The article references a study which claims that university students have difficulty reading Dickens or Jane Austen. Here's an excerpt of the Dickens from the study:
"LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest."
I'm a college-educated, reasonably well-read person and this is a rough paragraph to get through. Old idioms, excessively lengthy sentences, anachronisms (what is a "horse blinker"? "Michaelmas"?), etc. Why choose this type of subject matter to draw conclusions from?
> (what is a "horse blinker"? "Michaelmas"?), etc. Why choose this type of subject matter to draw conclusions from?
Well for one thing it was topical for it's time, horses have these little black pad things that sit on their bridle (not 'face harness') to keep them from reacting to things in their field of vision that would be to the carriage driver's left and right (horses have a bigger field of vision than non-grazing non-prey animals like people who want them to go in a straight line without being scared). I had to look up Michaelmas (but am glad I did, it's a Christian religious tradition that likely isn't popular today in the US but probably was a bigger deal in Victorian England where they didn't have a quasi-replacement in Thanksgiving).
So there's all that history, a bit of sentiment on the present. And I didn't even touch on why the passage is good, it conveys a scene, mud splattered and smokey, so pretty much exactly what it intends. I'm not even a particular fan of Dickens or Jane Austen and don't go out of my way to read them. But I understand their value, it seems increasingly people do not and that shows their own gaping hole in worldly understanding.
Edit: Autocorrect
We're currently in Michaelmas term in schools in the UK.
In the now forgotten past, it was a tradition to read books containing unknown words. It was as a way of teaching students to use a dictionary and enrich their own vocabulary. If people only read books that have known words, they're missing an opportunity to improve their command of the language.
People are not reading books anymore because their attention is oversaturated from everywhere else.
I would suggest you may be well read in certain areas, but not widely read. Blinkers are not an anachronism, and while Michaelmas may be less widely known than Christmas, it’s certainly still celebrated.
Agreed. The OP's declaration that this is a difficult read pretty much proves the point of the article.
Especially if you were entering university as an English major, it seems like table stakes to have a conceptual understanding that not all English is going to be in simple, modern terms. That is you're going to be reading books from a variety of time periods and cultural origins, you might need to develop an understanding of those sources.
> Why choose this type of subject matter to draw conclusions from?
Because they were English Lit students, and the paper was to see how modern students interpret and understand literary modes such as simile, metaphor and their underlying meaning.
Meanwhile, Dickens went to school for only about four years, with a break in the middle to work in the boot blacking factory.
I agree. Today I learned Michaelmas is a christian thing happening on Mon, 29 Sept 2025 and "one legend from the British Isles holds that when St. Michael defeated Satan, he cast Satan into a particularly prickly blackberry bush".
I don't think people these days can be bothered with such nonsense. Though next time I see a blackberry bush I'll think of chucking Satan at it.
And I say that as someone who was forced to do Great Expectations in English Lit. I read the CliffsNotes and passed.
My main memory of the book is Pip was fooled into thinking he'd get off with Estella because he got some money from the convict who went to Oz and thought it was from Miss Havisham in error. And then Dickens spun that out into about a million words because he was basically paid by the word to fill newspaper space. Some of the old stuff wasn't actually that good and there's more competition for entertainment these days.
This is more about relative decline of reading level.
Only 13% of adults read at PIAAC levels 4 or 5, so it's not like college degree means that you have maxed out at reading skills. When high reading levels decline, other levels decline as well.
I’m a well read individual, didn’t go to college. English isn’t even my primary language, and I find this paragraph to be fairly easy to read?
I think this is less about people's ignorance to these terms, but more about their resistance to actually learn new things. Since we live in a time that we can easily search up what any unknown term in that paragraph is, but we actively don't says volumes.
English hardly my first language and I can read it without difficulties, so I'm not sure it's such a bad excerpt.
For me personally, and I've never read Dickens in original English, it reads quite well. It's perhaps showing its age, but with a definite character and recognizable style. I'd call it a good piece of literature, and frankly would make me read more of the author, if his general choice of subjects wouldn't be so anachronistic and uninteresting for me personally.
Honestly mate, you may be an example of what the article is talking about. As other people here have pointed out, the decline in reading skills begins with television not the smartphone. Same for the shorter sentences which make you find Dickens so hard.
I am particularly a fan of "flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun."
But even as somebody who likes Dickens' prose, I think his syntax is often a lot more complicated than it needs to be. In that sense I agree that it's slightly difficult at times.
Not "difficult" as in "this really took me a tremendous amount of effort to understand" but difficult as in "I think his syntax is a little more difficult than it needs to be."
(Of course, any sort of art should be understood in context. It wouldn't be reasonable to impose modern expectations on something written 150 years ago)