I've been struggling (for the second time) to read Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend. A bad cold hasn't helped. This is an unequal struggle (the book is over 800 pages long) and one I have set aside in order to read C J Sansom's Heartstone. Why is it getting so much harder to read even Victorian books?
It's not (just) the length - Sansom's book is over 600 pages - it's the whole approach to what a novel is meant to do. The financial arrangements of circulating libraries meant that multi-volume works became common. People had no radio, TV or internet, which means we have less encouragement to stick with a complex multilayered story. Dickens, like many of his contemporary authors in the UK published pretty much as they wrote. This is clear from a book like Barnaby Rudge, where the story changes central character several times as Dickens tries to work out whose story it is.
Our modern attention spans are goldfish-short. We bore easily and unless there is a whizzbang, sex or a murder every few pages, we book-surf for sensation only. Whilst I have a good knowledge of the English language, I find some of Dickens' linguistic knots hard to follow. Perhaps we are destined to find Great Literature (important initial capitals) of the past unreadable.
Mark Twain once said that a 'classic' is a book everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read. Is this the future?
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