George Washington by Henry Cabot Lodge
Published 1889 · 427 pages · 180,000 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Biography, History, Nonfiction
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.
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.