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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I agree with 9:19.

The opening of Bleak House is a particularly challenging passage, far more challenging than the rest of that novel. I would argue it was written specifically to grab the reader by making the familiar strange. The passage includes a number of referents that would have been familiar to 19th century English readers (Michaelmas Term, Lord Chancellor, Lincoln’s Inn Hall, Holborn Hill, and what London used to be like in November back when everyone burned coal for heating and cooking and the streets were not yet paved). But no one in 21st century Kansas is or should be casually familiar with these things. So for them this passage makes the strange, stranger. Of course they struggled. The use of this passage for this particular research purpose leads me to believe that the researchers themselves don’t really understand the material or that they are operating in bad faith. [/quote]

It assumes students know a lot about London for the time.  Now given that the students could do some research on Dickens and then Londo at the time, they should have been able to understand more.  But I don't suspect most did that.  It's also over descriptive at times IMO.  Here is the full passage:

"LONDON. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. 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. 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. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. 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."

All this to basically say it was a cold, rainy, and dreary November day in London. On this particular street thick mud abounds, causing people to slip and slide about while knocking into one another because of the frequency of umbrellas. Meanwhile, it's still drizzling, and the sky is filled with smog from the chimneys.  Everyone and everything is miserable including the dogs left outside and the horses.[/quote]

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