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I wonder if there's an Victorian -> contemporary English filter. While I actually like Victorian prose, I know some people (especially non-native English speake
by jhbadger 4y ago
I wonder if there's an Victorian -> contemporary English filter. While I actually like Victorian prose, I know some people (especially non-native English speakers) are put off from reading Charles Dickens and the like because of the Victorian style which can come across as stilted to to modern ear. Maybe a filter could be made to make Victorian prose seem more modern.
- tempodox 4y agoPlease don't. Half of the fun is the time travel into a different culture, or maybe even most of it.
- wolfgang42 4y agoIt’s not just the phrasing, though; there’s also a lot of cultural context that the modern reader will miss without footnotes to guide them. For example, from Oliver Twist: > It was a meanly furnished apartment, with nothing but the contents of the closet to induce the belief that its occupier was anything but a working man; and with no more suspicious articles displayed to view than two or three heavy bludgeons which stood in a corner, and a “life-preserver”* that hung over the chimney-piece. > * ‘life-preserver’: stick weighted with lead; widely used for self-protection. That footnote rather drastically changes the mental picture for the modern reader!
- jhbadger 4y agoThat reminds me of how, in A Christmas Carol, Dickens describes a ghost glowing like "a bad lobster in a dark cellar". Some modern people think Dickens was just being surreal, but there was a real meaning to this. Before refrigeration, people would keep meat and seafood in the cellar as was cooler than elsewhere. But not cool enough and things would rot after a couple of days. One of the bacteria that rots seafood is Vibrio, which often has genes for luminescence. So you could see if seafood had gone off if it glowed.