply contrasted with the fussily antique opening sentence about Michaelmas term and the Lord Chancellor in Lincoln's Inn Hall. He's setting up a “Dialectic of Enlightenment” contrast around the obsolete stuffiness of an arcane legal system that had nonetheless persisted into modernity. The fog is itself also a metaphor for the impenetrable stuffiness of the legal system.
Spoiler alert bro. I've actually not read the novel and know nothing about it except that it opens with a paragraph about a shitty day in London. I've only read Two Cities and struggled to finish it. If I'm going to slog through an older text that makes some demands on the reader, especially as regards historical references and Brit terms, then the book needs to be at least funny. Tristram Shandy is a good example
Everything I said can be gleaned from the first few paragraphs: I've not read the whole book either! I find Dickens very boring lol. But the experiment had them read the first seven paragraphs, so I read them too, in order to experience what the test subjects read so that I could more fairly judge the difficulty of the text. As you intimate, the text was easier for me as a) I am British so know what a Lord Chancellor is and where Holborn Hill is, and b) I went to Oxford where we still refer to Michaelmas Term. You can find Bleak House here to do the same if you'd like: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1023/pg1023-images.html. Bleak House is a fairly comic novel by Dickens' standards, fwiw.
Ok now I'm gonna go read the first seven paragraphs. Will report back
Ok it's a depressingly accurate description of probate court
Edit: I'd also add that the complexity drops off rather quickly and we get to Dickens simply setting the scene rather than poetically writing about fog etc
You will probably also enjoy reading the full study: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346.
Btw, most of the respondents did identify that “Dickens is saying is that it's raining and there's a ton of mud everywhere”. Read the section starting with the sentence, “The most common [reading tactic] was oversimplifying—that is, reducing the details of a complex sentence to a generic statement.” for the authors' comments on and examples of that phenomenon.
It’s a great read and pays off in the end. Worth persisting. The BBC adaptation with Trevor West, Gillian Anderson and Charles Dance is one of the best books to TV productions.
Yes, that TV adaptation was so very good, I could imagine Dickens himself applauding it. It also took me to the book, for the first time, and it is now my number one Dickens ("pipping" Great Expectations to the post). But I would not expect a young reader (especially an American undergraduate) to find it easy to appreciate, without the assistance of a good teacher with knowledge of the social conditions and the class and gender issues of Victorian England.
The Little Dorrit adaptation is also very good.
It’s a fair point that ‘old’ literature cannot be read in isolation of learning something about the social context. Part of our English lit lessons at school were really social history lessons, before we got to the text. Or rather, in long diversions from the text with a wonderful teacher who enjoyed going off piste.
I read the intro to Bleak House prior to reading this article and I thought it was pretty funny.
Bleak House is actually pretty funny, as are a lot of other works that Dickens wrote (David Copperfield comes to mind). I think it takes a while to get into the rhythm of the writing style but it eventually becomes easier to read. I say this with a grain of salt though; I grew up reading Shakespeare in high school and so for me, that was dense text that required a lot more brain power so Dickens came off easier to digest lol.
Dickens was paid by the word and it shows lol. (most of his novels were published a chapter at a time in periodicals before being compiled into books)
A Tale of Two Cities is nothing to slog through.
I don't know what you mean
I thought the death of the sun meant it was super cloudy given it was rainy and super muddy.
Yes partly but it's in the context of the sentence about the soot.
The thing about Dickens, as well as Shakespeare, in my opinion, is that there are so many more meanings in what's said than what appears on the surface.
You could almost say it was bleak...
I expect other Brits will jump in here, but ‘Michaelmas’ and Lord Chancellor were not antique terms in Dickens’ day and nor are they now. Our courts (and some schools) still use the terms, and the political head of our judicial system is still the Lord Chancellor. And eccentric senior judges are sometimes sporting whiskers, but perhaps not as luxurious as in the mid 19th century. Hence why British schoolkids have no problem reading Dickens - they assume it is an account of contemporary London.
However, they do struggle with William Faulkner…
"The evils of industrial society"??? No, he's just laying out the environment. "soot as big as snowflakes" --> It's cold, so people have fires going in their fireplaces. "the death of the sun" --> It's England; it's rainy and overcast; you simply can't see the sun through the dense cloud cover. The rest about the stuffiness of the legal system, maybe, but with how badly you mussed these descriptions, I'm leery to follow along with that interpretation.
You don't get soot like that just from little wood fireplaces. The subsequent paragraphs make clear that it's not just cloudy: he's talking about the infamous pea-soupers of industrial smog caused by mass coal-burning. For example, in the second paragraph, Dickens writes, “fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.” Yes, he is absolutely talking about industrialisation. You could have been clued in to this even from the first paragraph by the strength of the description: “the death of the sun” is not something that one would say of an English sky when it is merely cloudy and raining. I am English: no one here would bewail the death of the sun just because it's overcast.
The problem of smoke from coal-burning and industrialisation was a very hot topic at the time of Bleak House's original 1852 publication. Within the next few years there would be two Smoke Nuisance Abatement Acts (1853 and 1856) passed in a futile effort to clean up the notorious smogs. You can read the text of the 1853 act here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Vict/16-17/128/pdfs/ukpga_18530128_en.pdf. Its full title was “An Act to abate the Nuisance arising from the Smoke of Furnaces in the Metropolis, and from Steam Vessels above London Bridge.” It's not about little household wood fires! Parliament didn't pass those acts just to stop it from raining and being cloudy: the problem was industrialisation (“furnaces and steam vessels”), it was choking the city, and everyone knew it.
And Dickens, the great social reformer, has taken this problem of which everyone at the time knew—the literal choking of the city by smoke pollution produced by industrial elites—and brilliantly analogised it to the problem he wishes to tackle in Bleak House—the spiritual choking of the city by regulatory pollution produced by legal elites.
Wood fires (if you're not using modern treated low-smoke wood) do produce quite a lot of soot. I grew up living in some mountain cabins where our only heating were wood stoves; the chimneys need periodic cleaning out, besides the frequent removal of ashes from the stoves themselves. Yes, coal fires (which the common folk in the 1800s also used – not just "big industry") produce more soot, enough to have made "chimney sweep" a viable occupation. To make up some numbers, 200,000 homes each burning 100 lbs. of coal per year would match 10 factories each burning 1000 tons of coal per year, so even if these are unbalanced and inaccurate (very likely, as they're made-up), they show how condemning "coal-burning industries" without addressing the public's homes would have gotten at only part of the problem.
And then there's the issue of the types of coal, bituminous and anthracite. Bituminous is cheaper and abundant, so it's more likely to have been used by common folk. Anthracite burns more cleanly and produces more heat, but it's also more expensive and less common, so its use would have been higher in factory furnaces (their owners could afford it) and steam ships (which have tighter space requirements).
Overall, I guess my point is that even if Dickens (et al.) were misguidedly complaining about and vilifying "industrialization" as even just the main source of environmental and social ills, his description here in _Bleak House_ would not necessarily be more than a verbal painting of the environment he wished his readers to imagine.
Dickens and William Blake were just two English writers who bemoaned the effects of industrialization on the environment of London and English urban life.
It is also setting up the atmosphere of the novel: the characters' inability to discern each other's pasts and motives and the sense of prevailing stasis and their inability to escape the multigenerational fate imposed on them. Of which the interminable court case is the most visible representation.
All what you’re saying here would likely have been elicited in the classroom discussion (one would hope).
Sure, but a) most of these students have been doing this for three or four years by now, they should be able to do it themselves, b) these students are the ones who will be leading classroom discussions in a year's time and they can't do it, and c) you shouldn't need to have a classroom discussion to know that Dickens wasn't writing about dinosaurs walking around London.
Sample size of one, and I understood it all easily minus "Michaelmas term", which could have been a few different things but was ultimately easily dismissed as not very relevant. In hindsight, it's easy to relate to Christmas via the "mas" suffix.
I also caught myself wondering where humanity was in its understanding of dinosaurs at the time of Dickens. Was it commonly assumed that they lived at the time of the Biblical flood?
It doesn't relate to Christmas. -mas is for "Mass" and Michaelmas is the Mass of St Michael, ie his feast day, and thus by reference the term that starts on or around 29 September.
And Christmas is the Mass of Christ; so your interlocutor correctly gathers that Michaelmas is some other sort of major seasonal festival, although this hasn't been the case for hundreds of years, outside of Waldorf schools.
Cambridge and Oxford Universities in England still refer to the autumn term as Michaelmas Term.
A lot of posh private schools in England also use Michaelmas Term.
More directly it's also the first of the four terms of the legal year in England when the senior courts sit.
At first I was pretty sympathetic to the students- this is a pretty dense and archaic way of writing, with a bunch of unfamiliar terms and sentences with no verbs. I can’t really tell what’s going on in any detail, other than that he is showing some kind of gloomy and chilly hellscape (really trying not to use the word ‘bleak’) in the context of a court case (Lord Chancellor). But then I saw they could use their phones and google what Michaelmas is etc, and I became much less sympathetic.
or figure out from the next sentance that it is currently november
Also does that sentance not drive home how Dickens absolutely *could* be conscise he just chooses not to lol. "Implacable November weather" I might just start using that phrase.
Massive self own here, fam.
And the test subjects were from Kansas.
It relates to christmas in the sense that they are both dates and thats the important part of the clause. So if encounter the term Michaelmas and conclude "thats some kind of date", then you pretty much understood all you need to know about that clause. November is mentioned in the next sentence so knowing the exact date isn't necessary.
The clause is saying that the first term (Michaelmas Term) of the English legal year has recently ended and the senior courts are currently in recess, which is fairly relevant to the work of the head of the judiciary (the Lord Chancellor).
The Court of Chancery was dissolved in 1873 so I am not sure if it followed the legal year or if it sat through the recesses. If the latter then the passage means that now the other courts were in recess the Lord Chancellor was now presiding over the Court of Chancery as it sat at the Old Hall of Lincoln's Inn.
I initially misread it because Oxford and Cambridge both have Michaelmas, and Lord Chancellors, and Halls.
I still wonder if Dickens was trying to create a parallel, or at least show how these incredibly antique phrases have far too many meanings.
I think he was being straightforward and just using what would have been fairly familiar terminology to the audiences of the time (as least in the UK and its colonies). The audiences of the day would have consumed more detailed news reporting (whether directly through reading newspapers or listening to others reading aloud - such readings are depicted in some of Dickens's own novels), including coverage of the courts, so these terms would have been more familiar.
And many these phrases effectively have the same meaning, e.g. the Michaelmas Term in the autumn, because so many overlapped between the institutions. Who was it who criticised the way too many in the legal profession have gone "from quad to quad to quad" (i.e. public school to Oxbridge to Inns of Court, all using the term "quad" for a courtyard)?
Palaeontologist, Buckland, the Megalosaurus man, was publishing his findings during Dickens' time, and did at some point believe in various flood theories. But I don't think it was a common assumption, rather than them just being ancient. Dinosaurs were like THE hot topic in Victorian England while Dickens is writing Bleak House - to the point that the Megalosaurus in Bleak House is the first mention of a dinosaur in popular lit. (Great pub quiz knowledge)
Mr. Venus from Our Mutual Friend, is based on Sir Richard Owen (coined Dinosauria) - Dickens was certainly into his science.
The exact age of the earth was a scientific controversy at the time - see this article: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/kelvin-perry-and-the-age-of-the-earth
Nonetheless I somewhat doubt Dickens was a Biblical literalist. He remained a nominal Anglican for eminently practical and traditional reasons, and a conservative one at that despite brief flirtations with Unitarianism. But in private he displayed a good deal of skepticism towards Christianity, especially the Old Testament to which most biblical literalism is directed. This sentiment, as well as his praise of the allegorical moral force of the New Testament suggest someone who was open to the findings of the geologists and physcists of the day.
I was guessing that the megalosaurus reference might have been a nod to some pop culture meme that the readers of the day would have been familiar with.
Of the metaphors in the seven paragraphs, the megalosaur metaphor seems out of place to me otherwise.
Yes, Victorians were fascinated with dinosaurs, lots of talks and exhibits based on new discoveries - and they would have found the image of the giant ancient creature in modern (at the time) Holborn very amusing. What shocked me was finding out that the references to indoor fog in the courtroom were not (only) figurative, they really couldn't see the ceiling on bad pollution days.
It mentions November in the very next sentence, though I guess you could get "November weather" any time of year in some cases.
We 🇬🇧 had November weather yesterday; today it is June weather
On a visit from the Antipodes, I remember walking through North London and as I meandered (perhaps even waddling like an elephantine lizard) towards the train station I realised that I was experiencing Sleet. From my position of sodden misery, I experienced the joy of feeling like I was in a Dicken's novel-it helped a little.
The reference to the Megalosaurus was Dickens saying that London was so muddy and foggy that he imagined it to be a prehistoric environment that a dinosaur would be more comfortable in than a modern human. Dickens was also buddies with a paleontologist back when far less was known about dinosaurs than now.
Maybe I'm lacking some reading comprehension but I understood "As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth"
to indicate that it was especially dry. If the waters retire from the face of the earth, it must be dry no? Or is the point that the waters have decided to retire from the face of the earth and have decided to become mud instead?
But of course dryness wouldn't lead to mud, and all the fog and the November weather also indicates that it's wet so I must be misunderstanding this sentence.
*Newly* retired: imagine a conventional flood (not even one of Biblical scale) covered a field several metres deep, then the water was siphoned or drained off. The ground would still be muddy, waterlogged. It might take weeks even in warm weather for the ground to dry.
It's a reference to Genesis and the creation of the Earth, eg "as if the world had just been born"
leading directly to "it would not be wonderful (surprising) to see a dinosaur walking down the street"
I assumed it was an Anglican thing
Or Catholic, or Orthodox. Anybody who celebrates the feast days of saints.
It’s still used today to refer to the Autumn term at Trinity College Dublin.
It's one of the English Quarter Days, so the Academic/Legal term that begins with it takes its name. In Scotland, the Autumn Quarter Day is Martinmas, so the Ancient Universities of Scotland use that instead.
blows my mind that college English majors would have so much trouble. I'm a fkn Chemist. I don't particularly like Dickens and I haven't read anything by him since 10th grade English. Maybe because I do read a *lot* I have the vocabulary, I forget for example *when* Michaelmas is, but the passage explicitly tells us it's November. I know what a megalodon was because I used to be an 8 year old boy. The Genesis reference is clear to me, which sets up the whole premise of there being a megalodon waddling down the street (because we're in prehistory). That's probably the most difficult reference to get... I might expect a bunch of white kids from KS to have read some of the Bible? That's like not reading Shakespeare. As an English major.
They had an average ACT score of 22ish. In a sane society, these kids would not go to college
Someday, soon, maybe Griggs v Duke Power will be overturned. That's not the whole story, but it certainly a big part of the problem.
Such a waste of resources at so many levels.
I recommend The Case Against Education. Thought provoking book
Thanks. It's an important subject.
Today's students are VERY unlikely to be literate in the Bible. Oh, sure, a few of the more common stories (particularly those that might have been seen on TV - particularly those in cartoon format).
But, generally? Absolutely not!
I like the 8 year old reference. Imagine how amazing dinosaurs would have been to people of every age when they'd just been discovered. This in a society where everyone was already collecting beetles and butterflies. There was apparently a dinosaur exhibition at Crystal Palace at this time which was unsurprisingly quite popular.
The Victorians loved everything to do with dinosaurs and when the Natural History Museum was opened in London, the dinosaurs were front and centre (literally, in the great entrance hall). Millions of excited British kids have passed through that Hall since and experienced the thrill of meeting "Dippy" the Diplodocus (she's now retired from the Hall, but tours the country).
Also a chemist (of the pharmaceutical kind) who last studied English at a similar age and I had few issues understanding the text. But again I read a lot, not just novels but non-fiction, broadsheet papers, long form journalism, etc
"which sets up the whole premise of there being a megalodon waddling down the street (because we're in prehistory)."
Is this a troll or...?
Although it's not hugely relevant to the study, it's worth noting that Dickens published Bleak House in 20 illustrated episodes, in a considerably more accessible format than a 900 page novel.
And at a time when readers would have been at least fluent in Michaelmas term, Lord Chancellor, and quite familiar with the soot. I read the text and could visualize the street corner quite vividly, but I’ve seen a lot of period films.
And many would likely have had this read to them in a group settings (like after dinner entertainment) so could have asked questions if they were confused.
Others pointed out that this opening may be especially florid as a way to show off and catch the reader's attention, and the following prose is more conventional. I wonder if the opening of Episode Two is equally ornate.
The irony being that a single paragraph of this is now most likely to loose the reader's attention and send them running for another book (or, let's be honest, TikTok)
I studied “Tale of Two Cities” in high school. The English teacher spent two classes walking us through the first chapter: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …”
Most of the novel wasn’t that dense. A list of lists! But really going into it and understanding it is necessary to understand the background of revolutionary Paris.
Dickens creates these horribly complex introductory chapters because he expects his readers to trudge through them. They are necessary to understand the rest of the novel.
There’s a lot here that’s culturally dependent. “The end of Michaelmas term” is like saying “the beginning of Christmas break.” It brings to mind snow and snowball fights and church services and time with family you haven’t seen in a while.
You aren’t going to get that from looking up “Michaelmas term” in a dictionary to Wikipedia.
If this was an actual novel, I would hope annotations were available.
I made my 15 y/o. read that first passage & he understood it just fine- who are these students??
(He did roll his eyes at me though)
Yeah, my ACT score was 32 and I could have easily read and understood this in high school, if not middle school.
You're absolutely right. It doesn't. I remember that passage well as being particularly complex.
You find the same thing in modern novels - especially literary novels. A couple of examples: Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, or more recently The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk.
The first chapters of all Dickens novels are very florid and (to my taste) extraordinarily good writing. It's near poetry.
These opening pages leave me dumbstruck that anyone could write so well
These are textbook examples of what George Orwell would call bad writing. It fits right above the overly wordy Communist propaganda and under the corporate speak.
I consider myself very well-read and though not an English major, my study of literature (HS and college) was decent. I think the test with this passage was a bit unfair in the sense that in a good classroom setting, the teacher would have given some kind of introduction to the text. And as someone said above, these books often start out obscure or complicated, but the novel itself is not so bad. I remember trying to read something in English Lit—I think it wasReturn of the Native— and plodding through chapter 1 (at least I think it was Return), over and over.. no Google back then. Whatever. I’ll never get thru this, etc etc x Once I ‘gave up’ on chapter 1 though, reading the novel was fine.
The test wasn't to see how the students performed in a classroom setting though. It was to see if college english majors had developed a very relevant skill that they should have developed in high school. If they need the introduction from a teacher every time they read a book, i am not sure they should be majoring in english!
When I read The Scarlet Letter in high school, the teacher told us to skip the first section, and just dive into the real story.
Good advice.
You should try Solzhenitsyn some time.
I have; he's great! _August 1914_ and _Cancer Ward_ especially recommended.
So true. Ì wonder if he is any more accessible in Russian?
Dickens got paid by the word , I was told , which was the explanation for his verbose descriptions of place, time, and characters- a similar example to the passage in Bleak House, would be the opening paragraph of “A Christmas Carol”, where he describes in excruciatingly verbose detail exactly how dead Jacob Marley was.
I doubt that the same students would be able to accurately parse A Christmas Carol- which in my experience was one of Dickens “easier” reads.
You're absolutely right. It doesn't. I remember that passage well as being particularly complex.
For a historical comparison, I. A. Richards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._A._Richards) did a similar exercise a century ago back in the 1920s with his Cambridge students (rather than "two regional Kansas universities"), with poems: _Practical Criticism_ https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.179256 They were also really bad! So it may be a comfort to know that it's hard to tell if 'Tiktok ruined these students' because most students have always been terrible at understanding literature...
If you actually read the linked book [do so; it’s short], this in fact shows how much has changed. Read the quotations from the 1920s students (and others: some subjects were laypeople) and you will immediately realise that their engagement and erudition is off the scale of the 2015 study. The most eloquent of the 2015 study’s “proficient writers” would have been at best merely average in the 1920s study.
The students disagree wildly in their emotional and aesthetic reactions and of course they miss things, as one will. Poetry is deliberately cryptic and allusive, and the students were several centuries past some writers tested, not a mere century and a half. But there is no equivalent of “[Sixteen seconds of breathing, chair creaking. Then she whispers, I’m just gonna skip that.]”, let alone of thinking that an advocate with great whiskers is a Studio Ghibli-esque anthropomorphic cat, or that dinosaurs were walking around Victorian London. Richards’ chief criticisms are that his students are sometimes overly pedantic or insufficiently imaginative, sometimes too dogmatic about their own prejudices and preconceptions, sometimes too caught up in their subjective aesthetic feelings. Never though does he charge them with such heinous inanity, and never are they so incapable of expressing themselves.
It is perhaps true that for a hundred years each generation has despaired of the inability of the next—but perhaps each was right so to do!
How fast can you read? I'm afraid reading 392 pages would take me two or more full days, and I could only devote a measly 5 minutes to find and skim the beginning of part two. I don't think I am that slow of a reader, given that I scored on the 99th+ percentile on the SAT, but I am definitely not capable of reading the book in one sitting or something.
That being said, I agree that "their engagement and erudition is off the scale of the 2015 study." I was just about to edit my comment to say that it doesn't appear (from the very few excerpts I skimmed) that the 1920s students didn't understand the material. Rather, they just were not engaging appropriately with the text, letting their emotional and educational preconceptions interfere with their analyses.
> Rather, they just were not engaging appropriately with the text, letting their emotional and educational preconceptions interfere with their analyses.
Which is, of course, a good way to not read... And this addresses the cope that it's "just too antiquated and historical and from an entirely other country". The kids in c. 1925 were a lot closer to Dickens than in 2015. But even these elite English kids at Cambridge, steeped in England and English literature, at a time when, what, <5% of kids went to any college?, who are being graded in a course with responses written over a long time, rather than participating in a study, are still doing pretty badly in terms of 'engaging appropriately with the text', given that these are generally what one would consider not terribly difficult. He's not asking them read poems in the original Latin or Greece, or decrypt metaphysical poets' work! So, it's a highly relevant datapoint, since obviously you're not going to find any studies from 1900 asking Kansas students about _Bleak House_.
About 1.5% of people got a degree in the UK in 1920-somewhat different from today. Even if there were some aristocratic but dim, the majority were likely a long way to the right of the curve. Imagine the calibre of the scholarship kids. Would have been a pretty tough pack to run with
Last night I read all of Parts 1 and 2, and enough of Part 3 to be satisfied that it was mostly just recapitulating in condensed form the insights from Parts 2. I do read fairly fast, but also the pages are quite small and there is a lot of white space owing to so much of the content being quotes.
The students weren't ruined. The diplomas were ruined. The degrees were ruined.
Seems reasonable to compare the examiners' opinions of the students as stated in the 2 works. But the activity of criticism and the activity of checking one's own comprehension are vastly different. (Adler's How to Read a Book describes this at length.) In the 1920s, students might have reflexively held themselves to a high standard even when being asked to do the less rigorous task of criticism. (Remember, criticism is only rigorous if the preceding step of comprehension is, and that wasn't directly tested in the 1920s work.) I wouldn't be surprised if 2020s students responded fluently to a criticism task because criticism is basically a reflexive reaction to all media now. Martin Amis satirized the undergraduate reflex to criticize thoughtlessly in The Rachel Papers, and that was 1973!
The ones found on "Part Two: Documentation"? The responses I skimmed seem vastly superior, though I do sorta see what you're getting at. Moreover, it's unclear to me whether they are excerpts of larger responses. For example, this response, one of the better ones, strikes me as pretty reasonable:
1*182. Good on the whole, though it is doubtful if life really seems longer to the good than to the wicked or to the merely passive.
The lines are worth reading twice because they really do express something instead of just drivelling on like those of number II.
It is for this poem (copied and pasted badly here):
Life’s more than breath and the quick roimd of blood.
’Tis a great spirit and a busy heart ;
The coward and the small in soul scarce do live.
One generous feeling, one great thought, one deed
Of good, ere night, would make life longer seem
Than if each year might number a thousand days
Spent as is this by nations of mankind.
We live in deeds, not years ; in thoughts, not breaths ;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
If you read Part One, he makes it clear that they are indeed generally excerpts.
Yes this is an old complaint and cycles around. The real issue is what to do. The complaints go viral, the solutions, not so much.
I'm inclined to be very sympathetic to the students here. Those paragraphs may as well be in a different language, they're filled with words no-one uses anymore, or which are being used in ways these kids have never seen before (if you haven't encountered "whiskers" or "wonderful" in these contexts before you won't think to look them up in the dictionary just in case) and it's entirely reasonable for college students not to have learned the words for 19th century phenomena they will never encounter in their own lives (horse blinkers, Michaelmas). Even the fact they had a dictionary isn't the catch-all excuse you want it to be because if they have no incentive to get these questions right they won't be motivated to do twenty minutes of linguistic archaeology to answer these questions.
I fully expect the underlying point, that college student literacy has collapsed, is true, but I think the people who designed this test failed to build it in a way that it could possibly prove or disprove their hypotheses.
At this level of difficulty, reading a text like this is a test of subject matter knowledge and reasoning ability, not literacy or English language skills.
I used to get poor marks in French listening, speaking, and writing, but ace reading comprehension, because I had general knowledge and the ability to reason well with incomplete information. It wasn't reflective of my French skills when I overperformed in one of four French tests.
I would be more hospitable to this argument if they weren't English majors. They are quite literally studying the English language and English literary canon.
Well, they're actually going to have been studying left wing activism if the stories about English Lit courses are true these days. I daresay they'd ace reading comprehension on a text about modern critical theory that would be completely opaque to many supposedly more advanced readers...
You should get a hobby
Amen!
That "Amen!" was to Alistair Pembroke, in case there's any ambiguity.
Even understanding where the boundaries are of the dinosaur figure-of-speech requires knowing exactly how people at the time reconciled excavation of dinosaur bones with biblical flood stories.
If you *don't* know that, there aren't many ways the imagery is likely to click as intended. And there isn't any particular reason an English major should know that.
This test would be more suited to a history major than an English one.
If you want to test an English major's comprehension of complex contemporary prose, just write some.
No, you don't have to know anything about then-current theories of dinosaurs to grasp the metaphor. You're telling on your reading ability.
Feel free to provide the proper boundaries to the figure of speech without reference to biblical flood stories.
The way I read it was "it was so muddy that you could think the biblical flood had just drained out recently enough that--should it have failed to drown all dinosaurs--you could plausibly expect to find one still waddling around".
Which to me seems both funny and evocative. As far as figurative language goes quite good and pleasing.
Did you know about then-current theories of dinosaurs before coming to those conclusions?
Because if you didn't, you're proving my point.
Yes, I did know about the then-current theory of dinos.
I agree actually. I don't expect great performance even from English majors but some of these quotes are just shameful.
My bad. I misremembered the blog post in the six hours between reading the post and getting the time type up my comment.
I don’t think you have to know “wonderful” can mean “unbelievable” to figure out that there’s no real dinosaur in this paragraph. The example students are clearly unaware of what actually reading even is.
Exactly. The concern isn't that they don't understand every word, it's that they can't even recognize literal vs metaphorical language. On top of that, it seems like they don't have good BS detectors (for lack of a better term). If you read a paragraph and think it says two guys met a dinosaur, you should conclude "maybe I didn't read this correctly" instead of continuing on.
Yes. Certainly. Especially in... Checks notes.. Kansas...
I would still suggest that part of a good education is to be able to visualise the time before our own, when indeed horses had blinkers and the streets were full of mud. Otherwise we live only in the present tense - as it were.
Yes, an eternal Year Zero.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(political_notion)
Yes. We read old books to understand about life as it was in various times before we were alive. We read old books to discover ways of thinking that are no longer current. In the process, we learn different ways of using language and how language has changed over time. That is, we become educated.
Maybe the students would've had an easier time with an annotated edition, which highlighted & translated some of the archaic language. The problem is these students are the ones who we would expect to produce such an edition.
I don't think anyone is looking to second-year undergrads to produce those editions. Maybe twenty years down the line. I think that I had terrible reading ability when I was twenty. Doesn't mean I couldn't have improved a decade later.
"2 Decades from now, these mechanical engineers might be competent at linear algebra."
High culture rests on several of civilizations load-bearing pillars. When it goes, you know things have already fallen apart.
I barely read any books above the reading level of Reddit and Percy Jackson before I took my ACTs and I received a 35-36 on all reading scores without studying whatsoever, on 5 hours of sleep. Many of these terms can be understood by their vicinities, their definitions at-least partially inferred. I have an IQ of 145-150. I hate the fact that I have to postface these verbal concessions to obviate morons, but I will include it nonetheless - this does also mean there are men much more mentally powerful than me. There is a hierarchy to all things, I don't mean to brag or be arrogant, but this is simply how it is.
Certainly, (some of) these kids could eventually pick up some semblance of literacy. It would also take much longer for them than it would for certain blessed individuals.
IQ has been declining across the Western world since the 19th century due to dysgenic fertility(where the less intelligent are outbreeding the more intelligent):
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289614000841
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00361/full
It should not be surprising that people today cannot read those Victorian era books, they're made by and for smarter men. The wokes and controlled opposition conservatives will blame culture or education, but the problem lies in genetics—it is always genetics.
This is exactly the point I was making when I invoked French language exams.
At a certain level of linguistic, cultural and temporal distance, parsing a text is an IQ/general knowledge test, not a literacy test.
Thank you, I was going to bring up some of the same points and add that there's not only a difference in temporal context (19th century) but spacial as well (Dickens was English but the students are American). I think you covered it well, the students aren't functionally illiterate in the English language as a whole but a particular kind of English. That's unfortunate but not disastrous in my mind.
I would say we have failures beginning in very early grades in American education. Back in fourth grade, my son had read LOTR, in full. He was so inspired by it, that he began writing stories of his own and invented his own language "just like Tolkien did, mom." He had stacks of papers under his bed with elaborate script and fonts he produced, by hand.
State testing time came around and I was informed by his teacher that he would likely get the lowest score (1 out of 4) and require additional "supports" for reading and writing. I sat dumbfounded knowing what he was doing at home. When I told her what he was reading and writing, she said, and I quote: "well, that kind of reading isn't what we focus on. We are teaching readers for the future who will be able to decipher technical manuals. Think of assembling a grill." Again, dumbfounded (my husband, when I told him the story said, "has that teacher every looked at a LEGO manual? I think he'll be fine).
Anyway, they no longer focus on simply exposing kids to good literature. It's all about "technical reading and writing." We withdrew him from public school and sent him to a classical school the next year. Best thing we ever did.
I'm also inclined to be sympathetic to these students. Like, if you don't know to look up "advocate," you're not going to look it up and find that it's a law title! I also don't think this study's methodology was a good test of the participants' literacy at all. I was just imagining myself as one of them, and I definitely would not do well in literary analysis under the scrutiny of researchers...
I didn't know "advocate" was an actual title, & I could gather what his role was (esp. once clued into the fact this is a court proceeding).
I don't understand the knee-jerk reflex to defend manifestly terrible reading abilities & cultural familiarity. College Majors should be beyond competent at this, even facing difficult texts.
It’s not a “knee-jerk reaction” for me. Indeed, I was pretty shocked by their interpretations as well while reading this. But I thought about my own reading ability at 20, when I was in community college and taking English classes. I also thought about how I would personally do while reading in front of researchers and having to tell them what it meant on the fly. And I concluded that I definitely would have done better reading it on my own, and likely so would have these students.
"Reading" involves handling unfamiliar words describing unfamiliar situations. Reading doesn't just mean instruction manuals or simple food recipes. Figurative language and unfamiliar references and allusions are part of the basic task. That's why we make students read novels.
Reread my argument? I agree with you, but I think when you stack enough of those on top of each other it becomes a quantitatively different exercise. It becomes pure logic puzzle.
Being able to make inferences based on the surrounding context versus figuring out what the hell the context is in the first place.
Oh goodness
It seems really difficult to read it aloud and then reword it immediately on the fly. I don’t think I’d have any issue doing that in writing, but if I needed to do it orally, the transcript would make me look pretty dumb.
YES! I think this study’s methodology and its own analysis of its findings is very flawed. It’s assumed to uncover these students’ raw reading ability. But it really shows their reading ability of a harder text (than they’re likely used to reading) while under the scrutiny of researchers (who end up LAUGHING at them). Most of us would look pretty dumb under those circumstances, when we’d likely do much better reading it on our own.
For sure, their tone seemed really inappropriate. I bet they didn’t dictate their article and publish it with 0 revisions. Not an easy thing to do.
When I took Eng Lit at 17 🇬🇧, it was supposed that we’d read the set texts (Austen, Chaucer, Shakey) in the preceding summer holiday. We didn’t, we went to the beach.
In my case, thankfully Martin Shaw had made a Macbeth movie, which gave enough info in an hour and a half to get the general gist and a few details for colour.
Then Branagh made a number in the late 80s through 90s that gave an easy intro into the canon.
My wife and I have a long-standing debate about whether literacy levels really are as poor as I tell her they are. So after reading the full paper I got her to take the test, as administered by me. [She is very tolerant of my eccentricities lol.] She is decades out of college and didn't do English Literature past high school anyway, so not exactly primed for success like these students ought to have been. She took a while over it but was able to fully explain what was going on and recognise pretty much all of the metaphors and allusions. (She didn't recognise the Genesis allusion about the waters retiring because she has no Christian background at all, but understood that it was a metaphor anyway.) I didn't assist her during the test or give her feedback about how she was doing. It was interesting to compare her performance to the subjects in the paper. I would place her at about the 8th or 9th percentile, i.e. in the group who were able to understand the text proficiently but took a while over it. She is now more convinced that literacy levels are in fact as poor as I have been telling her. Always do your own research, kids!
"I would place her at about the 8th or 9th percentile"
Failed the numeracy test award
Ha yes. I work as a statistician and in practice we always count everything down from the top because that's what clients care about. But you're technically correct and as everyone knows that is the best kind of correct.
Oddly enough, at 64 and a math major, I only ran into "decile" quite recently. Or I did years ago and forgot it with most of what I learned in college.
I grew up in a completely areligious household and even I would have recognized the biblical reference because, at one time, our culture shared a foundation based on Judeo-Christian texts. You didn't have to read the classics. You could find biblical references in everything from Agatha Christie murder mysteries to short stories to magazine articles. There has been a concerted effort to eliminate this shared culture and to even offer "trigger warnings" for language that the modern ear might find offensive.
Agreed. The attempt to eradicate Christianity from culture has been deliberate, usually pushed by a particular type of person—the same type of person who insisted on ahistorically diluting the term “Christian” to “Judaeo-Christian”, in fact.
Are you in the US, though? Here in the Yookay there has been very little public Christianity in the culture for many decades. I know the references mainly because I was one of the few of my Millennial generation to be raised as a practising Christian; there are even fewer now. Only 6% of Britons are practising Christians, and most of them are elderly.
I am in the US. Yes, we have a more robust public Christianity here and there does seem to be a bit of a revival (please, God, may it be real). I am a Catholic and I thought I heard that the diocese of London had several hundred people come into the Church this past Easter. I imagine importing so many from non-Christian countries is not helping the situation in the UK.
The Catholic Diocese of Westminster has five million people in it though. Several hundred is small beans.
And in fact mass immigration is hugely propping up British Christianity. Pews are now disproportionately filled with Africans in particular, and to a lesser extent Latinos and Goans.
As well, which will be a big part of the several hundred new converts, Muslim illegal immigrants are encouraged by immigration NGOs to officially (but not actually) convert to Christianity. If they do, it becomes illegal for the Yookay government to send them home because they would be at risk of persecution for apostasy. They then live their life as normal as a Muslim unless the authorities come for them, in which case they say they are a Christian who can't be deported.
That is fascinating context. Thank you for teaching me something.
The fact that the study participants were from two (anonymized apparently) Kansas universities made me think of Dr. John Senior, who ran the famous University of Kansas Integrated Humanities Program in the 70s, where students spent two years reading "the Great Books." It was eventually shut down as a disproportionate percentage of students were converting to Catholicism, though no explicit evidence of proselytizing was ever uncovered.
He also found that students were having trouble reading the "Great Books," and hypothesized that encouraging kids in their youth to read "The Good Books," (e.g. Aesop's Fables, Three Musketeers), as a prerequisite would assist them in reading the "Great Books" (such as Plato and Aristotle). Dr. John Senior's "Thousand Good Books List" is available online with a quick google (not sure if I'm allowed to link it). Interestingly enough, it contains plenty of Dickens, and "Bleak House" is on the list for "Youth 16-20."
Very important missing link in education & culture generally. Transformers & Zelda et al. really are important stepping stones to grasping higher culture; the quality of popular matters.
I'd be interested to hear how appreciating Transformers and Zelda could be a stepping stone to grasping, say Plato and Aristotle (I enjoyed both the former, and while I've sampled both the latter I don't claim any expertise). John Senior himself would have vehemently disagreed though, and articulated some form of "Lindy" principle in his selections in his "Thousand Good Books" article:
"Contemporary works can be appreciated and enjoyed but not very properly judged, and just as a principle must stand outside what follows from it (as a point to a line), so a cultural standard must be established from some time at least as distant as our grandparents’. For us today the cut-off point is World War I before which cars and the electric light had not yet come to dominate our lives and the experience of nature had not been distorted by speed and the destruction of shadows. There is a serious question—with arguments on both sides surely—as to whether there can be any culture at all in a mechanized society."
I honestly think a number of the books on his 1000 Good Books list are not actually that “good”. Quite a few, especially on the part of the list for younger children, don’t really meet the “living books” standard (to borrow Charlotte Mason’s term).
And using World War I as the cutoff eliminates, just to name two authors I think young people SHOULD read, both Tolkien and Lewis.
I really appreciate John Senior’s work but as a book list, I do find it lacking in a lot of ways.
Reading Tolkien is why I know what Michaelmas is.
Learning how to analyze a text or other form of media is one skill. Applying it to a set of books is a second skill (or at least an application of the first skill). You can develop the first skill on any set of media, low or high.
I listen to a local Catholic radio show and the priest-host mentions Dr. John Senior on an almost weekly basis!
John Senior proposed the 1000 Good Books in around 1980, decades before the advent of the internet (I noticed my own reading comprehension went down once most of what I read was online). I doubt many students today could comprehend The Three Musketeers if this is how they fared with Dickens. Even the comments on this post are dispiriting. So many people describing Dickens’s modern English as “archaic”.
I remember reading Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales and found them a real slog. As if the great story and characters I was imagining were being purposefully obfuscated by the writer. Conversely, reading Scott Fitzgerald, Chandler and Steinbeck, I found myself at ease with language that seemed very contemporary to me although it came from a time when my grandparents were in their pomp.
If it's any consolation, Mark Twain is on your side here about Cooper being a terrible prose stylist.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3172/3172-h/3172-h.htm
Cooper is a bit of a slog, but I made my son read "The Last of the Mohicans" when we homeschooled him in high school and he really enjoyed it. Though wordy, he liked the dense prose and the brain work out. He said his peers would never be able to get through it.
Quite so. I have read several of Dickens's novels and found the language perfectly understandable, if occasionally florid. I perhaps encountered two or three words I had never seen. I distinctly remember learning the word 'pursy' to describe Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield.
Florid is the perfect word. I've read several of his books now and what I am most struck by is his sense of humor. I didn't expect to chuckle as much as I do when reading his stories (which may just reveal that I had no knowledge of Dickens prior to reading him).
Something I didn't realize until I actually started reading the study: it was recently published, but the experiment itself is ten years old now - these college students were assessed in 2015!
This leaves me with two main questions. First, can anyone shed light on why there was so much delay? Nine years from experiment to publication is appalling, but I'm not really familiar with the norms of the field.
Second, how should the timing make us update our understanding of the study? Does the fact that this experiment was done in 2015 mean that things are even worse now? Or does it mean that the recent "the students are not okay after COVID" zeitgeist is over-emphasizing the recency of the change?
“Does the fact that this experiment was done in 2015 mean that things are even worse now? Or does it mean that the recent "the students are not okay after COVID" zeitgeist is over-emphasizing the recency of the change?”
Why not both?
I had this same reaction, this same study would likely look much, much worse today. Although I wonder if phone use to look things up would lead these kids to use AI and get better summaries then they themselves could write?
Ugh it’s all so dark.
This may not help the totally incompetent readers, but for the semi-competent readers, I wonder if there is a bias in the study from just never engaging with text with archaic language? When I started reading a text that was written in Middle English, it was very difficult, as I had never read such language before. Within 20-40 pages, I got used to the style and even some of the vocabulary, and have been able to read through the rest of the book. Even when I had to break from the book for a period of time, picking it back up was easier than picking it up for the first time. This is similar to my experience reading classics for the first time (the first was much harder than the second, so on and so forth).
That might be. I have a love/hate relationship with Dickens. He has an incredible gift for setting scenes and conversations, but I finish a chapter and almost feel that nothing has happened. I have recently started reading Tale of Two Cities, and if I set it down for a week, I have to back up a chapter or two to remember what's been happening.
I learned some Japanese in the Navy, enough for tourist conversations, to ask directions (never ask where something is; the answer will involve going past the barber ship, turn right at such and so a bridge, go past the Piggly Wiggly, and I don't know all those words; instead, point in the likely direction and ask if your destination is in that direction. You can tell by the tone of their answer how close you are, they will point somewhere, and you thank them profusely, go that way, and ask someone else).
After I got out, I spent two years in a reading / writing class, got up to about 500 characters (you need 1850 to graduate high school), and could not learn more without spending several hours a night. A famous book from the late 1800s, "waga hai wa neko de aru" ("we are a cat", that's the Queen Victoria royal we), took me about an hour per page, and by the time I finished, I could not remember how the page had started. That's almost how I feel about Dickens.
Reading that first paragraph, I did not know what Michaelmas Term was, but it said November and was cold and muddy, so it didn't really matter. I know Lord Chancellor is some local mucky muck, a mayor maybe, and again, it didn't really matter. Foggy round his head threw me, but not the general image. I find much of the fun of reading things like that lies in not looking things up, but just reading and keeping them in the back of your mind. Eventually they'll tie or or not, and if not, it didn't matter.
No wonder they don't like LOTR.
Yeah, no shit!
Re: my comment above about them being secretaries 50 years ago, I'd be very curious to see how these students would do with something like the Thorn Birds (popular literature released in 1977); I'm guessing they're still going to do badly but I do think some of the language is just too far for most readers.
I loved the Thorn Birds. Loved the movie, too.
Think I actually have a copy in my basement thanks to cleaning out my mother-in-laws basement. Since like most books, I can’t sell or it give it away, I might read it.
I’m a bit confused about the relevance of figuring out Middle English to figuring out Dickens…
It's very relevant to this passage, although it's only archaism to Americans. A British specialist of English literature will likely already know about the Inns of Court and the legal usage of "Michaelmas term," both of which still exist in the present day. There is no reason for an American to be acquainted with these terms, even an American college student who has just been exposed to a rigorous American literature curriculum and read Hawthorne, Melville, Du Bois, et al.
If these American students failed to critically question their own comprehension and double-check deceptively simple-looking terms like "Lincoln’s Inn," it would be completely natural for them to see the phrase "a large advocate with great whiskers" and think Dickens is making some sort of joke about a cat advocating for some cause. Once the terminology is established it will be much easier for them to read and enjoy the book. This is where Bleak House in particular overlaps with Chaucer.
However, in this article we can see these "Competent Readers" are tired with being confused by this mass of unfamiliar terms and want to go to SparkNotes to have the secrets of the passage explained to them, which they explain is their usual tactic. This is the real problem being identified by the study's authors. LLMs make this immeasurably worse, of course.
Well, they won’t even get these things explained on SparkNotes or by an LLM, since the particularities of the jokes about dinosaurs and whiskers are so small scale.
Not a specialist in English Literature, but as a Brit I know about Michelmas Term as this language is still used by Cambridge and Oxford and the Inns of Court as all barristers still belong to an inn. Maybe giving the students a passage from American literature from a similar time would be less confusing?
But many of the students are English Education majors who will be teaching Dickens themselves on the curriculum in just a few years' time! Their window for being given easy texts to parse has passed.
Presumably they won’t be teaching Dickens though, if his prose is too difficult for 95% of English Education majors. It might seem simple to you and me, but perhaps that doesn’t mean very much.
You might as well fault them for being unable to parse Faulkner or Milton or Joyce. It could just be that owing to time and national differences, Dickens has joined them in the Very Hard Literature category. Great if you can read it! But not actually important for anything you might be doing professionally or personally.
They will be teaching Salinger and Fitzgerald and Wharton, and it would be more productive to judge them on that basis.
Or assume that ‘advocate’ is a spellcheck error for ‘aardvark’ (with whiskers)
My son had to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in eighth grade. I couldn't get through it.
But these are second year college English majors.
I will never forget the shock of going from books I liked (Stephen King), to Geoffrey Farken Chaucer. Horrible, just horrible
I’m not terribly impressed by this study. The majority of the authors’ complaints come down to a lack of cultural familiarity with the London of 200 years ago. The English language is broad, and while I’d expect English majors to understand wide slices of it, it’s not astonishing that they haven’t come across Dickens, his world, or his old meanings of modern words before. The tendency to skim over the unfamiliar bits and retroactively connect the dots as one continues reading later chapters is basically fine as far as I’m concerned - 7 paragraphs might not be enough to infer what a “chancery” is, but it’ll be obvious after a few more pages.
Their inability to recognize simile and metaphor is a greater sin, but it’s also dependent on understanding the object level. Which again will come with exposure. Stopping every few lines to google a word might speed up the understanding of the literal meaning of the passage, but it also destroys the understanding of the meter and atmosphere of the text. Which is more important? I don’t think it’s an obvious answer.
Yeah, it would have been better with a different passage, or maybe a different passage in addition to this.
One particular problem with this passage is that it refers to things like Lincoln’s Inn and Temple Bar. Even a very good reader who doesn’t know these terms might miss that these are specific institutions and places and might assume eg Lincoln’s Inn is a place Dickens invented for the story, in which case it is reasonable to assume that it is an inn like a hotel.
American lawyers don’t wear horse hair wigs or silk gowns
If you talk to someone about the West Wing and the Oval Office to someone who has never heard these terms, they won’t get that you are referring to politics.
What tour of English literature doesn't have you reading at least some Dickens?
The one that threw out all the old white guys for being problematic.
Homeschooler here. We read aloud every school day from Dickens and much other literature. We discussed. In addition, they were required to read a lot and write a lot. It’s disconcerting that commenters are missing the humor. This is a funny passage!
Yes! The bit about the mud in particular.
The brightest of my Uni English profs thundered all term on a single point - if we students did not have an ease with the contents of the King James Bible, the vast majority of English literature produced over the last 500 years would be impermeably closed to us. I was a godless heathen then, and while I’ve evolved somewhat as a practising Pastafarian now, by his God he was right. Bible study as literature cypher was the key to unlocking meaning beyond compare in my adult reading - and interestingly, aided immensely to additional pleasures experiencing classical music, art and architecture.
As everything current stands on the shoulders of everything that’s come before it, to get today, ya gotta have got yesterday. It’s work, but I like it!
"[Sixteen seconds of breathing, chair creaking. Then she whispers, I’m just gonna skip that.]"
From the rare file of "lines from studies that could be dropped into a horror script with no changes"
Although I will note (as I did in late comment about Mass Literacy Isn't post)...a lot of this is selection effects. I'm guessing one of the KRUs is Pittsburg State, where the authors teach. Pittsburg State seems to have an acceptance rate in the high 80s-low 90s, and an average SAT of 920-1180. I'm going to guess it's on the low end of that spectrum. This is exactly what you would expect from making dumb people do intellectually demanding work.
The Good News is the Academic Apocalypse kicking in as we speak solves some of this problem, because the regional universities will be shut down due to lack of bodies. The bad news is the plan seems to be to just send these people to flagships and then give them master's degrees.
ETA: from the study:
"When we asked our subjects to name British and American authors and/or works of the nineteenth-century, 48 percent of those from KRU2 and 52 percent of those from KRU1 could recall at most only one author or title on their own. The majority also could not access any detail on the information they recalled; they could mention the Industrial Revolution, for example, but could not define what it was. These results suggest that the majority of the subjects in our study were not transferring the literary texts or information from previous classes into their long-term memories."
**At most** one author or title
That last passage you cite, about not knowing what the Industrial Revolution is, made me question the methodology of the study tbh. How much of this phenomenon is that the students were lazily doing this study at a bare minimum level purely to get their payment for doing so? It left me uncertain how much is pure mental incapacity and how much of it is laziness.
I’ve met a 30 year old MIT/Stanford grad, native-born American, who could not correctly produce the decade of either the American Revolutionary War or the Civil War. I promise, they have absolutely no idea what the Industrial Revolution is at the satellite schools in Kansas.
In fairness to the MIT grad, he may just be engaging in Sherlock Holmes-level sperg & actively ignoring factoids he doesn't care about.
This is roughly true, but doesn’t really make it any better to my mind.
Obviously we can't rule out that students were just blowing through the study to get the reward; that doesn't seem to be the impression from the quoted excerpts of their answers, but they also might not have quoted from those people either because it doesn't make the point they want.
My knowledge of the English education system is incomplete and mostly derived from Midsomer Murders, but it's worth noting these kids aren't Oxbridge material. Frankly, they aren't even grammar school material; Wikipedia comparison suggests they were probably good (not great) comprehensive school students). Brief Wiki survey suggests Pittsburg State and Post-1992 universities are decent comparisons.
I can actually believe the thing about the Industrial Revolution, because I strongly suspect that these students didn't pay much attention in history class in HS, thus knew enough for the exam to know that the Industrial Revolution was a thing, but not really what it was. The modal student in the program is a solidly middle class (enough to be interested in literature and reading, anyway) girl (2/3rds of the sample was female) who is comfortable enough to believe in "following her dreams and passions" and loves to read *(NB I'd love to know what the results of asking them to name a 19th century author if you removed Jane Austen as an answer), but isn't very smart and isn't actually very good at reading (because they aren't very smart). I can 100% picture these gals not caring enough about history to class to bother investing in what the Industrial Revolution was. 50 years ago, they would go to typing school and we would just let these women be secretaries until they caught some junior executive's eye and get married; now we cruelly let them think they can go places with their English lit degree from a 3rd tier state university and send them to teach literature that they can't understand to idiots who also can't understand it.
Oh agreed 100%—and I love your very recognisable pen portrait of the typical subject. I'm a researcher now so I'm always very sceptical of methodologies, especially by academics (they are nearly all lazy and inept). But even if there's some degree of methodological problem here (which there surely will be), the overall trend is clear. It just might not be quite as high as an 88% incompetence rate, is all.
Even though I'm fairly sure I'm better than most of the students listed here, the depressing part is reading the comments and seeing people post insights that escaped me. This is my best to write down just my own observations:
I had to google "michaelmas term" and "Lincoln's Inn Hall" but first is the fall university term, and second basically a courthouse. So, the fall term is over and it's now gloomy winter; a judge sits in court (I assume in opulence), so that frames the coming paragraphs of squalor as the haves/haves not thing that Dickens likes to do.
The dinosaur is figurative. It's so rainy and so muddy and the streets are so swamped that it wouldn't be surprising to see a dinosaur waddling up them. This was the era of thinking dinosaurs all lived in swamps, so that tracks. I failed to catch the Biblical allusion ("waters but newly retired...") until the comments here.
The filth of human industry is everywhere, oppressive. It was raining, but now the "snow" is filth from the factories. The streets are so crowded it's difficult to move, and if you do find a place to stand you'll be jostled out of it. And it's so dark and gloomy it's impossible to tell if it's daytime or nighttime. The impression all this gives is one of squalor.
All of this filth "accumulating at compound interest" takes us back to the imagery of the financial/legal system, which ties it back to the first paragraph. The overall impression is one of squeezing oppression. This world was arranged this way by powerful men.
I was trying to be generous as it seemed like most of the participants were not motivated to bother trying to translate. But this passage, ooof:
Of the competent group “55 percent had no idea that the passage was focused on lawyers and a courtroom.”
Public universities, a bleak house indeed.
Almost all the references to law in that passage are culturally specific to England or otherwise technical, so it doesn’t surprise me American readers didn’t get it was about lawyers.
A large part of the problem seems to be the death of the humanities as a discipline. It's mostly a dumping ground now, a place where people whose parents push them through getting a degree go. There's no interest in a degree as technical certification, & the university as a rigorous academic training is generations dead.
The liberal arts are a rotting corpse, stumbling around as a leftist zombie.
This is just dumbass. An academic laggard is not going to take up a concentration in which you have to read big, fat every week. The rotting corpse is the general public that's dead to high literacy and the arts, not the saving remnant that maintains them.
"Big, fat" books, I presume? Please cite a college syllabus from the last decade which has students reading novels at a rate of every 1-2 weeks, even 1 a month. Bonus points for state colleges.
I honestly do not know, all I know is that when I was half-assedly going to college in the 1970s I never took English classes because it meant that all your reading was going to be the class reading, and I wanted to spend my time reading science fiction. My recollection is that they were doing a different book each week of the term and the were fairly hefty books.
“What I remember from being young in the 1970’s . . .”
Stop doing that. The world of the ‘70’s was dead before the turn of the millennium. It is now a half-century gone. The difference is as great as the difference from 1900 to 1950, if not greater. For the sake of everyone’s sanity, you have to accept what you knew of the world is as unrecognizable to younger generations as their world is to you.
Educational spending per capita has tripled since 1970
Even when adjusting for inflation.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_236.55.asp
https://reason.org/commentary/inflation-adjusted-k-12-education-spending-per-student-has-increased-by-280-percent-since-1960/
Philosophy majors in all honesty make better English majors than English majors. Having been both I feel qualified to say this.
And computer science majors make the best philosophers and literature appreciators
I was the only engineering major in my Literary London class in undergrad, everyone else was English majors. I was the only one in the class who read Bleak House, which was assigned (and had assigned papers due on it).
I was floored when I found out none of them had read it; most of them hadn't even attempted it. I asked them, "Why did you major in English if you don't love reading?" They either said they didn't want to take math courses or they had relatives who were teachers and they thought they could do that.
That was fourteen years ago and I'm still disappointed in those students when I think about it. Bleak House is my favourite of Dickens' books, and I like Dickens!
Anecdotally, nearly every engineering and comp-sci student I’ve encountered in my English and Philosophy classes has been borderline illiterate. So your experience may be something of an exception here.
Oh, all other engineering majors I knew were functionally illiterate, absolutely.
I would have loved to be an English major, but I knew I needed, as my dad always said, "a J-O-B." So I majored in electrical engineering and minored in English. (My dad was an engineer and my mom was an English major. Their kids are four electrical engineers and an IT manager, all of whom are readers, writers, and speech givers. We're definitely an unusual family!)
Lies of the devil!