I think you're confusing critical and analytical reading with narrative reading. It is definitely true that critical reading ability is uncommon but that doesn't mean a typical reader can't follow a story.

Sidenote - Dickens is unreadable to me for two reasons: that version of English is not the same language I speak natively and he uses so much visual descriptions and I'm an aphant.

The task wasn't sophisticated. The English majors were being asked to describe in simple terms what the text was saying. If they were unfamiliar with any of the words they were allowed to look them up. This was beyond them.

So as a comparison I asked AI to translate the text as closely as possible to modern English. Which I know is the task given to the students but the text isn't hard once it's in roughly your native tongue, it's just written using unfamiliar prose.

> LONDON. The Michaelmas term recently ended, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Relentless November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had just recently pulled back from the surface of the earth, and it wouldn't be surprising to encounter a Megalosaurus, about forty feet long, waddling like an elephant-sized lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke hanging low from chimney tops, creating a soft black drizzle with flakes of soot in it as large as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might think, for the death of the sun. Dogs, unrecognizable in the mire. Horses, barely better; splashed up to their very blinders. Pedestrians, bumping into one another's umbrellas, in a widespread outbreak of bad temper, and losing their footing at street corners, where tens of thousands of other pedestrians have been slipping and sliding since daybreak (if this day ever broke), adding new layers to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking stubbornly to the pavement at those points, and building up with compound interest.

The Feast of St. Michael's just ended. Some guy who is roughly akin to the Chief Justice of The Supreme Court is chilling at what is basically "The Supreme Court Building" (The US was so creative with the name). It's raining, a lot. Everything is muddy. Dickens when writing this clearly had just learned recently what a Megalosaurus is. Oh my god Dickens is so pretentious describing chimneys doing absolutely nothing special. The dogs and horses are covered in mud. The people are struggling to get around and are becoming frustrated at one another. The mud is building up on the pavement because of all the people tracking it.

Nobody talks the way that text was written anymore. This is a test of a different skill than ability to grok a bit of narrative.