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.
I knew I have read it before somewhere.
Well, like every craft, skills develop over time. What was a blacksmith hundreds of years ago is now a CNC operator. Likewise, writing styles have evolved over time.
Yes, he has been a great storyteller, and his stories and characters stood the test of time, but his writing style did not.
yea and I don’t like how its written
I also read the news about the same research article you did.
I was surprised how much I could understand, based on how much trouble people in the study had. Sounds like a wet miserable city our Lord Chancellor is in.
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
I didn’t recognize the source and thought to myself this is either archaic or amateur. It feels purple by modern standards.
I have aphantasia so I can’t visualize much of anything. But I did understand the passage.
I read a lot of fictionalized historical diaries as a kid (i.e., diary entries written from the POV of a fictional character living during important historical events) because they were given to me as gifts and the writing style is somewhat similar, though not as creative with imagery as Dickens.
What does understanding mean for you in this sense?
I don’t mean to come across as ignorant or disrespectful - just curious. A big part of my understanding of that passage is the process of visualization. When I read that passage, I feel it. It’s wet, it’s filthy, everyone is upset and I imagine faces scowling. That’s what “understanding” means to me as a process.
I sort of just try to contextualize the words and their meaning and draw upon my experiences to fill in the blanks. I still have other senses and my own mental concept of things and how they fit together. I can imagine “faces scowling” or a muddy street and how that affects the story and its setting, just not visually.
I will often infer the emotions of a scene and place myself within that context, since I usually am drawn to more character-driven experiences. I know what a room will look like based on the description, I just can’t hold an image of it in my mind.
I should also note that there are levels of aphantasia and everyone is different. I kind of have a little bit of visualization, but not much. Like limbs moving, some motions, etc. kind of like stick figures that can barely move. It doesn’t allow me to “see” things with any detail, and if I were to try to visualize (for example) a golfer taking a swing, the swing gets to the ball and then stops. There’s no physics applied to it.
I actually joined a psychological study in undergrad, because it was mandatory to do some, that was about visualizing and that’s how I discovered that I have aphantasia. They asked me to visualize and describe certain things and I was like, “I can’t” for basically every question. The researcher’s face was sort of priceless, lol.
Tl;dr the weather sucked. Everything was muddy and covered in soot.
Sure. It paints a very vivid picture, I love it.
Never read anything by Dickens before except for A Christmas Carol (and that was for school) but this is now on my reading list :^)
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!
Yeah, and I can translate it for you if need be.
Yup, I was able to understand and visualize all of it. The only thing I didn’t know was what “Michaelmas” was, but I determined its salient meaning well enough from context (it’s a Christian festival celebrated on September 29, which is redundant information with the immediately following reference to “implacable November weather” which sets the approximate time of year just as well).
The passage can be summarized into two fundamental points of information:
- The weather on this particular day in London was typical.
- Charles Dickens was paid by the word.
I started reading, I drifted away at about the mud part so I restarted. This is really not my cuppa tea when it comes to text. On the second run I did better but no, I didn’t manage to visualize everything. The Megalosaurus sentence doesn’t make much sense to me. The text is convoluted, boring, and depressing but yes I guess I see the shitty street, the animals, the people -a crowd-, the miserable weather.
I’m aware of more information I’m not really processing but I’m just too annoyed at the text to apply the necessary brainpower required to digest it. It’s almost 2 AM and I’m tired.
Then I make it to the end and realize it’s Dickens, and that explains everything. I never liked his writing. Good night.
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.
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:
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.
Kind of, “It was very muddy in London” but nobody talks like this today, so it sounds very strange. I’m personally not a fan. I don’t think there’s a complete sentence anywhere in that passage.
Sentence fragments, capitalized and punctuated like fresh immigrants assimilating to their new mother.
Nabokov seemed to think that the fog was important. I guess it’s a novel about a legal case, and maybe the metaphor is the “fog” of legal confusion.
Nabokov? You mean that guy from The Police song?
Hey - don’t stand so close to me.
Nabokov is fun, because he had an opinion on basically every author ever. If you feel frustrated about something you read in an English class, you can probably find an essay by Nabokov reading that author to filth.
Like c’mon man - if you don’t feel something reading the Grand Inquisitor passage in Karamazov - are you human?
I have never read Bleak House, nor do I even know the outline of the plot. This is what I’m getting from it:
LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
The scene is London. Michaelmas’ term (shift?) has just finished, and the Lord Chancellor is now sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.
Implacable November weather.
The weather is cold, wet and overcast, as one would expect for November.
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.
The streets are incredibly muddy, as if the waters of the Biblical Flood of Noah had just receded. So muddy, one would not be surprised to find a giant amphibian frolicking in it up on 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.
Smoke drifts downward from the chimneys; soft black ash the size of snowflakes coats exposed surfaces. It’s as if everything is dressed in black to mourn the death of the Sun’s warmth and light.
Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.
Dogs and horses are covered in the mud up to their eyeballs, and their owners can hardly tell which ones are theirs.
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.
Pedestrians fight through the crowded street, their umbrellas bumping into each other, like a seething angry mob. They slip and lose traction at street corners, like the thousands of pedestrians that came before them since the day broke (although “daybreak” is a meaningless term for a day as grey and cloudy as this one.) The mud continues to cake on their boots where the pavement ends, as if the mud was somehow multiplying like money in a rich man’s investment account.
I get essentially the same, although not being familiar with the references makes some parts unclear.
I’m assuming Michaelmas is a name, but maybe it’s a celebration (like Christmas) and the word term here is implying the author’s feelings about it.
Same with the Chancellor part. What does sitting in the hall mean? It’s an Inn, so not in official capacity then? Is it a metaphor or common turn of phrase?
Is Holbern hill steep? Or is it a famously gentle hill? The use of “wonderful” here tripped me up at first too since it’s so different from how we’d use it now.
What are chimney-pots? Are they just chimneys or something else?
The streets are incredibly muddy, as if the waters of the Biblical Flood of Noah had just receded. So muddy, one would not be surprised to find a giant amphibian frolicking in it up on Holborn Hill.
I really love your breakdown here. You should move to teach English in Kansas, they need you.
