The idea that people were better at writing a hundred or so years ago than they are today is a favourite contention of users on Twitter (or X). About once every six months, a post making this point, or one very similar, goes semi-viral and provokes much chattering over a question which surely cannot be resolved by any objective means. After all, though no one would account the semi-literate scrawling of a toddler superior to The Great Gatsby or Les Misérables, who can truly say whether F. Scott Fitzgerald’s economical prose surpasses the more free-flowing writing of Victor Hugo?
Letters penned by ordinary people in the nineteenth century, when literacy rates in the UK were rapidly climbing thanks to educational reform, often read with a certain charm and pleasing rhythm — particularly those conveying romantic feelings. “My hand shakes so that I can hardly write,” Agnes Bowers scratched onto paper intended for Arthur Thorndike in June 1881, “I suppose the reason is because it is my first love letter to you.”
The ensuing items of correspondence between the newly-engaged couple, who wrote to each other almost daily for several months, offer not only fascinating glimpses into the love lives of middle class Victorians but also snippets of colourful writing. After a tiff in July, Arthur wrote that, having received a reconciliatory letter from Agnes, “my soul has melted under the genial warmth of your sweetness [which] will soon disperse the clouds and all will be sunshine again”.
But it is also a truth universally acknowledged that the presence of antiquated vocabulary (the use of “genial” peaked in about 1860 and has since fallen out of favour) and old-fashioned syntax can be mistaken for superior literary quality. Love letters were an important part of Victorian courtship and could be sweet, but were also prone to descending into soppy hyperbole. In 1868, The Raftsman’s Journal, an American newspaper, printed a “stunning” love letter, which was in fact a satire of the romantic templates offered in popular letter-writing manuals of the time. “Your eyes are glorious to behold,” one line of flattery begins, “in their liquid depths, I see legions of little Cupids bathing, like a cohort of ants in an old Army cracker.”
Many pieces of Victorian writing share the same fondness for extended sentences, florid description, and now-unconventional syntax as the great works of Dickens or the Brontë sisters. They are all difficult for a modern writer — who will be naturally inclined towards shorter sentences made up of modern vocabulary — to imitate. They are nonetheless poles apart in quality.
George Orwell’s six rules for good writing make the rounds regularly on social media — and it is worth recalling that he put them forward in criticism of much of the writing of his time. He advised against the unnecessary use of jargon, reliance on the passive voice, unnecessary words, and clichés. I wonder what Orwell might have thought about one nineteenth-century news report I read some time ago which began its coverage of a murder with the lamentation that “the world is a stage of tragedies”. (Shakespeare, of course, did not invent, but popularised and expounded upon, the idea of the world as a stage. In any case — having coined so many of them — he is the one writer for whom an abundance of clichés cannot be pointed to as criticism.)
The newspapers of old are regularly brought up as proof that professional writing has declined in quality. There is probably some merit to this argument, insofar as search engine optimization and clickbait are concerned. But the plain truth is that many nineteenth-century news articles would be unpublishable today — not, at least, without extreme cosmetic surgery by a sub-editor. Take the beginning of this report about the murder of a woman by her son, which appeared in The Times in 1885 under the heading “TRAGEDY IN CHESHIRE“:
“Yesterday morning a shocking tragedy was enacted at Little Farm, near Buglawton, a village a few miles distant from Congleton, Cheshire. At the farm lived Hester Horabin and her only son James, who assisted her in the management of the farm. James Horabin, who had for some time been in a depressed condition, yesterday seized a knife and made a sudden and most determined attack upon his mother. After a terrible struggle he inflicted a dreadful gash in his mother’s throat, and she died almost immediately.”
We are some 80 words in before the mother’s death — the most pertinent detail in the story — is related. This is a feat of information deferment which would make the most click-hungry of modern journalists blush. And if today’s papers were to suddenly adopt its tone and syntax, they would simply sound more old-fashioned. They would not be better written.
Academic writing has changed too. In 1880, the critic Edmund Gosse wrote a study of the seventeenth-century poet Samuel Rowlands. In a slightly mixed metaphor, Gosse remarks that Rowlands was one of “the lesser stars of the Elizabethan galaxy” and “it is left to us, therefore, as to those who map the heavens, to draw an approximate outline of his life by the conjunction of those works or stars that form his constellation”. Turning to a 1622 collection of poems, Gosse verbosely tells us that “according to all probable computation, Rowlands by this time was at least fifty years of age”. Here we can clearly see the colourful and loquacious style which affords a superficial elegance to his writing.
All this said, there are reasons to suspect the average person today may be less eloquent and bookish than some of their literate ancestors. The drive for mass literacy in the late nineteenth century was complemented by the drawing up of reading lists of classic works which were reprinted for the masses — comprising such writers and poets as Homer, Plutarch, Virgil, and Aristotle.
Historian Jonathan Rose has argued, though, that it was Dickens who reigned supreme. In Welsh miners’ libraries, he was the most widely stocked novelist and had a “dominating presence” in the memoirs of those workers who encountered him; his novel David Copperfield (1850) was eagerly devoured by the public, one London schoolboy later recalling that “Dickens was a fairy musician to us, filling our minds with a sweeter strain than the constant cry of hunger, or the howling wind”. These people read him critically, too, and in turn developed a kind of cultural literacy which had political implications. “Perhaps Dickens’ most important gift to the working classes,” Rose observes, “was the role he played in making them articulate.”
Today, students of English literature at two American universities are unable to understand the opening paragraph of Dickens’ novel Bleak House (1853), according to a study in 2024. Some thought a piece of imagery about a Megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill referred literally to a dinosaur prowling the streets of London in his work. In the same year, an Oxford professor warned that literature students struggle to read the long books they are assigned.
Doubtless the continued encroachment of short-form social media content into daily life has not helped us develop or maintain our literary muscles. WhatsApp messages, informal and fleeting as they are, presumably do not rely on or induce the same writing skills required to sit down and pen a letter.
But critics of modern literacy must be careful not to fall victim to sampling bias. Virtually all people in the West can read and write, and social media has become a huge landfill of lumbering and broken prose. Online blogs and Twitter feeds can be stumbled upon completely by accident, but one is hardly likely to have a chance encounter with nineteenth-century ephemera.
Much of the writing from bygone times, including a great deal of professional writing from before the eighteenth century, has been lost altogether. Those pieces which have survived owe their existence to collectors who thought their quality merited saving — and of these, it is usually the best-written which are deemed worth showing to the public. The digitization of documents, especially if made freely accessible to all, will perhaps temper this imbalance slightly.
Many an aged mediocre news article and printed story lies dustily forgotten in the archives, accruing more attention from mites than human readers. There is also surely a trove of virtually unperused Substack newsletters waiting to be discovered by the literary historians of the future. Will they, like some of us, stand in awe at the quality of their ancestors’ writing and lament the degradation of their own?
