There are few spectacles more dispiriting to the devoted reader than that of sitting down with a perfectly good book, every intention honourable and every circumstance favourable, only to discover, somewhere in the middle of the second page, that one has read the same sentence four times, absorbed none of it, and is now thinking with quite unreasonable urgency about whether somebody has replied to a message.
It would be comforting to pretend that the modern reader has ceased to read, for this would at least give us a simple villain and a simple remedy, but the truth is considerably more awkward: we read almost incessantly. We read before getting out of bed and while eating breakfast; we read headlines, captions, messages, comments, advertisements, arguments between strangers, shopping reviews, fragments of articles, fragments of conversations and fragments of other people's lives, until a person may quite easily have encountered several thousand words before luncheon while retaining very little beyond the vague impression that somebody somewhere is furious about something. What has altered is not necessarily the quantity of our reading but its manner. We have become extraordinarily accomplished at moving through words and increasingly unaccustomed to remaining with them.
This distinction becomes painfully obvious when one attempts, after several hours spent in the company of a telephone, to open a Victorian novel. George Eliot does not present herself in fourteen-second instalments. Dickens, having introduced a gentleman, considers it perfectly reasonable to acquaint us with his hat, his waistcoat, the state of his whiskers, the expression with which he enters a room and the peculiar moral implications of the way in which he blows his nose before permitting him to perform whatever small service the plot originally required. Elizabeth Gaskell may allow half a chapter to pass in conversation during which nothing explodes, nobody is murdered and yet three people manage to misunderstand one another so thoroughly that the consequences will occupy another hundred pages. To the reader who has become accustomed to novelty arriving every few seconds, such fiction may initially seem impossibly slow; but it is precisely in that slowness, and in the mental resistance it provokes, that its usefulness begins.
The phrase bibliotherapy has acquired a certain fashionable elasticity, and it is worth saying at once that no sensible person should expect Middlemarch to substitute for medical treatment, however highly one may estimate George Eliot's understanding of the human condition. Yet books have always had uses beyond instruction and entertainment, and one of the less dramatic but increasingly valuable effects of sustained reading is that it requires us to exercise a faculty modern life continually encourages us to fragment: attention. Victorian fiction is particularly good at this because it does not merely reward concentration; it assumes it. The reader is expected to remember, to infer, to wait, to revise an opinion and, on occasion, to return to the beginning of a sentence with the chastening realisation that the fault lies not in the semicolon but in oneself.
We often speak of the shortening of the modern attention span as though some invisible thief had broken into civilisation during the night and made off with everybody's powers of concentration, leaving only a trail of notifications behind him. Yet attention is not merely something we possess; it is also something we practise, and the habits of contemporary digital life have made us very practised indeed at one particular form of it. We look, assess, respond and move on. A message arrives while we are reading an article, the message reminds us of something we intended to search for, the search produces a video, the video contains the name of an actor whose age suddenly seems indispensable to our happiness, and twenty minutes later we have acquired a surprising quantity of information about a stranger while entirely forgetting what we originally meant to do.
There is nothing inherently foolish about this kind of mental agility, and much of modern life depends upon it, but there is a cost in becoming accustomed to perpetual transition. The mind begins to expect interruption in the same way that the body may begin to expect sugar: not because it requires it, but because repetition has established a rhythm. A page which offers no flashing icon, no sudden movement and no promise of something newer immediately beneath it may therefore seem strangely inert. Victorian fiction responds to this impatience with magnificent indifference. It will not accelerate because you are restless. A character has entered the room and you do not yet know why he matters; a letter has been mentioned which may not become significant for sixty pages; somebody has made a remark whose cruelty is disguised as politeness and the narrator expects you to have noticed. The book does not rearrange itself around your distraction. You must rearrange yourself around the book.
This is one of the reasons long-form reading can feel difficult after too much time spent online, but it is also the reason the difficulty is useful. Every time the reader resists the impulse to look elsewhere, every time she notices that her attention has wandered and deliberately returns it to the page, she is practising continuity. There is no spectacular moment in which concentration suddenly returns, no intellectual fanfare announcing that one's ruined attention span has been restored to factory settings; there is merely the gradual discovery that ten uninterrupted pages have become twenty, and that twenty have become forty, and that somewhere along the way the telephone has ceased to feel quite so magnetically important.
There are sentences which deliver information and sentences which require the reader to accompany them, and nineteenth-century prose is gloriously full of the latter. A long Victorian sentence may establish an idea, qualify it, wander through an irony, introduce an exception, complicate the original assertion and arrive at its conclusion only after the reader has been obliged to keep the whole little structure suspended in the mind. The beginning cannot simply be discarded once the eye has reached the middle, because the meaning of the end may depend upon remembering precisely how the sentence began.
George Eliot is particularly exacting in this respect because she is rarely content to tell us merely what a character has done; she wishes us to understand how that character has managed to do something selfish while believing himself generous, something foolish while congratulating himself upon his wisdom, or something cruel while remaining sincerely persuaded that he is the injured party. Her sentences often contain the same contradictions her characters do, and to read them properly is to follow thought as it changes shape. Dickens demands another sort of attention, less philosophical perhaps but no less alert: his novels teem with faces, gestures, verbal tics, recurring objects and people whose names alone deserve to be remembered, while Gaskell builds emotional meaning out of pauses, misunderstandings and social distinctions which disappear completely if the reader is only half present.
Such prose is unfriendly to skimming, and this is precisely its charm. One cannot keep a Victorian novel open on the knee while simultaneously checking messages, browsing photographs and conducting a desultory argument in a family group chat without eventually discovering that somebody has become engaged, ruined, estranged or unexpectedly wealthy during one's absence. The text punishes inattention not maliciously but naturally: if you leave the room, things happen without you. The only remedy is to go back and read again, an experience sufficiently annoying to discourage repeated desertion.
The modern reader is constantly being courted. A video must capture attention at once, an article must explain why it deserves to be read before it has been read, a headline must astonish, a platform must refresh, and almost every form of digital entertainment behaves as though the audience is forever standing at the door with its coat already on. It is hardly surprising that we have begun to mistake immediacy for quality and slowness for failure.
Victorian fiction was produced under rather different assumptions. It does not seem perpetually afraid that you will leave. It will describe the weather if the weather matters, and occasionally when it does not; it will furnish a house before allowing anything dramatic to occur inside it; it will supply the ancestry of a minor character whom a modern novelist might have permitted to enter, deliver a telegram and vanish before the end of the paragraph. This expansiveness can irritate at first because it withholds the rapid rewards to which we have grown accustomed, but if one remains with it long enough, the terms of pleasure begin to change. Description stops feeling like an obstacle between events and becomes part of the event itself; conversation acquires suspense because we understand the relationships beneath it; a quiet dinner becomes interesting because we know precisely which two people ought not to be seated beside one another and why.
The change is subtle, but it matters. The reader is no longer being jolted into attention by novelty; she is discovering that attention can generate its own pleasure. This is a far more durable kind of concentration because it does not depend upon constant stimulation. Indeed, one of the strange satisfactions of reading an old and leisurely novel is the recognition that nothing particularly sensational has happened for twenty pages and yet one has not wanted to leave.
A long novel does something that a succession of isolated pieces of content cannot easily do: it accumulates. After a hundred pages, a house is no longer simply a house because we remember the quarrel that occurred in the breakfast room and the confidence exchanged on the stairs; a name carries with it the history of everything that person has said; an apparently casual remark may suddenly acquire weight because another character repeats it several chapters later. The reader gradually constructs an elaborate private architecture in which people, places and incidents remain available to be revisited and reinterpreted.
This is one reason returning to a novel feels so different from opening a feed. The feed continually asks, What is new? The novel asks, What do you remember? Its pleasures depend upon continuity, and Victorian novels, with their large casts and intricate social worlds, make particularly vigorous use of it. A person introduced in the first volume may matter enormously in the third; a judgment formed early may prove embarrassingly mistaken; a marriage which seemed desirable at the beginning may reveal, by degrees rather than catastrophe, the exact shape of its misery. The reader must hold all this in mind while permitting new information to alter what has already been understood.
There is something almost luxurious in this demand now, because so much of digital life is designed to make remembering unnecessary. The next item arrives whether or not the previous one has been absorbed. The novel refuses such easy replacement. Its past remains present, and the quality of the reader's experience depends upon keeping it so.