The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence by Raymond Williams
Published 1970 · 85,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism
How hard is The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence to read?
The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence scores 51 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 56 out of 100
- Williams writes with unusual clarity for a theorist of his political commitments.
- Sentence structure: 52 out of 100
- Abstraction: 68 out of 100
- Formal and social analysis combined at a level of medium abstraction.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Each chapter offers substantive close reading with historical contextualization.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Argument is direct and cumulative.
- Symbolic density: 12 out of 100
- Analytical.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Critical but not detached; Williams is deeply invested in his subjects.
- Resolution withholding: 12 out of 100
- Each chapter reaches its conclusions about its author.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Organized chronologically by novelist within a unifying social-formal argument.
How The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence is regarded
The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence holds a literary regard score of 82 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.