No Stupid Questions

Oddly enough I overthought the first sentence, and imagined the Lord Chancellor was some type of local decorative feature like the Duke of Wellington. Then I realized it's probably just a guy with a fancy title sitting at a table in a pub?

The rest is mostly straightforward to me. The text feels the way it literally reads - a bit muddy?

The streets are so full of fresh mud that they may as well be prehistoric mud flats after a Great Flood. I imagine it's quite a large street leading up a big hill if he could imagine a giant dinosaur making the walk. So I picture basically a solid river of mud rising up in the distance.

If there are normally cobblestones or whatever, they've disappeared beneath the muck. I don't know exactly what a chimney-pot is, but black smoke is pouring from the chimney somethings and mixing with the falling drizzle into dirty soot water. The rain is so blackened - and the weather so dreary - that the city itself could be in mourning.

It's so muddy that the dogs are just dirty shapes in the muck, the horses have mud all the way up to their blinkers... which I read as blinders first, so I imagined it up to their heads and necks, like only the top 10% of the horse is actually visible and most of that is the headgear, and the rest of the horse is mud. I don't know if that's what a horse blinker is though.

The foot traffic feels cramped and irritable in the muck, people holding umbrellas against the dirty rain. It also sounds like a lot - tens of thousands of people walking the same paths. The edge of the sidewalk or whatever at the street corner is probably invisible under the mud, and because of that people keep slipping in the same spots. This pushes the mud more and more in the same directions, forming gross layered piles of muck in specific places against the sidewalk or something, causing more people to slip, adding more to the local mud (compound interest)

The day is so dark and dreary that it may as well be night. Overall, it's muddy, raining, sooty, and depressing. There's a big, wide, muddy street up a hill, filled with a constant flow of unhappy people.

I don't know if I would actually read this for leisure, but I like it. I think I'm on the same page for most of it? But I still have no idea what's up with Lord Chancellor. Is he a person staring out a window at the scene in the street? Does his title imply nobility and fancy clothing? What does the inside of the Lincoln's Inn Hall look like?

Michaelmas out this bitch, yo, and LC up in Lincoln's crib. Weather is off the hook, frfr. Streets so muddy like Noah's flood just got done, I ain't even be shook if a Dino come roaring up at me lmao. Chimney smoke be hanging low like Snoop Drizzle in town and ash be falling like fuckin snow, no cap. Watching the dogs and horses getting about covered in filth like they be swimming in it. Shit is wild, fam, homies on foot got no rizz, they be slipping and sliding on mud just tryna get along down the street for reals, stepping in mud and it be stepping back on them like they only drip.

Yes. But I van imagine my children being clueless. English is our third language but I think that's not the issue. They just haven't read enough. They are consumers and aren't accustomed to active reading.

No, because aphantasia. I love the turns of phrase, though.

I can't really visualize things in general. Due to that, if you tell me it's muddy that's most of the information I get. My brain won't automatically try to put mud on the horses or add other details.

Here the specifics help a lot and I have a better sense of the muddy day for it.

Yes I can. And disagree with virtually everyone else; I think that this along with virtually everything else by Dickens is absolutely top class writing. The meaning of every individual phrase isn't the point, the whole passage just gives the perfect impression of the scene he is trying to convey. Also, remember much of Dickens' stuff was written to be read out loud. Try that, it helps!

Oh of course it's Charles fucking Dickens Yeah I get the gist of it but it's unpleasant to read and doesn't tell me much

Yes. Why do you ask?

Sure. It paints a very vivid picture, I love it.

Never read anything by Dickens before except for A Christmas Carol (and that was for school) but this is now on my reading list :^)

Yup, I was able to understand and visualize all of it. The only thing I didn't know was what "Michaelmas" was, but I determined its salient meaning well enough from context (it's a Christian festival celebrated on September 29, which is redundant information with the immediately following reference to "implacable November weather" which sets the approximate time of year just as well).

The passage can be summarized into two fundamental points of information:

• The weather on this particular day in London was typical.
• Charles Dickens was paid by the word.

Tl;dr the weather sucked. Everything was muddy and covered in soot.

I also read the news about the same research article you did.

I was surprised how much I could understand, based on how much trouble people in the study had. Sounds like a wet miserable city our Lord Chancellor is in.

yea and I don't like how its written

Kind of, "It was very muddy in London" but nobody talks like this today, so it sounds very strange. I'm personally not a fan. I don't think there's a complete sentence anywhere in that passage.

Sentence fragments, capitalized and punctuated like fresh immigrants assimilating to their new mother.

I have aphantasia so I can't visualize much of anything. But I did understand the passage.

I read a lot of fictionalized historical diaries as a kid (i.e., diary entries written from the POV of a fictional character living during important historical events) because they were given to me as gifts and the writing style is somewhat similar, though not as creative with imagery as Dickens.

I started reading, I drifted away at about the mud part so I restarted. This is really not my cuppa tea when it comes to text. On the second run I did better but no, I didn't manage to visualize everything. The Megalosaurus sentence doesn't make much sense to me. The text is convoluted, boring, and depressing but yes I guess I see the shitty street, the animals, the people -a crowd-, the miserable weather.

I'm aware of more information I'm not really processing but I'm just too annoyed at the text to apply the necessary brainpower required to digest it. It's almost 2 AM and I'm tired.

Then I make it to the end and realize it's Dickens, and that explains everything. I never liked his writing. Good night.

I have never read Bleak House, nor do I even know the outline of the plot. This is what I'm getting from it:

LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.

The scene is London. Michaelmas' term (shift?) has just finished, and the Lord Chancellor is now sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall.

Implacable November weather.

The weather is cold, wet and overcast, as one would expect for November.

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.

The streets are incredibly muddy, as if the waters of the Biblical Flood of Noah had just receded. So muddy, one would not be surprised to find a giant amphibian frolicking in it up on 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.

Smoke drifts downward from the chimneys; soft black ash the size of snowflakes coats exposed surfaces. It's as if everything is dressed in black to mourn the death of the Sun's warmth and light.

Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.

Dogs and horses are covered in the mud up to their eyeballs, and their owners can hardly tell which ones are theirs.

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.

Pedestrians fight through the crowded street, their umbrellas bumping into each other, like a seething angry mob. They slip and lose traction at street corners, like the thousands of pedestrians that came before them since the day broke (although "daybreak" is a meaningless term for a day as grey and cloudy as this one.) The mud continues to cake on their boots where the pavement ends, as if the mud was somehow multiplying like money in a rich man's investment account.

I knew I have read it before somewhere.

Well, like every craft, skills develop over time. What was a blacksmith hundreds of years ago is now a CNC operator. Likewise, writing styles have evolved over time.

Yes, he has been a great storyteller, and his stories and characters stood the test of time, but his writing style did not.

Understanding and being able to visualize are different things. Some people can't visualize at all

Yes, but it was a slog. My summary:

the weather was dreadful, some high muckety muck is back from Michaelmas break. The scene is in London. All the people and critters in the street are covered in mud. The ground is slippery with mud (and probably horse crap, but we're too polite to mention it). OMG the weather sucks, very wet and dreary. Everyone's in a bad mood. Did I mention it's wet and icky and muddy and the weather is bad?

I can read it, but for some reason I read it like a screenplay being read about some old-timey detective story.

Yes, although I'm struck by some of the words, particularly this sense of "wonderful".

And now I'm even more glad that it's sunny out here right now and I can hear birds.

Sure—but I grew up reading a lot of 19th-century literature.

Yeah, and I can translate it for you if need be.

I didn't recognize the source and thought to myself this is either archaic or amateur. It feels purple by modern standards.