Scenes of Clerical Life, by George Eliot ...Who Still Reads the 'Classics'?

Do you still read any of the 'classics' of English Literature? 

By which I think I mean any of the great monumental novels of the Nineteenth Century. I was wondering about this having just read Scenes of Clerical Life by George Eliot. I looked back through my reading record for the last few years, reading 20-30 books a year, and saw that I read Jane Austen's Mansfield Park last year, and several books by Jerome K. Jerome at various times, though they're not exactly 'great novels'. That's all. Also, there have been a couple by Joseph Conrad, however now we're edging into the Twentieth Century. So it seems I don't read 'classics' that often myself, despite having a Lit degree and being a keen reader.

(FYI - there will be a few remarks about Scenes of Clerical Life, eventually, but this didn't turn out to be the usual sort of review I'd planned)

Do you remember Heron Books? You'd have to be quite mature; they were advertised all the time for a period, in the old 3/4 channel television age, also in magazines. All those Nineteenth Century novels were already out of copyright, therefore the text was freely available. What Heron Books and some other similar outfits did was print them and give them classy 'prestigious' bindings, providing you with a long row of famous books for your living room, much like those to be found in the libraries of stately homes. This is literature as pure decoration. It's unlikely that anyone ever read them. If the thought had crossed anyone's mind, they might have been worried about spoiling the look of the gold finish to the pages' edges. Very classy, except that the gold leaf lettering etc tended to look a bit tacky, and nobody's living room looks like that kind of library.

The funny thing is, this has been going on forever. Some years ago, I had to clear my aunt's house, which was all very sad, including finding a large box containing books which I'd never seen on her bookshelves. Most of them consisted of a very large and probably complete set of Charles Dickens' novels. They are in a very poor state; the binding of several is crumbling to dust. It's hard to tell if they've been read, but I'm sure it's only a few, if any. No, they're not Heron Books or similar, from the Sixties. I believe the set dates from the turn of the century (as that used to mean, 19th into 20th Century!), and they were almost certainly bought, by Joan's parents I assume, to impress on the bookshelf.

A friend of mine - normally reads genre fiction - is ploughing through Little Dorrit at the moment. I haven't read that myself, but it's a formidable tome, and I'm not surprised he's finding it hard going. Maybe Great Expectations (the one Dickens I have read) or A Christmas Carol would have been a better choice. Another friend is considering reading Smollett's Tristram Shandy, and has been for a while. It's a remarkable book by the way and I'm sure it'll be rewarding to read. I've had that book since university days, and still haven't read it myself.

I studied English Literature for a degree, and to be honest I consciously skewed my module choices to avoid the Nineteenth Century, knowing I'd find the sheer amount of reading required to be a challenge, to do it properly. So my direct knowledge of the so-called classics is largely limited to a few authors I admire. Jane Austen is one, and George Eliot is another. I've read all but one of each of their outputs. My thematic question here is, now we're well into the Twenty-First Century, with all those Great Novels fast receding from the world we live in, not to mention the language they're written in, how many of us still do happily read them? If we don't have to, because we're not studying them? I'd be surprised if it didn't turn out that they don't get read, outside literature courses, unless they're the subject of a new film or television series.

I was curious about what a modern Literature course was like, and so I looked up the course now offered by the English Department at my old university. Unsurprisingly, it's very different to the course I took. Overall, I was impressed, by its intelligent approach to its subject, its complete embracing of the state of the art, and especially its relevance. Despite greatly respecting the course I followed, I think it was weak in turning out graduates with solid skills to offer prospective employers; that's very much not the case now, with an emphasis on real world activities and experiences (even encouragement to take spells abroad), and requirements to gain and use all kinds of personal working skills, ie. in presentation (some interesting multimedia elements), arguing ones case, different forms of writing, varieties of team work, and so on and so forth. There's a greater emphasis on research than I remember. For a smart, ambitious and adventurous student, it's brilliant. If one has good ideas to explore, it looks as if the university would help you any way it could.

There were some aspects of this picture of excellence which cast slight shadows for me. For one, would I have even been accepted for the course these days? Actually, maybe, because the school I went to has also changed in the intervening years, and without checking, I'm sure I'd be much better tooled up to apply today. But then there's the money. Any prospective student in the UK today has to think long and hard about whether they can justify the expense. As I've said above, my old college has clearly done its best to make its English course one of the best (and it currently ranks near the top). But it costs, especially if one wants to follow that dream to spend part of the course in one of their foreign partner institutions.

A second 'shadow' for me is that overall the course demands even more reading. I barely managed to survive that in my time, now, well I wonder, suppose like so many others I had to support myself with a part time job. I think I'd definitely have to cut down on my table football practice.

A more mildly critical point is to do with foreign literature. It is a department of 'English and Related Literature', and in my day you couldn't do the course without some proficiency in a foreign language. I weakly satisfied this by doing a module on Dante, and making a hash of starting to learn Italian (Can I just say I do today possess both a GCSE and an AS Level in Italian - after years of evening classes!) If I've read the website correctly, although you will engage with foreign literature more widely than we were expected to, it does seem that you can avoid actually knowing a foreign language, if you fashion your course to do so.

All very fascinating. As I said, I was impressed. The progress made, the evolution of the course, as far as I can tell from what I read, suggests that while the course and its tutors still hold the study of literature in the highest regard, they've created something valuable and relevant to the world we live in.

And yes, it does seem that you can configure your course to minimise the attention you pay to the 'classics'. The modern course is much less of a study covering the corpus of English Literature than it was; on the other hand, whatever English Literature is, in a modern globalised world, English Literature is a far more expansive beast than it was. Does it matter, if we gradually forget such authors as George Eliot, all but the select few favoured by film producers? 

For a long while now, if you wanted to read anything from the Early Modern era or earlier, you had to interpret or even translate. The language barrier has moved forwards, I think, in my own lifetime, into the Nineteenth Century. Perhaps as far as mid-century writers like George Eliot and Charles Dickens. The main and obvious obstacle is vocabulary. There are whole areas of terminology which are obsolete today, which can make a reader want to have a dictionary handy. And in George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, her (I hope you haven't got this far without knowing that 'George Eliot' was the pen name of Mary Anne Evans?) writing is full of words for clothing. This won't have been accidental; the curious thing is that she was writing stories set a generation beforehand, and the various words for clothing would have been obviously old fashioned for her readership. In the second story, she even writes about Gothic architecture as a new fashion. 'Trending', as we would say today. She wanted to underline that she was writing about a world gone by, even for her and her readers. 

So much alien vocabulary means we have to be historians as much as literary critics. And Eliot's style of writing, like most of the Great Novel Writers, can seem ponderous to modern eyes, and not easily digested. I mean, I'm relatively familiar with these elaborately constructed sentences, fitted together with so many sub-clauses that you don't want to be too sleepy or it becomes impossible to hold in mind the various elements that make up the whole, before, after many lines of text, you reach the end of the sentence, and then wonder how it started. (Do you like how 'meta' that last sentence was?!) Almost reminds me of trying to read Finnish... ;) Anyway, Eliot's writing here was a mixed pleasure for me at times. And yet, I'm going to tell you that she writes beautifully. One trivial discovery, which delighted me, was spotting so many names of familiar garden flowers. I had no idea that so many of today's standard garden flowers have been commonplace in England since, at least, right back in early Victorian times.

Not trivial at all is that Eliot's writing makes its strongest impression in its realism. Social and psychological realism. Her characters are three dimensional, their virtues and failings quite believable. She didn't start writing until around 30 I believe, and her maturity and keen eye for character and behaviour are evident. Scenes of Clerical Life was her first book and it made a great impact. The book's three stories are very readable. They do focus on the lives of clerical figures, and from the historical point of view the last story, Janet's Repentance, has much to tell us about the divisions between Church and Chapel, and within the established Church, between Episcopalians and Evangelicals. Don't be put off!, it's done entirely in the context of the travails of the characters.The tales are a little sentimental at times, and the various Victorian-style tragedies can feel a bit much, but on balance they convey a picture of real life and people in the English Midlands of the early Nineteenth Century. I guess, there's the answer to my question. The Great Nineteenth Century novels have become books we mainly read out of historical interest.