There are few disappointments quite so peculiar to the devoted reader as that of finding oneself alone with a book one has been genuinely longing to read, with an hour unexpectedly free and every outward circumstance arranged in favour of concentration, only to discover, somewhere halfway down the second page, that although the eyes have travelled obediently across every line, the mind has declined to accompany them. The sentence is read again, with rather more determination; then a third time, by which point one is no longer thinking about the sentence at all, but about a message which may or may not have been answered, an article one meant to look up yesterday, or some other matter which five minutes earlier possessed no importance whatsoever and has now, by the obscure workings of a distracted mind, become intolerably urgent.

It would be convenient to conclude from this that modern people no longer read, but the truth is both less dramatic and rather more interesting. On an average day of an average person today, reading is quite closely integrated into everyday life. Before breakfast, many of us have already travelled through messages, headlines, advertisements, captions, reviews, comments and fragments of articles, collecting along the way the domestic announcements of acquaintances, the opinions of strangers and perhaps the details of a controversy in which we had never intended to become involved. By noon we may have encountered more written words than a nineteenth-century reader saw in several days, and yet much of what has passed before us leaves remarkably little behind. We have not so much abandoned reading as altered the conditions under which we perform it. Our eyes have become extraordinarily efficient travellers; our attention, rather less inclined to settle anywhere for long.

It is at this point that the Victorian novel begins to appear almost indecently demanding. George Eliot has no intention of presenting herself in convenient little portions, nor does she seem especially concerned that the reader should be rewarded every twelve seconds for remaining in her company. Dickens, having introduced a gentleman who needs only to cross a room and deliver a piece of information, may reasonably decide that before permitting him to do so we ought to know something of his coat, his gait, his whiskers, his habitual expression. Elizabeth Gaskell may spend several pages on a conversation that seems, at first, almost uneventful, only for some small misunderstanding or unguarded remark to linger long after the scene has ended and quietly shape what follows.

To a mind accustomed to novelty appearing almost before the previous novelty has been properly registered, this can feel, at first, like resistance. The novel will not hurry merely because the reader is restless; will not place a bright object in the next paragraph to prevent departure, nor interrupt itself with a reminder that something more exciting is coming. It proceeds upon the serene assumption that if we have opened the book, we mean to remain there; and it is precisely in this apparent inconvenience, I think, that much of its usefulness lies.

The word bibliotherapy has lately acquired such an accommodating breadth that almost any benefit derived from reading may be persuaded to shelter beneath it, and it is worth stating at once that no sensible person should expect Middlemarch to perform the work of medicine, however profound George Eliot’s knowledge of the human mind may be. Yet books have always done more for us than merely communicate information or provide diversion, and one of the quieter gifts of sustained reading is that it exercises a faculty which contemporary life continually encourages us to divide: the ability to just remain.

Victorian fiction is especially exacting in this respect because it does not merely reward attention; it presumes it. The reader is expected to remark small details and incidents which may acquire significance only much later, and occasionally to reach the end of a magnificent sentence with the chastening realisation that the difficulty lay not in the author’s punctuation but in one’s own wandering mind.

We Have Not Lost Our Attention So Much as Educated It Differently

We often speak of the shortening of the modern attention span as though concentration were an heirloom which previous generations possessed intact and which we, through some collective negligence, have managed to misplace. Yet attention is not simply a quantity stored somewhere within the mind; it is also a habit, and habits become stronger the more they are most frequently exercised.

Contemporary life has trained us extremely well in a particular species of alertness. We look, assess, respond and move on. A message arrives while we are reading an article; the message reminds us of something we meant to search for; the search produces a video; the video mentions a topic; and within a few minutes we are in possession of several facts about that topic while the article we were in the process of perusing has vanished entirely from memory.

This mental agility we have acquired is quite essential for navigating much of modern life, which depends upon precisely such rapid transitions, and the ability to move efficiently between several demands is often useful. The trouble begins when a mode of attention designed for perpetual switching becomes our default condition, because the mind soon begins to expect interruption even in its absence. A quiet page, which neither moves nor refreshes nor offers a new stimulus beneath the present one, may then feel strangely lifeless, not because nothing is happening but because it asks us to discover the interest already there rather than continually delivering another object for us to notice.

The Victorian novel meets this impatience with admirable composure. A character has entered, and we do not yet know why he matters. A letter has been mentioned, but its importance may not emerge for another hundred pages. Somebody has made an apparently courteous remark which contains, for the attentive reader, an insult sufficiently sharp to alter the whole scene, although the narrator will not obligingly underline it. The book does not rearrange itself around our distraction; we must, instead, recover the old ability to arrange ourselves around the book.

This is why sustained reading can feel unexpectedly difficult after several hours spent online, but it is also why that difficulty can be valuable. Each time attention wanders and is brought back, the mind is practising continuity, and there follows a gradual discovery that fifteen uninterrupted pages have become thirty, that thirty have become fifty, and that somewhere in the middle of them the smartphone has ceased, for a little while, to exercise quite such an absurd authority over one’s imagination.

The Victorian Sentence Refuses to Be Hurried

There are sentences which exist chiefly to transport information from writer to reader, and there are sentences which require the reader to enter into the movement of the thought itself; nineteenth-century prose, at its finest, is quite abundant in the latter.

A Victorian sentence may begin by stating an idea, qualify it almost immediately, introduce an exception, wander through an irony, admit a contradiction and return at last to its original proposition having made it subtler than it appeared when first introduced. To read such a sentence properly is not merely to gather its information but to keep its structure alive in the mind until the final clause has shown us what the first was really doing. The beginning cannot simply be discarded once the eye has advanced beyond it, because the meaning of the conclusion may depend entirely upon remembering the precise shape of what came before.

George Eliot is particularly demanding in this way because she is almost never satisfied with the surface of a motive. Her characters perform astonishing feats of self-deception while remaining, in many cases, perfectly sincere. Eliot’s sentences are built to contain these contradictions, and to follow them is to watch thought turning upon itself, and disguising its own impulses while remaining recognisably human.

Dickens demands another species of vigilance. His novels are so densely populated that a careless reader may lose track of a minor figure for 10 chapters only to have that person return, usually at the exact moment one had congratulated oneself upon finally understanding the plot. His characters announce themselves through verbal habits, gestures, clothing, peculiarities of movement and names so extravagantly suited to them that forgetting any of it feels almost ungrateful. Gaskell is subtler in another direction, building entire emotional structures out of hesitation, class distinction, wounded pride and the things people cannot quite bring themselves to say. In North and South, a conversation may appear perfectly civil while beneath it two opposing moral worlds are colliding.

Such prose is naturally hostile to skimming, and this hostility is part of its charm. You cannot keep Middlemarch open upon your lap while simultaneously answering messages, without discovering that you have overlooked some significant turn in the plot while your attention was elsewhere. The text does not punish inattention out of spite; it simply continues without us, and the embarrassment of returning to find oneself completely lost is often enough to make divided attention seem less attractive the next time.

The Real Luxury Is Absorption

We have developed an unfortunate habit of requiring pleasure to justify its existence. Reading, especially, is constantly recruited into the service of improvement. We are told that it enlarges the vocabulary, strengthens empathy, reduces stress, sharpens cognition and improves professional performance, until one begins to wonder whether the novel is permitted to remain a novel at all or must eventually be marketed as a particularly elegant form of productivity software.

There may be truth in many of these claims, but they miss something essential. Attention is not valuable only because it can later be converted into greater efficiency. It is valuable because it determines the depth with which we experience almost everything.

Music listened to while answering messages is not quite the same music. A conversation conducted while one eye remains upon a screen is not quite the same conversation. And a book reduced to its summary may leave us in possession of the facts while depriving us of the peculiar intimacy which comes only from having lived for several hours inside another consciousness.

A novel offers one of the increasingly rare forms of pleasure which cannot be fully hurried. We become familiar with houses that do not exist, worry about the financial prospects of imaginary families, remember conversations between people whose fictional lives concluded more than a century ago, and carry their troubles into entirely unrelated portions of our day.

There is something restorative in this not because it accomplishes some measurable programme of self-improvement, but because absorption is itself a form of relief. For an hour, perhaps two, the mind is released from the obligation to monitor everything at once. It is permitted to belong wholly to one world, and in an age so devoted to divided attention, that simple experience can feel almost extravagant.

Why Victorian Fiction in Particular?

It would be absurd to suggest that nineteenth-century fiction holds some exclusive patent upon concentration. Almost any demanding work of long-form reading can cultivate the habits I have described, and there are contemporary novels which ask as much of the reader as anything written in the late 19th century. Yet Victorian fiction remains especially suited to the exercise because so many of its characteristic pleasures depend upon exactly those mental habits which digital distraction most easily erodes: patience, memory, inference, sustained curiosity and tolerance for complexity.

Most of the novels published during this era are long enough that one must establish a genuine relationship with them. Their social worlds are densely populated enough to reward attention, their plots sufficiently intricate that forgotten details may return with consequences, and their narrators often proceed upon the flattering assumption that the reader possesses intelligence enough to understand what has not been fully explained. Above all, they belong to a literary world comparatively free from the contemporary terror that an audience not immediately gratified will vanish.

Charlotte Brontë does not interrupt Jane Eyre to assure us that another astonishing revelation is only three paragraphs away and George Eliot does not provide periodic recaps for the benefit of anybody whose attention wandered during the previous chapter. These writers assume that if we have entered their world, we intend to inhabit it for a while. At first this confidence may seem almost arrogant, but eventually it begins to feel like respect. The book does not shout after us because it assumes we are capable of staying.

Attention Does Not Need to Become Another Project

Perhaps the easiest way into Victorian fiction is not to approach it as a corrective at all. There is no need to make a project of concentration, or to treat the novel as some stern instrument for repairing habits acquired elsewhere. It may be enough simply to give it a little more room than one usually gives a screen: a quiet half hour, perhaps, in which nothing else is especially pressing. Read that way, the pleasure tends to announce itself without much assistance. The sentences begin to lose their initial heaviness, the apparently leisurely passages gather texture, and one finds, almost without noticing when it happened, that the world outside the book has become rather less insistent. It brings a quieter form of pleasure which many habitual readers recognise the instant it returns: the experience of becoming so absorbed in a book that, upon looking up, one requires a moment to remember where one actually is.

Perhaps that is the form of bibliotherapy most useful to us. Victorian fiction cannot cure the digital age, and there would be something rather absurd in wishing the digital age away while enjoying all its conveniences. What these novels can do is remind us that the mind is capable of modes of attention very different from the fragmented one we practise for much of the day.

We have become exceptionally skilled at distributing small quantities of attention among a great many things. There remains, however, an older and deeper pleasure in discovering how much more a thing contains when we allow ourselves, for a while, to give it nearly all of ours.

Written by Nishat Hossain. I write about books, culture, everyday life and the questions that make each of them interesting. For commissions and collaborations, visit my Work With Me page.