English in the Fiction of Dickens vs Grisham

Cafe Society
1

I’d like to compare the English of Charles Dickens and John Grisham and ask whether these differences point to anything profound or not.

Dickens was a hugely popular writer in his day, but the language of his books would pose serious problems to most of today’s readers. The dense language, the long-winded descriptive passages, and the vocabulary itself would make it reading a tough slog.

Grisham is a hugely popular writer today, and (obviously) his language poses no problems for readers today.

My question is twofold:

  1. Do you think that the readers in Victorian England would have found Grisham’s books difficult to read?

  2. Does the fact that books, especially popular fiction, from the 19th century (or even the first half of the 20th century) are so much more difficult for today’s readers to read say anything about us? Is the average North American getting dumber, or is the English language simply evolving naturally?

Now, my presumptions don’t apply to all the erudites on this forum. I’m talking about the average Joe and Mary…

Thanks,
Greg

2

I think what it mostly says is that we are not as immersed in the written (or spoken) word as people were back then. Dickens was hugely popular and ordinary people hung on his stories like modern people do on soap operas or American Idol, so the dense prose was not supposed to be difficult for the average person.

But I think we don’t spend as much time training our brains to regard long chunks of dense prose to be entertainment. People who learned to read from the King James Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress and who regarded a 2-hour speech (religious, political, or whatever) as interesting public entertainment–they learned from an early age to handle that kind of thing. We pretty much don’t–we spend our time training to handle large amounts of fast-moving, busy visual media and a whole lot of other stuff as well.

I don’t read Grisham, so I can’t comment on his prose. Perhaps it would be considered too abrupt?
On the plus side, we’re good at understanding very fast stuff and dealing with a lot all at once. On the con, I think we’re losing deep, careful analysis and sustained attention in favor of shallow noise and constant novelty. (Not that Victorians were all deep thinkers by any means, but as a general trend I think it’s there.) I see it in myself too.

3

I don’t think of Dickens as long-winded at all, myself. i think a Christmas Carol is an easy read.
I didn’t think that Poe was, either, until I played an audio recording of it for my 12 year old daughter, and instantly lost her interest. It was only while listening along with her that I realized how filled with circumlocutions that prose was. I think that Mark Twain’s two essays faulting James Fenimore cooper’s prose style is really an indictment of the era, rather than the author. I’d take an editorial pencil to poe as readily as Twain would to Cooper.
but really, Poe and Dickens are pretty easy to digest. if you want convoluted, interminable sentences, read Henry James. Or Gibbon. For the ultimate, read an Official pronouncement from Elizabethan times. I’m amazed people back then could retain the sense of the sentence from the beginning, though all the stops and phrases, all the way to the end. The Duke of Norfolk’s announcement when Sir Thomas More is invested as Chancellor in A Man for All Seasons is pretty typical.

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[quote=“CalMeacham, post:3, topic:514747”]

I don’t think of Dickens as long-winded at all, myself. i think a Christmas Carol is an easy read.

but really, Poe and Dickens are pretty easy to digest. if you want convoluted, interminable sentences, read Henry James. QUOTE]

Easy to read for the university-educated or others who do a lot of reading. The “masses”, however, would consider Dickens to be difficult. Stop at a WalMart in Nebraska and ask 100 people to read a one-paragraph excerpt from A Christmas Carol and you’ll see what I mean.
And I’m not disparaging WalMart or Nebraska… it’s just an illustration to clarify my question.

-Greg

5

I think this is a complex issue. Firstly, the older a piece of prose is, the harder it is to read simply because of changes in the language. But the big question is, who was the contemporary audience? What education level was expected? The audience reading popular fiction in Dickens’ time was not as large a segment of the population as the audience reading popular fiction now. And while they may not have spent as many years in school, when in school there was a lot of English grammar thrashed into them (as you can find out by reading some of Dickens’ novels) – English grammar that the average college graduate doesn’t know much about these days.

I think another factor may be that people read faster these days. Dickens was meant to be read word by word – not to be skimmed over to get a general idea of where the story is going – and Charles Dickens made part of his living by reading it out loud, which would inevitably be much slower than you could read by yourself. So, if you lost track of where a long sentence was going, you would be expected to go back and read it again. We think that’s tedious for an 800 page novel – but Dickens originally published in parts, so the contemporary audience was only reading about 3 chapters at a time.

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Back then, if you could read at all you were considered an “educated erudite”.

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Another factor is the cause and effect: To some extent, Dickens was long-winded because he was popular, not the other way around. Publishers at the time paid by the word, so there was an incentive for authors to write long-windedly. Of course, there’s a limit to how much of that the readers will put up with, but they’ll presumably put up with more if they otherwise like the writer. Dickens was popular enough that he could get away with a lot of padding, so he did.

8

In school, we assumed that Dickens wrote the way he did (i.e., wordily) because he was paid by the word.

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I went and re-read the beginning, to refresh my memory, and it’s my impression that Dickens’ writing is not particularly difficult to read or digest, but it may well be fair to call him long-winded. I like his writing there, but there’s repetition, there’s description, there’s piling on of phrases, there’s authorial cuteness, and he’s certainly not trying to tell his story as economically as possible—but then, neither do many modern writers.

Poe varies quite a bit from story to story. Sometimes he’s fairly straightforward and easy to read, but sometimes he’s showing off his erudition rather than telling a story: lots of big words, untranslated French or Latin, and long paragraphs in which nothing happens—damn, Edgar!

10

I’m reading Bleak House at the moment. When I started, I had the same questions you do. My simple answer to your two questions are that both Grisham and Dickens provide average readers with a good story. They address contemporary issues the reader will be happy to buy. They’re both popular writers who wrote for the publishing industry as it exists(ed) to sell the most product. Dickens wrote in serials. Grisham (at least in his early years) cranked out a novel or more a year.

Neither, though are experimental writers. They’re popular writers. It doesn’t make them any less pertinent or literary, it just makes them successful.

Grisham’s work, I suspect, would have been quite popular in the mid 19th century. They breeze along, tell snappy tales (generally), have a little sex, and, in the end, make the reader feel superior to the characters. Dickens wasn’t a whole lot different.

Huge passages of Dickens can be skimmed. But in my estimation, he writes dialogue as well as anyone ever has. That’s the cream of Dickens’ work in my mind. And that’s what Grisham’s good at, too. That’s what makes his novels so valuable to the film industry.

The fact that we find Dickens’ long, descriptive passages and obscure allusions difficult doesn’t make us dumber. We have 150 to 175 years more of our language and cultural references to deal with than he did. Charles Dickens didn’t have Adolf Hitler, D-Day, Jackie O, Watergate, Vietnam, The Jeffersons, 9/11, the Bay of Pigs, Stonewall, OJ, Sesame Street, the Panama Canal, 2 1/2 Men, or an infinite number of other references to deal with

In my reading I find that most of the difficult pieces in Dickens fall into four categories:

  1. The Bible – A lot of Americans seem less attuned to this document than Victorians were.

  2. Shakespeare – Sadly, The Bard doesn’t play as well as he once did in a “classical education.” I think we’re the poorer for it.

  3. Mythology – It was important once. Back when coal soot raining on the streets of London was considered “progress.” (Not by Dickens, of course).

  4. London in the 19th Century --Things have changed. I’ll catch a cab.

I’ve read several of Grisham’s books. I don’t read him any more, though, largely because his plots are simplistic and his characters are formulaic. I suspect some said the same about Dickens in 1868.

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Wow. Have you read Dickens? His language is extremely straightforward, with only the occasional unfamiliar word. Not difficult at all; many of his books are still considered suitable for children.

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Yes, but I’ll bet the same 100 people have trouble reading The New York Times.

There is one thing that makes Dickens significantly harder for contemporary readers even in comparison to the writing of other 19th c. novelists like James or Charlotte Bronte. Dickens uses a lot of what’s called marked speech to convey the regional accents of working-class characters. He was one of the first authors to do that. That can be hard going–though it’s not usually more than a few sentences and it can be fun.

In answer to your OP, I don’t think Victorian readers would find Grisham hard to read (though his plots would be different of course).

13

Dickens was actually considered (and is still considered) quite experimental. The very novel you are reading, Bleak House is famous for having two different narrations: one omniscient and the other first person. At time when classic realism (like say Jane Austen’s novels) was still the norm, Dickens’s did various things to shake things up. He was a significant influence on other experimental fiction writers: Herman Melville, various Russians. He was even an inspiration for T.S. Eliot’s poetry.

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I teach Dickens to college students and can attest that many find him difficult to read. Many find at least a word or 2, sometimes on every page, that they’re unfamiliar with. These aren’t obscure words: if you have a good vocabulary they’ll seem quite straightforward, as you say. But we are not very good at producing readers with large vocabularies any more!

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I also find Gresham’s stuff to be pretty formulaic: (honest young lawyer joins corrupt law firm, winds up almost getting killed").
Aside from stylistic differences, Dickens develops characters more, and spends more time on descriptions.
Gresham’s stuff could be written by a computer program.