The English Language has Changed a Lot. [View all]
Earlier, someone posted a thread about Lincoln's Gettysburg Address being used as a sample to get students to do something called "close reading." That's a literary analysis technique that looks at a piece of writing within itself, rather than in context. That particular text was probably not the best choice, since its context is, or should be, known by most students before they'd be asked to do a "close reading" of it. So, I looked for another piece of writing from about the same period that might have been a better choice. I chose "American Notes" by Charles Dickens. Like the Gettysburg Address, it uses some words in ways that employ less familiar definitions. It also has a more complex sentence structure than we're used to seeing today.
What do you think? Should today's students be able to read the passage below and understand it? Can they derive meaning from it without reference to context. I think they should. But, I doubt that most students would make much sense of it. How about you? Read it and see what you think. This is the English of the mid 19th Century, written by one of the most famous authors of his day. How do you see it today, in 2013?:
astonishment, with which, on the morning of the third of January
eighteen-hundred-and-forty-two, I opened the door of, and put my head
into, a ‘state-room’ on board the Britannia steam-packet, twelve hundred
tons burthen per register, bound for Halifax and Boston, and carrying Her
Majesty’s mails.
That this state-room had been specially engaged for ‘Charles Dickens,
Esquire, and Lady,’ was rendered sufficiently clear even to my scared
intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the fact, which was
pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a very thin mattress, spread like a
surgical plaster on a most inaccessible shelf. But that this was the
state-room concerning which Charles Dickens, Esquire, and Lady, had held
daily and nightly conferences for at least four months preceding: that
this could by any possibility be that small snug chamber of the
imagination, which Charles Dickens, Esquire, with the spirit of prophecy
strong upon him, had always foretold would contain at least one little
sofa, and which his lady, with a modest yet most magnificent sense of its
limited dimensions, had from the first opined would not hold more than
two enormous portmanteaus in some odd corner out of sight (portmanteaus
which could now no more be got in at the door, not to say stowed away,
than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a flower-pot): that this
utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous
box, had the remotest reference to, or connection with, those chaste and
pretty, not to say gorgeous little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand,
in the highly varnished lithographic plan hanging up in the agent’s
counting-house in the city of London: that this room of state, in short,
could be anything but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of the
captain’s, invented and put in practice for the better relish and
enjoyment of the real state-room presently to be disclosed:—these were
truths which I really could not, for the moment, bring my mind at all to
bear upon or comprehend. And I sat down upon a kind of horsehair slab,
or perch, of which there were two within; and looked, without any
expression of countenance whatever, at some friends who had come on board
with us, and who were crushing their faces into all manner of shapes by
endeavouring to squeeze them through the small doorway.
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