Is there a longer opening sentence or paragraph than this in English literature (popular or classical)
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Strauss (
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September 19th, 2009
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. Dickens, __A Tale Of Two Cities__.
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16 Answers
I don’t know, but I’d hate to think we’d maxed out at 119 words. I’m guessing there is.
I’ve said it before: too much drama over a fucking little comma. What dif. does it make if it was Strunk and Whited to editorial perfection, whittled down to normal sentences a la New York Times, or was one long ramble like they used to write back in Dicken’s day?
Just saying.
Not to troll, to answer your question without googling, I’d say it’s probably one of the longest, and most brilliant, opening sentences ever. Bar none.
I swear to God the second i saw the question without clicking on it to read the details i immediately thought about that specific sentence!
But this got me to thinking… i know these don´t count as opening sentences but i thought it was interesting:
By length in words
* 1,287 words – The Guinness Book of World Records has an entry for what it claims is the longest sentence in English, from William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! containing 1,287 words.
* 12,931 – The last section of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, consists of two sentences. The first one is 11,281 words long, and the second is 12,931 words long.
* 13,955 – In 2001 Jonathan Coe had a 13,955-word sentence in his novel, The Rotters’ Club.[4]
* 2,403,109 – A single sentence spans Volumes 16, 17, 18 and 19 of Nigel Tomm’s absurdist work The Blah Story. [5]. Most of this sentence consists of repetitions of the word “blah”. Volume 19 consists mostly of a single 3,609,750-letter word, itself an agglutination of many previously known long words.
* 3,000,000 – Mark Leach’s Marienbad My Love, marketed as the world’s longest published novel in English, features a sentence that contains about 3 million words of the 17 million-word book.[6][7]
It is a very powerful opening sentence. But considering the length of the final two sentences of James Joyce’s Ulysses are over 10K words each….oops @Dr_C and apparently @cyndihugs beat me to it….......
@whatthefluther we have been thwarted by the mighty mind of @cyndihugs as the lovely and talented @augustlan was kind enough to point out. I must say however that while i do enjoy Dickens, i have a soft spot in my heart for Faulkner and Joyce.
BTW.. one day in the not so distant future i´d love to sit down with you to have a drink and just pick your brain.
@cyndihugs, I copied and pasted into an already open Word file and then just used the word count function.
The question specified the longest opening sentence, so I don’t think those beauties count, do they, @Yetanotheruser?
@Jeruba You’re right.Isn’t it mazing how a single word can change the course of history?@Jack79 Yeah, we all know it doesn’t matter, buts fun to talk about~!
I seem to remember that Finnegans Wake is one continuous sentence. Am I wrong?
@pdworkin I do not think that is correct. It is unique in that the opening sentence is actually the end of the ending sentence. The first complete sentence, although long, would not qualify as either an opening sentence or opening paragraph. See this site. The first complete sentence starts with “Sir Tristram…” and ends with ”...on the aquaface.”
According to the Wikipedia,Absalom!#Trivia article on _Absalom, Absalom Faulkners novel has the Guiness certified longest sentence, but it is not the opening sentence or paragraph.
@Yetanotheruser Thanks. I struggled through it, but it is so dense I barely understood it.
I “cliff-noted” Absalom in HS (yes, they did have cliff notes way back then), so I was not aware of the length of the sentence until I Wiki’ed it for this thread. A far as “Finnegan’s Wake”, I always was more partial to the song.
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