Where do we get our ideas about writers? or Tales of 10th Grade Terror

The Incurable Logophile is reading Bleak House, and is surprised to discover that Dickens is funny. Ha ha ha! How could anyone not know that!

I know one way. My 10th grade English class used a reader that included a massively edited Great Expectations. The editors ruthlessly excised any element that was remotely comic, as unnecessary distractions that encumbered the plot. We would have been better off with an edition that squashed the plot and kept the comic bits.

No one confronted with this literary freak would have the slightest clue that Dickens was funny in any way, much less that he's one of the three or four greatest comic writers in English.

I don't remember when I overcame this prejudice. I know how I did it - I read Bleak House.

Where do we get our ideas about writers? I've never read Thackeray, and somehow picture him as some sort of blend of Dickens and Trollope. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote dreary novels about social issues, right? But then what is this, from Chapter 5 of Cranford:

"Small pieces of butter grieve others. They cannot attend to conversation because of the annoyance occasioned by the habit which some people have of invariably taking more butter than they want. Have you not seen the anxious look (almost mesmeric) which such persons fix on the article? They would feel it a relief if they might bury it out of their sight by popping it into their own mouths and swallowing it down; and they are really made happy if the person on whose plate it lies unused suddenly breaks off a piece of toast (which he does not want at all) and eats up his butter. They think that this is not waste."

I've never read any Gaskell aside from this hilarious passage. My ideas about Gaskell are obviously completely wrong. Where did they come from? At least I know how to correct them.

This is why literary readers are always so neurotically worried about Reading the Wrong Book. It might be years, decades, before misconceptions are corrected.

Anyone else have stories like this? Irrational prejudices you're willing to confess? Bad teachers you want to blame?