My late sister used to despair of me. She loved reading, as do I, so books were often exchanged as presents.
One year, I got up at 4:30am to go to Heathrow airport and wait in a book-signing queue to get the latest Stephen King book personally signed for her birthday. But when it came to buying books for me, I only ever suggested scientific ones, such as biographies of famous scientists or books on evolution or geology.
I have a confession. I have read very few ‘classic’ books. I read Oliver Twist as a child only because I was playing the Artful Dodger in a local operatic show. I tried Catch 22 as a young adult and gave up halfway through the first chapter. The same thing happened with James Joyce’s Ulysses (though I’ve been told that’s not at all unusual).
When people talk about reading classical literature, they often talk about it as if it were a kind of cultural passport, a document you must get stamped with Dickens, Austen, the Brontës and Hardy before you’re allowed to pass through the gates of polite society. Admit that you haven’t read Bleak House or that you stalled halfway through Jane Eyre, and you can watch their expressions shift from surprise to a faint, pitying amusement.
Yet the same people who treat nineteenth-century fiction as a universal benchmark will, without hesitation, dismiss the great scientific works of the same era as unreadable, irrelevant or impossibly dense. They will recoil at the idea of opening Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle or The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, even though these books were written for general readers and sold in their thousands to ordinary Victorians who had less scientific training than most of us today.
It’s a curious double standard that reveals more about our cultural habits than about the books themselves. We’ve inherited a hierarchy in which novels are seen as the accessible, human-centred heart of nineteenth-century literature, while science is relegated to the laboratory, imagined as a realm of equations, jargon, and impenetrable prose. Yet this is a distortion of history.
Dickens was a political journalist before he was a novelist, and his books were published in serial form for a mass audience. Darwin, meanwhile, wrote with a clarity and rhythm that many modern popular-science writers envy. His contemporaries read him not because they were scientists, but because they were curious. They wanted to understand the world, and Darwin gave them a way in.
The odd thing is that we still value curiosity, at least in theory. We praise lifelong learning, celebrate public engagement with science, and insist that education should open doors rather than close them. But when it comes to reading, we cling to a narrow canon of ‘classics’ that functions more like a cultural checklist than a genuine invitation to explore. People will nod approvingly if you say you’re rereading Great Expectations, but if you say you’re reading On the Origin of Species, they will assume you are either a specialist or a masochist.
Part of the problem is that we have separated literature and science so completely that they no longer seem to belong to the same imaginative world. In the nineteenth century, they did. The same readers who devoured Dickens also read Darwin, Huxley, and Lyell. The same magazines that published serialised fiction also ran essays on geology, botany, and the new science of evolution.
Today, however, we treat science as a specialist language that only experts can speak. This is why people assume Darwin must be unreadable, not because they have tried him, but because they have absorbed the idea that scientific writing is inherently difficult. Yet open The Voyage of the Beagle and you find a young man travelling through South America, marvelling at landscapes, animals, and people with the enthusiasm of a gifted storyteller.
Perhaps the real issue is that reading has become performative. People talk about books not only as sources of pleasure or insight, but as markers of identity. To say you have read Dickens is to signal cultural literacy. To say you have read Darwin is to risk being thought eccentric. We’ve created a hierarchy in which certain kinds of reading confer status while others are quietly sidelined.
There is something liberating about admitting that you have not read the books people expect you to have read. It opens the door to reading on your own terms, guided by curiosity rather than obligation. It also allows you to rediscover texts that have been unfairly labelled as ‘difficult’ simply because they belong to science rather than fiction.
Dr James Williams is an emeritus reader in science education and communication at Sussex University.
