Victorians! discussion

Jacopo wrote: "This issue is really destroying my self-esteem. Are victorian novels supposed to be completely accessible even for those who have been learning and practicing strictly American English? I find it v..."

Language changes over time, as we all know, and there is a learning curve involved, especially if English is your second language. Folks back then were fare more "wordy" as we are today. With German my native language, I recall when I read Jane Austen for the first time I couldn't make heads or tails of it, and I used the dictionary feature on my kindle all the time. It was slow and laborious going. Watching the movies of these novels and/or the BBC productions helps a great deal in getting a feel for the language.
Another gap in understanding these novels are the historical circumstances. Reading an edition that has footnotes, such as Penguin Classics (the books, not sure if they do them with e-editions; and there are other publishers that do footnotes as well), helps tremendously. With the Elizabeth Gaskell we are reading right now, she will use terms of local dialect from time to time which one will have a hard time finding in any dictionary, here the footnotes are crucial.

Please don’t be so hard on yourself. Even for those who are American born English speakers, the language used before the present is difficult. It isn’t only Victorian novels that present problems in comprehension. The way people write and speak today is much simpler and the vocabulary much smaller. On top of that, the way of life and the technology is so different that what was commonplace and ordinary to a Victorian is absolutely unknown to people today.

I am reading an Everyman Edition of Wives and Daughters that has footnotes explaining unfamiliar terms and references. Having that at hand eases the process.

I hope you don’t give up but rather that you keep learning. Your world will be that much richer and you will be able to carry forward your expanded knowledge into more exploration.

Jacopo wrote: "This issue is really destroying my self-esteem. Are victorian novels supposed to be completely accessible even for those who have been learning and practicing strictly American English? I find it v..."

I see that you are from Italy. Do you feel similar when you read a 19th-century Italian novel in its original Italian? Just curious? For example Alessandro Manzoni's 'Promessi Sposi'? Does it also have a denser quality compared to modern Italian literature?

Annotated editions can help. It does take exposure to the language. The more you read them, the easier it gets. But at first it was hard for me.

I agree with Deborah - it is just a matter at time (a few thousand pages.... :P) and things (vocabulary and syntax) get familiar. It is a learning curve just like most subjects. Perhaps the Victorians had a more convoluted writing style, but is so beautiful and expressive compared to more modern English.

On a similar note the K-12 system here in the US seemingly never assigns classics in the English classes (apart from a couple of Shakespeare's plays). I think Austen is assigned for the seniors. However, that's it! No Dickens! No Eliot! No Trollope! No Gaskell! And, of course, none of the major epics such as Dante or Homer. This is based on the experience of having kids in a top 10% school district. This makes it difficult to dive into the classics later on. Almost all of my kids' peers read below their reading level and never challenge themselves with other works. It is a bit disheartening. At least my kids live in a book jungle when they come home with piles and bookshelves all over the place. Perhaps I'm not doing them a favor because their friends are always "reacting" to whatever they currently are reading. Hmmm

@Jacopo

Does the Italian school system require that students read books from across the ages?

Haaze wrote: "I agree with Deborah - it is just a matter at time (a few thousand pages.... :P) and things (vocabulary and syntax) get familiar. It is a learning curve just like most subjects. Perhaps the Victori..."

That’s so sad. I didn’t have the classics in high school other than 1 Shakespeare play. But in 8th grade I had dickens and fell in love

Maybe the answer is to be more impressionistic. You don’t need to understand every word. Analyzing each sentence is surely a way to “do it to death”. Perhaps because I am English I find Victorian novels very easy to read. The only thing is they take a long time to get to a point. Dickens is very hyperbolic. I have a hard time with Balzac in the original French but I get on fine with Maupassant because we have the same sense of humor. But I cannot understand a modern writer like Genet. Maybe one has to accept that there are certain genres with which one will never gel. Surprisingly, my French students got on well with Shakespeare – they liked the visceral aspects of a tale. So one can never tell. It is better to read widely, though, in the hope that something will click.

I've seen my own reading pace change over time with Victorian literature - even classics in general- so this is a thing time will resolve :)

I think you get used to it and have to persevere, then it becomes easier. Don't worry if you don't understand every single word, it's like when you first start reading in a foreign language.
For me, as a native French speaker, I did struggle at first but now I enjoy it as the sentences are longer and more constructed than modern English, making the writing more similar to French.

Vergilius, when you said that you had no trouble with Gulliver’s Travels, which was written roughly a century before the Victorian Era began, I was curious to see what the difference in prose style was.

I think the key to Gulliver’s Travels is that it is written as the memoirs of a sailor. The “editor” notes in the introductory remarks that the style is “simple.” I don’t think that simplicity was the aim of most Victorian novelists. They wrote finely detailed descriptions of the characters and their surroundings which would have been familiar to their readers who would know the difference between a landau, a fly and a brougham when today we have no idea what these are in the first place. We also have been taught that in writing, short, simple declarative sentences are the ideal. Complex sentences, with all sorts of qualifying clauses are discouraged.

It’s interesting that in Gulliver’s Travels, Swift has Gulliver critique the edition of his book at the beginning.
One of the things that annoys Gulliver is that the language of sailors has changed so much since he retired that he cannot understand the present day sailors who come to visit him.

There is a sentence in Villette where she says she can hear the bells of St Paul's cathedral, very loudly. This line blew me away because I attempted a similar get-away when I was her age, making the same bid for travel and independence.

Nucky, don't feel bad, first of all. You're way ahead of most Americans, who hardly know other languages. Second, I would try audiobooks. I read them all the time now, in addition to regular books. It's better timewise, and sometimes you can get a better sense of things when it's being read. I've found it very helpful. I've been listening to Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, on audio, which I believe was written during the Queen Anne period, and is 900 pages long if I were to read it in print.

Just read...is the only solution I know. It will come, or it won't. (I'm struggling with learning a language foreign to me, at an age when both memory and hearing may be faltering. Learning another language has never been easy for me. Even in my own language, although I have a vocabulary I quite enjoy both reading and using, I frequently look up words just to uncover their nuances over time or a bit about their origins -- suggesting how they link to other ideas. All good stuff, to be enjoyed, even when tucked among life's must-be-done demands. Discipline, I think its called, but I prefer to ignore labels like that and consider more pleasant ones, like pleasure.