> A study of English literature students at American universities found that they were unable to understand the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House — a book that was once regularly read by children.
First, I think this is overly crediting "children" and unnecessarily harsh to the university students. The first sentence of the book proper is, "LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall." It seems perfectly reasonable for an average person today to not know what "Michaelmas" is, but otherwise that's a fairly simple sentence. So I assume the above refers to the first sentence of the preface, which is:
> A CHANCERY Judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the Judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was almost immaculate.
That's not a simple sentence: ~60 words, with multiple interjections splitting up the actual point: "A CHANCERY Judge once informed me that the Court of Chancery was almost immaculate."
Further, English has wandered substantially over the intervening ~175 years. This criticism seems akin to complaining that college students of 1800 had a hard time reading Shakespeare, when any contemporary child in 1600 could have understood his work (had they been able to read it at all).
Finally, this ignores the advance of technology. Books were, in their day, a huge technological advance. People could only read more because of moveable type and mass printing. Someone in 1600 might have lamented the mass standardization of printed material, saying that it depersonalized the communication of information.
Today, if someone finds Bleak house challenging, an LLM can modernize, simplify, or summarize as needed. We're on the verge of being able to turn it into a graphic novel on demand.
All to say: there's a point to be made about what information people choose to consume, but focusing on how they consume it misses the point.
This is why it's called literature, instead of a social network post. Until recently it used to be normal for someone to learn more complex forms of writing, including literature, as part of becoming a more educated person.
I think Emma qualifies as literature. This is much clearer than Bleak House:
> Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.
Moby Dick -- of course the first sentence is about as simple as possible. But extending to the second:
> Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.
Again, that is much clearer. N=3 and selection bias and all, but Bleak House appears to be the outlier here.
Ok, let me tie this using a beautiful sentence from Marcel Proust:
But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest, built up out of the most diverse materials, the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl, the edge of my bed, and a copy of an evening paper, all of which things I would contrive, with the infinite patience of birds building their nests, to cement into one whole; rooms where, in a keen frost, I would feel the satisfaction of being shut in from the outer world (like the sea-swallow which builds at the end of a dark tunnel and is kept warm by the surrounding earth), and where, the fire keeping in all night, I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of the logs which would break out again in flame: in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across them to strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room, or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold — or rooms in summer, where I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm evening, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam — or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and to keep it separate; sometimes again that little room with the high ceiling, hollowed in the form of a pyramid out of two separate storeys, and partly walled with mahogany, in which from the first moment my mind was drugged by the unfamiliar scent of flowering grasses, convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and of the insolent indifference of a clock that chattered on at the top of its voice as though I were not there; while a strange and pitiless mirror with square feet, which stood across one corner of the room, cleared for itself a site I had not looked to find tenanted in the quiet surroundings of my normal field of vision: that room in which my mind, forcing itself for hours on end to leave its moorings, to elongate itself upwards so as to take on the exact shape of the room, and to reach to the summit of that monstrous funnel, had passed so many anxious nights while my body lay stretched out in bed, my eyes staring upwards, my ears straining, my nostrils sniffing uneasily, and my heart beating; until custom had changed the colour of the curtains, made the clock keep quiet, brought an expression of pity to the cruel, slanting face of the glass, disguised or even completely dispelled the scent of flowering grasses, and distinctly reduced the apparent loftiness of the ceiling.