Victorian English

[Anonymous No.10993092]

Why did Victorian writers express themselves in such a complicated and circuitous manner? Were they simply a bunch of pseuds trying to make themselves look smart, or did people genuinely speak like that?

Also, if Victorian writers were alive today, would they find our written English easier to understand than their own?

I'm reading the English Constitution by Walter Bagehot and I feel that everything he writes could be conveyed much more simply and clearly. I can barely make out some of the points he tries to get across because of his vague descriptions and tendency to use extremely complicated syntax and sentences that span half a page.

[Anonymous No.10993571]

Bump

[Anonymous No.10993664]

>>10993092
ur just a plebian brainlet, lad

[Anonymous No.10993687]

>>10993664
Thanks for answering my questions

[Anonymous No.10993707]

>>10993092
Victorians loved purple prose

[Anonymous No.10993719]

>>10993092
their goal wasn't to imitate real life

[Anonymous No.10993720]

They would think of our English as shitty poor person talk.

[Anonymous No.10993730]

>>10993092
It's mostly a matter of acclimatizing yourself. Yes, Victorian writers generally used stilted clever prose, not natural speech, but it wasn't that far from educated discourse. Remember that the upper and lower classes could barely decipher each other: England had so many dialects and speech patterns that one needed a "common" educated parlance to communicate to the literate.

[Anonymous No.10993760]

I'm not sure what you're talking about, Dickens is very straightforward. He wrote serialized novels for a pretty substantial audience, after all.

Now Henry James on the other hand...

[Anonymous No.10993763]

>>10993092
Many reasons. Foremost because high art was still the sole domain of the classically educated and noble -- the democratization of literacy, public education, and art has lead in a general 'massification' aka degradation of language. Second because they were still living in under the shadow of baroque aesthetics and Shakespearean English and Aristotelian and Cicerian rhetoric . And last, the world hasn't yet been taken over by Capital and its utilitarian angel of efficiency (see: look at how even the non-fiction and professional reference books were written in those times compared to the very dry, very dry technical writing today) and in the modern managerial era, no one gives a shit about beauty.

and the unprovable meme answer is the Victorians had a higher IQ

[Anonymous No.10993765]

>>10993092
Decorum, bitch.

[Anonymous No.10993773]

>>10993763
Modern styles have so much more depth than the literary scope Victorians confined themselves to, which consisted of Romantacism and Gothic. Simple as. No one has time for that shit.

[Anonymous No.10993795]

>>10993092
This my not explain all of it; but, Dryden had started a popular trend of imitating Latin grammar, Dryden being popular his style of hybrid Anglo-Latin grammar was taught in schools across Victorian England, this drifted language in , not only in, speech but the written word.
That stereotypical abuse of speech the upper-class speech we hear in period-dramas ;and the like, on Victorian Britain as well as there literary style can be sourced to Dryden's love of Latin (all so prior to the Victorian era Roman literature was more popular than Greek works especially during the Augustean period).

[Anonymous No.10994175]

>>10993773
Somebody hasn't read Gissing, Kipling, Hardy, or Meredith.