George Washington by Henry Cabot Lodge
Published 1889 · 427 pages · 180,000 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Biography, History, Nonfiction
How many words are on a page? A ReadingRate study
How hard is George Washington to read?
George Washington scores 45 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. 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: 58 out of 100
- Lodge writes the formal, Latinate English of a Gilded Age man of letters, with long quotations from eighteenth-century letters in their original spelling and diction. Words such as 'imperilled', 'effusions' and 'trappings and suits of woe' and allusions to Shakespeare and Shelley assume a well-read audience.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Sentences are long and periodic, with balanced clauses and nested qualifications in the Victorian manner ('He had died in the fullness of time, quietly, quickly, and in his own house, and yet...'). The prose is controlled but slower going than a modern biography.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Most chapters narrate campaigns, cabinet quarrels and treaties concretely. Lodge regularly breaks off to judge character, political principle and 'the forms' of republican government, especially in the final chapter's portrait of the man.
- Information density: 62 out of 100
- Two volumes cover Virginia society, the Braddock campaign, the whole Revolutionary War, the Constitution and two presidential terms. Names of generals, ministers and congressmen come thick and fast, and Lodge assumes readers can place them.
- Argumentative complexity: 45 out of 100
- Lodge argues that the real Washington, 'an unknown man' behind the myth, was a passionate, shrewd and strongly partisan statesman. He sets Washington's Federalism against Jefferson's 'French notions' and defends his party role against critics, a sustained case the reader must weigh.
- Prerequisite knowledge: 55 out of 100
- The book assumes familiarity with the Revolution, the early republic's Federalist and Republican quarrels, and nineteenth-century writers on Washington such as Weems, Sparks, Irving and McMaster. Modern readers will want some background on 1790s politics.
- Terminological opacity: 30 out of 100
- Eighteenth-century military and political terms (Continental line, the Assumption, the Jay Treaty, Genêt) appear without much explanation, but there is no specialist jargon.
- Rhetorical indirection: 30 out of 100
- Lodge's judgements are explicit, and his partisanship is open: he praises Hamilton and scorns Jefferson in plain terms. His irony toward earlier hagiographers is easy to read.
- Systemic scope: 40 out of 100
- The biography joins colonial social history, military history, constitutional history and diplomacy, and closes with a character study. It stays within political and military biography.
How George Washington is regarded
George Washington holds a literary regard score of 47 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.