In the Daily Mail Mark Howarth reports Charles Dickens ... or the world's worst writer ? Blind reading test found 48% couldn't tell difference between literature great and ridiculed novelist, and in The Guardian Alison Flood takes issue with the study, in Can you spot a Charles Dickens sentence ?
Disappointingly, neither piece points to the (freely accessible) study (Flood links to the subscription version): it is Scientific evaluation of Charles Dickens (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) by Mikhail Simkin, published in the Journal of Quantitative Linguistics. But don't expect something too 'scientific' .....
What he did was take: "a dozen of representative literary passages" by Charles Dickens and Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- billed by him as: "the worst writer in history of letters" -- and see if readers could correctly ascribe each passage to its author; see (or take) the quiz here.
As Flood points out, a basic mistake is to dismiss or categorize Bulwer-Lytton as the 'worst writer' of his or all ages. (I, for one, am a fan -- I've read 19 of his works, totaling nearly 10,000 pages, and while he's rarely top flight much of his fiction is very good; he's also an astonishingly versatile author, and in that sense more interesting than many writers of his age.)
The Daily Mail piece closes: "Ironically, both Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton are buried within yards of each other at Westminster Abbey" -- but surely that fact should already raise a lot of flags. Like maybe they were considered roughly in the same league in their time (as, of course, they were) .....
In a way, of course, these are the right authors to compare -- because they are, in many respects (even ones of style) very similar. Hence also the general confusion in properly ascribing passages. But Simkin ties himself to the idea that Bulwer-Lytton is considered a terrible writer -- and that's a mistake, since he isn't, and he's not considered that by those who have actually read his work, and though he had his faults ... well, so did Dickens, if we want to be clinically objective.
Regardless, it's a silly comparison too because individual passages do not an author -- or even a book -- make. I remind you of how many contemporary American (MFA-graduate ...) authors offer beautifully polished sentences ... in unreadable novels.
Disappointingly, neither piece points to the (freely accessible) study (Flood links to the subscription version): it is Scientific evaluation of Charles Dickens (warning ! dreaded pdf format !) by Mikhail Simkin, published in the Journal of Quantitative Linguistics. But don't expect something too 'scientific' .....
What he did was take: "a dozen of representative literary passages" by Charles Dickens and Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- billed by him as: "the worst writer in history of letters" -- and see if readers could correctly ascribe each passage to its author; see (or take) the quiz here.
As Flood points out, a basic mistake is to dismiss or categorize Bulwer-Lytton as the 'worst writer' of his or all ages. (I, for one, am a fan -- I've read 19 of his works, totaling nearly 10,000 pages, and while he's rarely top flight much of his fiction is very good; he's also an astonishingly versatile author, and in that sense more interesting than many writers of his age.)
The Daily Mail piece closes: "Ironically, both Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton are buried within yards of each other at Westminster Abbey" -- but surely that fact should already raise a lot of flags. Like maybe they were considered roughly in the same league in their time (as, of course, they were) .....
In a way, of course, these are the right authors to compare -- because they are, in many respects (even ones of style) very similar. Hence also the general confusion in properly ascribing passages. But Simkin ties himself to the idea that Bulwer-Lytton is considered a terrible writer -- and that's a mistake, since he isn't, and he's not considered that by those who have actually read his work, and though he had his faults ... well, so did Dickens, if we want to be clinically objective.
Regardless, it's a silly comparison too because individual passages do not an author -- or even a book -- make. I remind you of how many contemporary American (MFA-graduate ...) authors offer beautifully polished sentences ... in unreadable novels.