The English Language has Changed a Lot.
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.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I will use your suggestion with one of my groups and report back to you the outcome. It may be next week following the break. More to follow.
"Well, bless your li'l ole heart!" 
This isn't difficult. Chaucer was difficult. Dickens was merely boring, and often depressing. I was a little surprised, on reading this passage, to learn that the man had a sense of humor. I'm only familiar with his novels. I never would have guessed.
I'll put it on my list. 
'cept the left-tenant thing.
Tikki
*Technically* I can read it, but like Jane Austin, I can't understand it well enough to get more than the general sense of what he's talking about.
Yes, I went to shitty schools where we only read 20th century literature. 
Update: I read it a few times and I got it. But it took work. Reading is hard.
Kudos for that - because seriously, not everyone would bother trying. 
One thing I tell my students (I teach history and they often have to read primary source material that makes Dickens look like Dr. Suess) is to try reading it out loud. Often the combination of the visual and auditory stimuli will kick the old brain cells into gear when just reading it won't.
Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, The Canterbury Tales, Whitman, Emerson, going to see A Midsummer Night's Dream in Stratford, CT. after spending weeks studying it in class...and much else
We ALSO read and studied Evangeline. I can remember the classroom, where in each class someone would be assigned to recite passages from memory. I can still barely remember the beginning--
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and hemlocks,
bearded with moss, and garments green....duh.. that's it...
And Latin, French and Spanish, and Algebra, Trig, Geometry, Calculus, World, European and American History.(Excluding Asia pretty much.) Art History, GYM !!! :> I can still smell the wrestling room.
How could I have known what an influence all this would have upon my soon-to-begin-life in college, grad school, post grad, and career--no--"life," as a classical musician and teacher.
And in 2013---- what?
Great post.
