Ah, now that about the guy himself is quite interesting.
I flagged this thing up in another thread actually. Maybe I should have put it on this forum instead.
I did it and came off with 42%. My father came off with a mere 17%. Admittedly, I've never read anything much of Dickens because I can't stand him (to me he is like
Les Misérables, but without the content and the thought behind it), but I personally thought that the worst passages in that series were actually Lytton's, not Dickens's... How wrong I was.
Maybe if you knew about Dickens's style, you could tell the difference, as Mona so aptly showed
, but then possibly the idea of deciding which is better written is skewed. Now, probably the guy took the most dysmal passages in Dickens to put maybe up against some slightly better ones by Lytton. Who knows.
I'm sure Lytton is bad or at least at the lower end of mediocre compared to Hardy or Thackeray, but then where is Dickens? I grant you, Dickens wrote some great stories. You can make me sit through millions of adaptations of Dickens stories (even multiple adaptations of the same stories if you like), but don't make me sit through a novel of his. Maybe it was Lytton's characterisation that doesn't get through to people anymore, maybe it is what we now perceive as the cliché (the dark and stormy night was indeed, not such a cliché as it is now; I'm sure you could get a Radcliffe prize in that respect too, in that case), maybe it is (judging from those few passages) the not-original style or whatever and his one-dimensional characterisation, I'm told. But the fact remains that not every sentence can be admired in Dickens (in which writer can that be done anyway? Kafka has many admirable sentences, but even he had some instantances of normality).
I'm sure that if you got well-read people to evaluate blind a number of random exerpts from Victorian writers merely for their style and had them put them in order from better to worse that Dickens would not come out on top.
I like some Dickens bashing.