Struggles with 'Bleak House'

Should college students be expected to read and understand nineteenth-century novels?

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Amid reports that many undergraduates are unable to read at length or understand complex texts, a recently published study suggests this isn’t a new problem.

The study, carried out in 2015 but for some reason published only last year, had 85 English majors at two regional Kansas universities read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens and evaluated their comprehension. (I first read about this study in a Substack written by someone who goes by the moniker “Kitten.”)

Each student was tested in a private 20-minute session with a facilitator, reading a sentence or two of the text out loud before trying to translate it into “plain English.” Facilitators weren’t allowed to offer help, but students could use their phones to look up unfamiliar terms. Still, most struggled to make any sense of what they’d been asked to read.

To give you an idea of the task, here’s the first paragraph of the book:

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.

According to the study, which bears the forthright title “They Don’t Read Very Well,” only five percent—four of the 85 subjects—managed to gain a “detailed, literal understanding” of what they had read. Thirty-eight percent were “competent” readers, but even they were able to understand only about half of the text. Another 58 percent were “problematic” readers, who quickly became lost. On a literacy test administered as part of the study, most of this group scored at a 10^th-grade reading level.

In what the authors of the article call a “typical case,” one of the problematic readers got stuck on the first few lines: “LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.”

Subject:

I don’t know exactly what “Lord Chancellor” is—some person of authority, so that’s probably what I would go with. “Sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall,” which would be like a maybe like a hotel or something so [Ten-second pause. The student is clicking on her phone and breathing heavily.] O.K., so “Michaelmas Term is the first academic term of the year,” so, Lincoln’s Inn Hall is probably not a hotel [Laughs].

[Sixteen seconds of breathing, chair creaking. Then she whispers, I’m just gonna skip that.]

That student at least tried looking up the phrase “Michaelmas Term” although not, unfortunately, “Lord Chancellor.” Most of the problematic readers simply guessed when they came to unfamiliar words, with 75 percent guessing incorrectly and therefore misinterpreting the sentence.

In another “typical example” of problematic reading, a student was asked to translate this text:

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog.

Here’s the student’s attempt:

Subject:

Describing him in a room with an animal, I think? Great whiskers?

Facilitator:

[Laughs.]

Subject:

A cat?

Even among the “competent” readers, 96 percent defined words incorrectly, and 46 percent skipped words they didn’t understand. What seemed to distinguish them from the problematic readers, at least in the researchers’ view, was that “they were comfortable with their confusion.”

One was asked to translate the following phrase in the first paragraph: “it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.”

It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another that it is talking about encountering in the streets. And “wandering like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.” So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these, these characters have, have met in the street.

These attempts to wring some meaning out of Dickens’ prose are likely to amuse but also horrify those who assume that English majors should be able to read and understand a nineteenth-century novel. The authors of the study note that “English professors often assume that students can read the novels and poetry assigned for their courses.” However, they add dryly, “like many of our colleagues, we have come to question that assumption.” Hence their study, which may have revealed that the situation was even worse than they feared.

Understandable Confusion

Still, the students’ confusion is understandable. I happen to be a Dickens fan, but even I’ll admit that among nineteenth-century writers, he stands out for prose that can be opaque to a contemporary reader. And those paragraphs from Bleak House assume quite a bit of background knowledge about things like the English court system, including the concept of “chancery.” The evidence indicates that readers start to struggle with comprehension when just two percent of the words in a text are unfamiliar.

The test subjects had an average ACT Reading score of 22.4, which put them on the “low-intermediate level.” They also lacked quite a bit of relevant background knowledge. Given a preliminary questionnaire, most were unable to name more than one British or American author or work of the nineteenth century. They might have heard of the Industrial Revolution, but they couldn’t explain what it was.

No wonder most of them didn’t even try looking up words they didn’t understand. When there’s so much that’s confusing, it’s hard to know where to begin. And the definitions might not have been understandable either.

Even at elite universities, professors are discovering they need to revise their assumptions about what students can understand. A Harvard English professor, quoted in the New Yorker, opined that students are so oriented to the present that they find works from the past confusing.

“The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’” she said, “I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb. Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”

But the Harvard students appear to be confused by nineteenth-century syntax rather than the past itself. That seems like an easier problem to address. For the Kansas students, archaic syntax was just one of many barriers to comprehension.

A Dearth of Novels in K-12

Still, all of these problems with comprehension likely stem from a common cause. College students can’t understand works like Bleak House or The Scarlet Letter because they’ve never been asked to read that kind of prose in high school. While there’s little hard data on the issue, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that many schools have stopped assigning nineteenth-century novels, or possibly any novels at all.

Why? Teachers say novels are hard to teach, especially when you can’t rely on students to do homework and you’re under pressure to cover a lot of other material. And for complex reasons, texts have come to be seen as vehicles for teaching reading comprehension skills rather than as works to be read for their own sake.

The most commonly used elementary literacy curricula, which foreground comprehension skills, include no whole books. One parent who asked her son’s middle school teacher why the class was reading only short texts and parts of a novel rather than the whole thing got the response, “the skills are the same.”

Most students aren’t reading novels for fun, either. In 2023, a survey found that only 14% of 13-year-olds read for pleasure almost every day. Even if kids do read for fun, it’s unlikely to be a nineteenth-century novel.

An English professor at the University of Virginia, a highly selective school, told me that if you asked his students to name their favorite book, two-thirds would choose a young adult novel. He and other college-level instructors say they’ve had to significantly lower their expectations of what kind of reading their students can handle.

The researchers in the Kansas study were concerned because, they said, “Bleak House is a standard in college literature classes.” They also saw it as an important text for English Education majors—as 41 percent of the subjects in their study were—“who often are called on to teach Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities in high schools.” I suspect their assumptions are out of date.

SparkNotes and ChatGPT

Even if high school or college students are assigned a novel by Dickens, who’s to say they’ll actually even try to read it? In the Kansas study, all the problematic readers who struggled with the opening paragraphs of Bleak House were confident they could read the rest of the 900-page novel. How? They would skim it and rely on SparkNotes. Several said they had successfully used that approach to “read” Jane Austen and Shakespeare in their English classes. These days, they would just have to ask ChatGPT for a summary.

I tried feeding the first paragraph of Bleak House into ChatGPT. In the blink of an eye, here’s what I got back:

This opening paragraph of Bleak House sets a bleak, grim atmosphere in London during late autumn. The weather is miserable—cold, muddy, and foggy—making the city feel prehistoric and suffocating. Dickens uses vivid imagery to describe smoke, soot, and filth blanketing the streets, where people and animals alike are nearly unrecognizable under the dirt. The crowded, muddy streets breed frustration and gloom, as pedestrians struggle to move through the mess. It’s a powerful, almost surreal depiction of urban decay and discomfort.

That’s certainly a more accurate summary than what most students in the study could provide. But it’s drained of the humor and charm that made Dickens a hugely popular author in his own time and, in my view, one who is still worth reading 150 years after his death. And being told that an author “uses vivid imagery” or has provided a “powerful, almost surreal depiction of urban decay” isn’t the same thing as perceiving those things for yourself.

Many high school teachers, and possibly some college English professors, would be happy to see authors like Dickens fall by the wayside. The problem isn’t students, they say, but rather the assumption that they’ll be interested in reading novels by dead white males about topics that have nothing to do with their own experience.

But a crucial part of education is enabling us—sometimes through the medium of fiction—to learn about the experiences and feelings of people totally unlike ourselves and come to a sense of the common humanity that links us to them. And the experience of reading novels can be particularly powerful. Because of their length, they immerse the reader in the lives of characters in a way that short stories and excerpts can’t.

Yes, understanding prose from 200 years ago can require some effort, but that effort is often worthwhile. Perhaps at some point, authors like Dickens will become the preserve of a few specialists, as Chaucer has become, but it’s not clear to me we’ve reached that point. Dickens’ English isn’t all that different from our own, once you get used to it.

Teachers Need to Provide More Support

As the Kansas researchers point out, teachers—including professors—can’t just assume that students will understand texts like these on their own. They need to act as guides through the thicket of words, unpacking complex sentences and providing background knowledge as needed. Ideally, that guidance will start in high school, if not before, but if students arrive in college without having received it, then it’s the responsibility of professors to provide it.

That means adjusting their teaching methods to provide more support. Rather than just lecturing on the assumption that students will have read and understood an assigned text independently, they may need to spend time having students read—and write about—the text in class, so that they can monitor and support comprehension. That’s likely to mean smaller, more discussion-based classes—and shorter nineteenth-century novels than Bleak House.

I recently tested my own ability to get through a nineteenth-century novel by reading Frankenstein, which I had read in college but didn’t recall in detail. I was going to see a play based on the novel and wanted to refresh my memory first.

Compared to Bleak House, Frankenstein is a mere bagatelle. Still, it does take a while to get going. It’s a good 100 pages before the “monster” even appears. But eventually, I got swept up in the story—which is still a great and thought-provoking one.

Then I went to see the play, which is billed as an “adaptation.” The production has gotten some rave reviews, which I find inexplicable. There are surely ways to adapt or update the story of a creature that runs amok in ways its creator didn’t anticipate (generative AI, anyone?). But this play bears only a passing resemblance to the novel and has changed the story in ways that make little sense.

For example, the monster, who in the play doesn’t appear until the last ten minutes or so, turns out to look pretty hot. The plot of the novel hinges on the monster, pieced together from cadavers, being so hideous that people immediately either try to kill him or run screaming in the other direction. That’s why he turns against humanity and becomes destructive. Why would the hunk depicted in the play demand that Victor Frankenstein create a wife for him when he could easily attract a gorgeous female without any assistance?

And although a few lines from the novel are intoned here and there, via voiceover, the characters speak in a completely modern idiom. Victor and his fiancé, Elizabeth—a marginal character in the novel who becomes a central one in the play—bicker like a couple you might overhear in a Brooklyn artisanal coffee shop, even though they’re wearing period costumes.

True, the dialogue would have been easily understandable to any contemporary college or high school student. But as with the ChatGPT version of Bleak House, something precious has been lost in the translation.