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.
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.
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, causing more people to slip, adding more to the local mud (compound interest)
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.
Hah dang you should have told me to read the rest of the sample before I read the study! Now I’ll never know how far I’d get before I stopped imagining some nobleman drinking at a pub for no reason. I’m certain I would have figured it out eventually… but 35 English students never figuring that out? Almost half?
Given a dictionary and the words solicitor, injunction, affidavit, talk of tripping each other up with arguments and a literal reference to a “pile of money”?! They couldn’t make the leap to “court of law”? Couldn’t functionally use the dictionary as a tool for comprehending a sentence?
…That’s really scary, huh…
Thanks! Oof, I don’t know a particular favorite book, but favorite author is the late great Sir Terry Pratchett.
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).
I looked up Michaelmas because I had never heard of it. And it’s exactly what I initially thought it was (and exactly what it sounds like): a celebration of the archangel.
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.
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.
Ah, thanks for the Michaelmas. I thought it was either a name of a politician or something I’m not British enough to understand. The rest of the text was fine.
had almost the same line of thought, that some leader’s term got over
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.
The absolute best strategy for most reading comprehension struggles is read aloud. Active discussion is good too.
Or I also like to tell my high schoolers to be contrarian with the text. To argue against it, to try to prove it wrong, even to the point of bad faith. “You’re saying the book sucks - I want receipts. Tell me about it.” I don’t really have training in teaching english but I will happily pressure high schoolers into reading the books in English class.
No, because aphantasia. I love the turns of phrase, though.
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!
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 :^)
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 can’t really visualize things in general. Due to that, if you tell me it’s muddy that’s most of the information I get. My brain won’t automatically try to put mud on the horses or add other details.
Here the specifics help a lot and I have a better sense of the muddy day for it.
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 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.
yea and I don’t like how its written
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.
Ah, the old usage of wonderful. That threw me for a bit.
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.
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?
