A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell
Published 1951 · 240 pages · 70,855 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Social Novel, Roman-fleuve
How hard is A Question of Upbringing to read?
A Question of Upbringing scores 60 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Powell employs a precise Edwardian-inflected vocabulary — 'abnegation,' 'solecism,' 'appanage,' 'capricious,' 'vituperation' — without the arcane density of Modernist difficulty. Characters quote Andrew Lang and Callimachus in passing, and French phrases (grognard, souffrante, en pension) appear untranslated. The register is that of an educated English narrator circa 1950: elevated, exact, but accessible to any reader comfortable with literary prose.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Powell's sentences are long and multiply subordinated, piling clauses in the manner of a careful retrospective narrator qualifying every observation. 'For some reason, the sight of snow descending on fire always makes me think of the ancient world — legionaries in sheepskin warming themselves at a brazier' is characteristic: a main clause followed by a long em-dash expansion, then a list of appositives. The prose demands attentive reading but resists genuine obscurity; the syntax is always grounded in a grammatically clear spine.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- The novel balances concrete social observation with periodic, measured philosophical reflection. The opening Poussin-and-Time meditation sets a conceptual frame — human beings moving 'hand in hand in intricate measure' — that recurs in the narrator's commentary on friendship, social class, and the passage of time. These passages are thoughtful but brief; the novel's dominant mode is precise, physical social comedy rather than abstraction.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Each scene densely populates the social field: the boarding-house at La Grenadière introduces Widmerpool, two quarrelling Scandinavians, the Dubuissons, two French nieces, and two boys within a few pages. Character details accumulate quickly — Widmerpool's spectacles, Stringham's Veronese look, Sunny Farebrother's frayed elbows — and the narrator's retrospective commentary adds interpretive layers. Yet scenes are unhurried; Powell rewards patient readers rather than demanding rapid information processing.
- Narrative indirection: 70 out of 100
- Jenkins almost never states emotional truths directly. His growing attachment to Stringham and sense of loss at their diverging paths emerges entirely through observed detail — Stringham cutting their dinner engagement, the wave across Grosvenor Square — without the narrator naming grief. The significance of Widmerpool's overcoat, the Le Bas arrest prank, and Templer's 'unfortunate incident' are all delivered through anecdote, requiring readers to construct the broader portrait of class, character, and social consequence themselves.
- Symbolic density: 62 out of 100
- The Poussin painting of the Seasons as a figure for time and fate is established explicitly in the opening paragraph and subtly governs the whole novel's architecture. Widmerpool's wrong overcoat functions as a sustained emblem of social misfit-hood and thwarted ambition. Jenkins's recurring near-encounter with Jean Templer — always deflected, never resolved — symbolises the gap between desire and attainment that structures his coming-of-age. These symbols are present and deliberate but not laboured.
- Ironic distance: 72 out of 100
- Powell's irony is pervasive but quiet. Le Bas's pretensions to poetry and his humiliation via the Braddock alias Thorne hoax, Uncle Giles's self-serving radicalism, Widmerpool's earnest social climbing, Sillery's manipulation behind academic benevolence — all are rendered in a tone of polite, entirely deadpan comedy that declines to editorialise. The retrospective narrator knows more than he reveals, creating constant ironic distance between younger self and older narrator.
- Resolution withholding: 65 out of 100
- As the first volume of a twelve-novel sequence, the book by design withholds resolution. Jenkins's feelings for Jean Templer dissolve into uncertainty; his friendship with Stringham ends not with drama but with a wave across a square; Widmerpool disappears from the narrative at school still misplaced on the house list. Closure is systematically refused — every relationship merely suspends, to resume decades later — which is both a formal strategy and a condition of the novel's open-ended view of human life.
- Structural complexity: 45 out of 100
- The structure is straightforward chronological first-person retrospect, divided by asterisks into anecdotal sequences that cover school, the Templer household, a French summer, and university. The single POV is stable and the temporal sequence unfolds with only mild retrospective commentary. Complexity lies in the texture of observation rather than in narrative architecture; there are no timeline jumps, POV shifts, or formal experiments.
How A Question of Upbringing is regarded
A Question of Upbringing holds a literary regard score of 66 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.