https://ourworldindata.org/literacy/ gives literacy rates of around 75% in Great Britain and the USA in 1851.

I would guess that's not _that_ low that it would have made an impact on those reading those reviews.

Chances are this has more to do with the limited, high-brow, circulation of these reviews. Harper's, for example, seems to have had a circulation of around 50,000 in 1851 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper%27s_Magazine#History). The USA had a population of about 23,000,000 at the time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1850_United_States_Census), so it would have reached less than 1% of the population.

Interestingly, the circulation percentage is even lower today.

> think what happened in that time was a kind of competition, where critics like these had a tendency to write things that are more difficult to read, in an attempt to prove how much more literate they are.

Are... these reviews considered difficult to read or especially overwritten, then? Or did you mean something else?

> bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English

Are these not legitimate grounds on which to judge a book? To the extent that these are smaller concerns for modern reviewers (are they?) I'd guess it has more to do with our having settled on a style of prose that allows little variation and is very simple, for a large majority of literature. We now expect and receive little poetry in our prose, to put it another way.

I don't think Moby Dick suffers from bad rhetoric, etc - although some of these reviews may do.

Language has become Hollywoodised over the last few decades. We've lost the ability to express colour and imagination through language - not just through plot or predictable genre tropes.

Modern fiction is more like a journalistic description of a movie or TV show, and less like an independent medium that sculpts language into story structures for its own sake.

I wouldn't say that the use of language in writing is a superficial thing to focus on. The language is the medium through which the author expresses whatever information they're trying to convey. It's always going to be one of the top two things to focus on when critiquing a work of fiction.

All interpersonal communication in any medium is semantically lossy- language is an intermediary through which you are attempting to encode a concept or story or feeling, so that someone else can decode your words into a similar concept/story/feeling whatever inside their own head. Language is the middleman, and an author's skill with language imposes a ceiling on how well they can transfer their ideas to other people.

In the case of fiction, language serves double duty as an art form in and of itself. Both the medium and the message are components of a creative work. Otherwise, every novel would be nothing more than outlines of plots describing sequences of imaginary events, which would be pointless.

I would also disagree with the characterization of /r/iamverysmart- in principle at least, it isn't there for shunning people trying to sound literate. It's for teasing people (usually teenagers or college undergrads going through a phase) who have started to learn interesting things about the world, who are very impressed with their own knowledge, and are expressing ignorance and narcissism rather than the 10-megaton knowledge bombs that they think they're carpet bombing everyone with. Not that I'm in favor of shunning anyone who isn't harming others- it's too mean-spirited and easy to abuse.

I don't see this at all. In fact, I think you have this exactly backwards. The negative criticisms here are by men who see themselves as plain-speaking (writing) commonsense types and see Melville's work as radical and unconventional. Literacy as a status symbol could only have meaning within a very small public sphere - in other words literacy was extremely high within the group that could be expected to do ANY reading AT ALL. There have always been people who write with deliberate obscurity to appear smarter but the language of these reviews and their concerns with language are entirely straightforward in terms of the standards of their day.

> Literacy rates in the 1800s were low.

Not all that low. Even in 1870, 80% of the US population were literate (and nearly 90% of the white population).

https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp

And although now we've pushed literacy up from 80% to 90-something percent, I wonder whether literacy is actually lower than it was in the 1850s. More people are literate, but those who are literate are on average less literate, because we've pushed our educational standards down in an effort to pick up those last 20%.

I think that sort of competition still very much exists. It's just that - in the Anglosphere, at any rate - the baseline for literacy is far higher. You need only look at the snobbery involved in choice of newspaper to see it.