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Notes -
It's not that simple to delineate one classic as the anchor of a language and another as outside of that. Certainly Shakespeare and the KJV are the bedrock of modern English, but everything within the canon serves a purpose as a bridge from here to there. Austen is much more accessible to the modern reader than the KJV or Hamlet, and reading things like Pride and Prejudice will prepare you for reading Shakespeare. Reading Austen serves much the same purpose, really, because Jane Austen read Shakespeare and the KJV. It's not about preserving one work and not others, it's about preserving the connective tissue that makes a living tradition with our ancestors.
My seventh grade English teacher had a big chart on her wall that some past class had made, with literary and intellectual movements stacked on top of each other, with their themes and what they were reacting against in the past movement. The writers of the Enlightenment were reacting against the religiosity and irrationalism of the medieval period, the Romantics were reacting against how boring the Enlightened rationalists were, Realism reacted against how goofy the Romantics were, Modernism and Absurdism reacted against Realism's limitations, etc. An extremely Hegelian view of literature. Everything exists within a context.
When you start editing original texts, you get stuff like this. The old teen girl book series Pretty Little Liars has been "updated" in the latest releases, including e-books apparently purchased in the past and stored in the cloud, to include modern references. At least, that's the stuff girls noticed, I wouldn't be surprised if slurs that would have been mildly edgy in 2003 were edited out in 2020. Now I'll grant you that PLL isn't a core work of the literary canon, but the only way this kind of thing doesn't happen is if people at least try to prevent it. I don't want to be hunting for particular editions of a book to make sure it's the real text and not recent politically correct innovations.
Funny, I would hard disagree on the Shakespeare point. Sure, there will be even more words you have to look at the footnotes for, but Shakespeare's plays are written to be performed on stage, generally in a simple and natural meter, which inherently limits sentence length and complexity. Having trouble with To Be or Not To Be? Just read it like you were speaking it. Austen and the later Victorian novelists are the result of a tradition continually building on Shakespeare's English, making it more structurally complex and verbose to fit a reading public rather than a theatre audience (if nothing else, if you look at Victorian novelists, their most kudzu sentences are generally physical descriptions of a scene, which Shakespeare doesn't do much. Marlowe, yes, but rarely Shakespeare).
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