Why we love 19th-century writing
And why we don’t write like that anymore
In recent weeks, several people have mentioned to me (quite unprompted) just how much they love Victorian writing. I must confess that I agree with them.
I love to read 19th-century prose. I love to write it, too, at least in the form of the occasional Victorian pastiche.
When reading, say, Bleak House, it’s hard not to entertain nostalgic thoughts, and wonder “Why don’t people write like this anymore?”
Sometimes this nostalgia is coupled with a sense that contemporary writing represents a degeneration from its lofty 19th-century peak, and that the best we can hope for today is a speedy return to these golden days of literature.
Even if you’re not prone to such reactionary sentiments, it’s hard to read Dickens or Ruskin or George Eliot and not come away with the feeling that something of value has been lost, even if something else has been gained.
Compare, for example, the following two literary descriptions of the weather, each of which serves to open a novel, the first from Dickens’ Bleak House (1853)1 and the second from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997):
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.
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.
Each of these passages is beautiful in its own, very different way. Some of the difference doubtless arises from the peculiarities of these two particular authors and these two particular works.
But if you’ve read a lot of 19th- and 20th-/21st-century literature, you’ll recognize that there’s something typical about each of these passages that makes them excellent stand-ins for literary fiction of the 19th and late 20th century, respectively.
If you look beyond literature, you will find that similar changes occurred in all genres: contemporary essays, journalism, and scholarship are also utterly unlike their Victorian counterparts.
So what is the great difference between the two styles? What changed to make the way we write today so unlike how people wrote in the Victorian age?
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You may have heard one style of answer already, which goes something like this:
Modern prose is the cleaned-up version. It’s plainer and easier to read. Victorian ornateness may be pretty but it reads like it was written someone who was paid by the word.2
Modern writers respect their readers time, because they write for the broad public, in other words, for people who aren’t lounging around at their country estates with nothing to do all day. The way we write today is the democratic style.
I’d like to suggest an alternative explanation. Contemporary writing is plainer, in that it’s less grammatically intricate. It packs more of a punch in fewer words. But that doesn’t mean it’s always easier to follow. In fact, the style of writing popular today, which we flatter ourselves is accessible and democratic, is in some ways more demanding of the reader than its Victorian predecessor.
