‘It’d be catastrophic if great books were only read by the elite’
Sir Jonathan Bate, Britain’s foremost Shakespeare scholar and a former Oxford college head, met scepticism this week when he insisted on a radio interview that while once his students would read three Dickens novels in a week, they now struggled to plough through one in three weeks.
A fellow Oxford academic wrote to The Times to point out that this feat would require 13 hours of concentrated reading a day. Speaking on Zoom from America, where he has taught since leaving his post at Worcester College, Oxford, in 2019, Bate admits that he was “partly exaggerating for rhetorical effect”.
“When I was at Cambridge only swots like me and Stephen Fry actually read all the books,” he said.
Nevertheless, during his eight years as provost of Worcester, he noticed a decline. “I talked to pretty well every student in the course about their time there, and there’s no doubt that they’d read a lot less,” he added.
