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.
Are you able to visualize what is happening in this passage?
This is from Bleak House by Charles Dickens, if you are curious.
Yes I can. And disagree with virtually everyone else; I think that this along with virtually everything else by Dickens is absolutely top class writing. The meaning of every individual phrase isn’t the point, the whole passage just gives the perfect impression of the scene he is trying to convey. Also, remember much of Dickens’ stuff was written to be read out loud. Try that, it helps!
Yes.
Also yes.
Yes. Why do you ask?
That last link is a study, where researchers provided English undergrads with that passage, and asked them to think aloud while reading it. They had access to dictionaries and could look up words.
Here are the results:
That last bullet point is shocking to me. To be an English undergraduate I would have expected them to enter with very strong vocabulary and an innate desire to read / love of the language.
I had no trouble understanding it and thought it painted a really clear picture.
Do you have a link to the study?
Yeah - it’s what’s linked at the end of the OP
It is fascinating and scary. The “whole literacy” experiment the US did - where we ignored decades of research on how to teach children to read while filling the pockets of educational consultants - seems to have created a generation of near illiterate adults.
I would want to repeat that study with novels written in the past 25 years before concluding too much. Yes, the participants had access to a dictionary, but I imagine that needing to decipher certain parts, such as foreign cultural references and familiar words with unexpected meanings, interferes with the brain’s usual functions for turning words into images in the mind’s eye. And this even ignores the folks wtih aphantasia like me.
There’s a discussion of the history context too:
These were college students who were seeking English majors. People who are going to go on to teach Dickens - and hopefully have read Great Expectations or Tale of Two Cities at some point in high school.
Thanks for that. Indeed, that makes me less confident in their suitability to teach those subjects, but I worry about a sensational conclusion about their general literacy.
This is interesting but with n=85 and Bleak House being the ONLY sample text they use, I wouldn’t really put much trust in the results.
N of 85 is entirely reasonable for that kind of study. You could safely generalize that to the population of Kansas English undergrads - run that through G Power and tell me otherwise.
You say in another comment that this is indicative of a failed American education experiment, and that there’s a generation of illiteracy. I’m not saying that’s wrong, but it’s a much bigger generalization than “Kansas English undergrads” (which is such a specific category, why should I care about data that relates specifically to Kansas English undergrads?).
But my main gripe is the use of just one text. “People cannot understand this one book (therefore literacy is deficient)” is a much less convincing argument than “people cannot understand these 6 popular books from this time period” or “these 30 randomly selected fiction works” etc.
Is it well-established that Bleak House is representative of all the works we think about when we consider “literacy” and “illiteracy” as people’s ability to understand texts?I’m sorry, but there isn’t a single word in that text that an English undergrad should have to look up (although I did look up the dinosaur purely to see what it looked like).
You say in another comment that this is indicative of a failed American education experiment, and that there’s a generation of illiteracy.
Yes, I’m alluding to a larger context outside of that study. In addition to the obvious harms of COVID/virtual school, many US schools switched to a model of teaching reading that omitted phonics entirely. This simply does not work for the vast majority of students, and this had already been demonstrated in the 1970’s.
The authors refer to that larger context here -
My remarks on generalizing the study to Kansas undergrads was to point out that is an entirely acceptable sample size. In statistics, when you think about sample size, you have to think about the population you are studying. This study was specifically studying the literacy of Kansas English undergrads, which I imagine is a small enough population that you can generalize that study to. This would indicate that many future English teachers in Kansas are struggling readers.
We can put that as a data point next to several other studies about the US’s current literacy crisis.
As far as why they chose Bleak House:
Sure—but I grew up reading a lot of 19th-century literature (hence my user name).
Oh of course it’s Charles fucking Dickens Yeah I get the gist of it but it’s unpleasant to read and doesn’t tell me much
Yes, but it’s really cumbersome to us foreigners.
Yeah, and I can translate it for you if need be.
Tl;dr the weather sucked. Everything was muddy and covered in soot.
I would have understood Michaelmas as the feast day of Saint Michael. My studies of hagiography are too limited to say which day that is or why he got sainted. Nor did I know that British people used (maybe still use) that term to refer to an entire season.
Yes. But I van imagine my children being clueless. English is our third language but I think that’s not the issue. They just haven’t read enough. They are consumers and aren’t accustomed to active reading.
Oddly enough I overthought the first sentence, and imagined the Lord Chancellor was some type of local decorative feature like the Duke of Wellington. Then I realized it’s probably just a guy with a fancy title sitting at a table in a pub?
The rest is mostly straightforward to me. The text feels the way it literally reads - a bit muddy?
The streets are so full of fresh mud that they may as well be prehistoric mud flats after a Great Flood. I imagine it’s quite a large street leading up a big hill if he could imagine a giant dinosaur making the walk. So I picture basically a solid river of mud rising up in the distance.
If there are normally cobblestones or whatever, they’ve disappeared beneath the muck. I don’t know exactly what a chimney-pot is, but black smoke is pouring from the chimney somethings and mixing with the falling drizzle into dirty soot water. The rain is so blackened - and the weather so dreary - that the city itself could be in mourning.
It’s so muddy that the dogs are just dirty shapes in the muck, the horses have mud all the way up to their blinkers… which I read as blinders first, so I imagined it up to their heads and necks, like only the top 10% of the horse is actually visible and most of that is the headgear, and the rest of the horse is mud. I don’t know if that’s what a horse blinker is though.
The foot traffic feels cramped and irritable in the muck, people holding umbrellas against the dirty rain. It also sounds like a lot - tens of thousands of people walking the same paths. The edge of the sidewalk or whatever at the street corner is probably invisible under the mud, and because of that people keep slipping in the same spots. This pushes the mud more and more in the same directions, forming gross layered piles of muck in specific places against the sidewalk or something.
The day is so dark and dreary that it may as well be night. Overall, it’s muddy, raining, sooty, and depressing. There’s a big, wide, muddy street up a hill, filled with a constant flow of unhappy people.
I don’t know if I would actually read this for leisure, but I like it. I think I’m on the same page for most of it? But I still have no idea what’s up with Lord Chancellor. Is he a person staring out a window at the scene in the street? Does his title imply nobility and fancy clothing? What does the inside of the Lincoln’s Inn Hall look like?
Random question -what’s your favorite book? I’m really vibing with your interpretation here.
Thanks! Oof, I don’t know a particular favorite book, but favorite author is the late great Sir Terry Pratchett.
Michaelmas out this bitch, yo, and LC up in Lincoln’s crib. Weather is off the hook, frfr. Streets so muddy like Noah’s flood just got done, I ain’t even be shook if a Dino come roaring up at me lmao. Chimney smoke be hanging low like Snoop Drizzle in town and ash be falling like fuckin snow, no cap. Watching the dogs and horses getting about covered in filth like they be swimming in it. Shit is wild, fam, homies on foot got no rizz, they be slipping and sliding on mud just tryna get along down the street for reals, stepping in mud and it be stepping back on them like they only drip.
Yes, although slowly. It might be bad because I don’t speak English natively.
Yes, although I’m struck by some of the words, particularly this sense of 'wonderful ".
And now I’m even more glad that it’s sunny out here right now and I can hear birds.
Sorta like how “awesome” and “terrible” in their current usage are very weak words.
A youth pastor and Cotton Mather could both say “God is awesome” and mean very different things.
