Struggles with 'Bleak House'

Amid reports that many undergraduates are unable to read at length or understand complex texts, a recently published study suggests this isn’t a new problem.

The study, carried out in 2015 but for some reason published only last year, had 85 English majors at two regional Kansas universities read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens and evaluated their comprehension. (I first read about this study in a Substack written by someone who goes by the moniker “Kitten.”)

Each student was tested in a private 20-minute session with a facilitator, reading a sentence or two of the text out loud before trying to translate it into “plain English.” Facilitators weren’t allowed to offer help, but students could use their phones to look up unfamiliar terms. Still, most struggled to make any sense of what they’d been asked to read.

To give you an idea of the task, here’s the first paragraph of the book:

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.

According to the study, which bears the forthright title “They Don’t Read Very Well,” only five percent—four of the 85 subjects—managed to gain a “detailed, literal understanding” of what they had read. Thirty-eight percent were “competent” readers, but even they were able to understand only about half of the text. Another 58 percent were “problematic” readers, who quickly became lost. On a literacy test administered as part of the study, most of this group scored at