Kitten has a Substack essay, College English majors can't read, discussing a study (from 2015) of reading comprehension among college-age English majors. One of the passages that was used was the opening of Bleak House:
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.Students were to paraphrase it into more colloquial English, and often fumbled it very badly, despite being allowed to use reference materials like dictionaries. A common failure in paraphrasing passages like this was an inability to distinguish between literal and figurative language even when literal paraphrase made no logical sense; they also clearly interpret not by actually reading the passage as a passage but by picking out things they understand (or think they understand) and trying to string them together. But what I find more enlightening than the student responses are the occasional comments (both at Substack and at other places in social media discussing the article) trying to defend the students, because when I read them, I say, "Ah, this is why they have difficulty reading; too many people don't really understand reading itself."
You have the people who say that the language is archaic. This is a common refrain -- I have students who say similar things. It is obviously false in this case -- the passage does not use any words that are not still used today, although chimney-pots and blinkers for horses are more niche than they used to be. (Trying to pretend that words less common than they used to be have ceased to exist is also a common refrain. I once had a class try to argue that 'providence' and 'providential' were not words in modern English -- I was discussing the relation between the words 'prudence' and 'providence', which are variants of the same word.) There are specifically British terms, of course, but there is still a Lord Chancellor, and Lincoln's Inn still exists, and Holborn Hill has not vanished. Moreover, this is all irrelevant; the students had access to reference materials in which they could look up what these were. Megalosaurus is not as popular a dinosaur as it used to be, but is obviously a dinosaur. (And in fairness, most of the students in the study clearly recognized that it was a dinosaur; you can tell because at this point their paraphrases begin to break down as they struggle to make sense of this story about, as they think, a dinosaur waddling around London.)
Others argue that it's 'not grammatical in a modern sense'. In a sense this is true -- Bleak House opens with a scene-setting like you would find in a play, and thus the sentences are functioning like 'captions'. In the sense that these people mean, it was not 'grammatical' in Dickens's day, either. It is in fact simpler, more vivid, and more journalistic than a more rigidly grammatical opening would have been; it is easier to read, not more difficult. But in any case, the defense is also irrelevant. Fluent readers do not generally consult the grammar when they read. The reverse is the case -- 'grammar' is just our word for using language to describe the functional roles of words in interpretations by fluent readers and listeners when they read or hear the passages in which they are embedded.
Some people argue that in order to understand the passage you need familiarity with the British judiciary, or pre-evolutionary accounts of dinosaurs, or some such. No; these can enrich your reading of the passage, particularly in the context of the larger novel -- the combination of primeval swamps, muddy London in November, and the Court of Chancery is a true masterpiece of juxtaposition that ties into the themes and events of the novel in a way that no reader would see immediately. But this is how novel-reading works -- in reading the novel, you have to start the novel, and then you find that the rest of the novel sheds light on the start of the novel, and learning about broader contextual matters sheds even more. If you had to know all the things that can be known about a passage before you could understand, you would never be able to read novels at all. To read a novel, you read it, and you understand what it says, and as you proceed you understand more about the things you have already read, and if you actually study the novel, you get an even deeper understanding of the things you have read (often many times). Just to paraphrase the opening, you don't actually need anywhere near that much.
It's also worth noting that Dickens structures the passage so that we get most of the essential information more than once. If you don't know when end of Michaelmas term is (and not all of his original readers would have, at least for legal contexts), he tells us that it's November weather; if you don't know what November weather in London is like, he tells us that it is muddy, that it's as if recently flooded, that there are mires, that the horses are splashed, that the people are carrying umbrellas, that people are slipping and sliding as they walk, that it is muddy again. If you didn't catch that the sun is not shining in the chimney-pot sentence, or guess it from all the evidence of rain, he implies it again when he puts into question whether the day ever broke. Someone reading the passage for the first time might not realize just from this passage that the Lord Chancellor is actually going to be (albeit rather indirectly) important to the novel, but they should be able to figure out easily that it is around November in London, and it is rainy and muddy. The reader should be able to think -- perhaps even, if they have a visual imagination, to imagine clearly -- the scene through the words. That is what it is actually to read: to think of what is beyond the words on the page, through the words on the page. Just as you see from the menu that the restaurant serves chicken, you see from the passage that London is muddy, and everything else tells us how and when and in what way it is muddy: it's London-in-November muddy, dinosaur-swamp muddy, snowing-soot-from-blackly-smoky-chimneys muddy, dogs-can't-be-told-apart muddy, horses-splattered-up-to-their-eyes muddy, pedestrians-slipping-and-sliding muddy, growing-muddier-at-a-compound-rate muddy. The students in question, as noted above, are clearly trying to guess and infer a meaning for the passage based on fragmented parts; they are not thinking through and beyond the words themselves. They are trying to decipher a puzzle from a few selected clues; they are not dwelling in muddy London while the Lord Chancellor holds court.
One of the attempted defenses of the students that gets close to right is the argument that it's just a kind of language that they aren't used to. This is in some sense true; but what the defense fails to grasp is that this is just what it is not to read well, particularly given that we are not dealing with euphuistic poetry but with a passage, originally published in popular periodicals, from an influential novel by one of the most influential novelists of all time. But the problem is rendered more acute in that, to have difficulty grasping the point of the passage, you would have to not only be unfamiliar with Dickens in particular, but many, many other works. Fluent readers can pick up books in style and even dialect with which they are unfamiliar and begin to make sense of it, because they have read many things of many kinds. That's what makes you a fluent reader. They won't necessarily catch everything or get everything exactly right, but they will be already beginning to adapt. If you have difficulty reading anything, that is sometimes because it is badly written, but it is also quite often just because there is a large region of texts you don't read much. There is no shame in it, of course -- no one has read a lot of every sort of thing -- but if you've read enough, of enough different kinds, you can generally read difficult texts, particularly texts that are network-central like the novels of Dickens, just by reading them a few times.
The most annoying defenses are from those people who say that they don't think it matters whether the students can read and interpret a paragraph from Dickens or any other nineteenth-century author. One commenter I saw somewhere said that he bet the students could read and interpret what was written in the past hundred years. This is implausible in the extreme -- a student who cannot read the vividly journalistic Bleak House is not likely to be able to read James Joyce's very experimental Ulysses (published beginning in 1918, within the hundred-years limit from when the study took place), and for that matter cannot necessarily be assumed easily to follow the finer points of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The only way they would be able to read these books well is either reading a lot of that kind of work or reading a whole lot of things in general. That is, again, how you read well. If they read a lot of things in general, they would have no real difficulty with Bleak House, although they might have to read the passage a few times to get it. If they read a lot of difficult novels in English at all, from any time period, they are also not going to have all that much difficulty with Bleak House. If they read a lot of different kinds of easier novels, they shouldn't have too much trouble, either, although, again, they might have to read it a few times and look up some words and phrases first. But, of course, the defense is again irrelevant; it doesn't matter what someone's arbitrary opinion is, because what's relevant here is what in fact college English majors need to be able to do, and being able to read influential novels in English is one of them. If a plumber without college education can't read Bleak House closely and well, that is perhaps a matter of 'no harm, no foul'. (Although it's not all that difficult to find plumbers without college educations who can.) If a college English major can't, that is an obvious problem.
Reading well, again, is just a matter of familiarity with reading. There have been, and still are, people with only a minimum of education who can pick up a King James Bible, first published in 1611, and read it without any difficulty at all. How do they do that? They read it, and keep reading it. That's it. There are other things that you can do to tighten things up -- consult reference works, ask experts, listen to lectures, read with others, and the like. But these supplement actually reading. Some people do take to it more easily than others; I could read at what the Substack essay calls literacy level 4 in middle school, and one would not expect something like that in general. But in every case, someone who reads well, reads massively, although their reading may be narrower or broader. In my own case, reading was from early on my primary pasttime, and I would often read library books or books I particularly liked multiple times; I read lots of animal stories and science fiction and mythology and theology, from the adult as well as the children's sections of the library. If I found I liked an author, like Albert Payson Terhune in second grade, or a few years later Isaac Asimov or C. S. Lewis, I read whatever I could find by them, which is, why for instance, I had the original Foundation trilogy and Mere Christianity on my bookshelves in elementary school, having put them on my birthday wishlist -- although living in a small town, what could be found was not always extensive. I also read a lot of Boy's Life and Reader's Digest. And so it went in an expanding circle. This sort of thing, with different preferences and tastes and available materials, and at different ages, is just the sort of thing readers do. Reading is a habitus of thinking beyond the words on a page, through the words on a page; it is an acquired disposition you gain by doing, and only gain by doing, and the acquisition of it is ever-expanding and never-ending.
Reading well, then, is just reading and reading. The struggles of the college English majors in the study are signs that they have not actually read much, and have read less, in fact, than can be wished for people entering college and trying to get a degree in English. Some of them, no doubt, turned out to be late bloomers, catching up after a childhood of not reading extensively and becoming exceptional readers; this certainly does happen. Others almost certainly never finished their degree, and never read much afterward. Yet others perhaps struggled through and then never did much with it. Some may have become English teachers and yet are still unable to read English all that well, surviving by sticking to a limited treadmill and developing a knack for glibness of speech; this also certainly does happen, unfortunately. More of them likely discovered what they found most interesting and then stuck mostly with that, which is what most people do when it comes to reading, and is usually fine. From a snapshot of students at a time, you can never tell how things will end for them. But it is true that students are increasingly coming into college without much skill in reading, and, while this is sometimes because reading has been outcompeted by other things, and sometimes due to various minor disabilities, and sometimes because they haven't tried and perhaps will never be interested in trying, it is also sometimes because they have been shortchanged. The thing of it is, college is not well designed for people who don't have much skill in reading, whatever the reason for it.
