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I found Dickens' sentence a little easier to follow. Perhaps because it didn't really shift subject/object so much?

That's gold! Sentences like that are WHY I read Dickens. Its like a conversation with the character. So much more humanity and humor in there than "He says, then she says, then we go there" style so popular now.

It's just periodic paragraphs in Dickens. He is kinda showing off that he can make the whole paragraph make sense.

WHETHER I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

  In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the day and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender born towards the small hours on a Friday night.	 

  I need say nothing here, on the first head, because nothing can show better than my history whether that prediction was verifed or falsified by the result. On the second branch of the question, I will only remark that unless I ran through that part of my inheritance while I was still a baby, I have not come into it yet. But I do not at all complain of having been kept out of this property; and if anybody else should be in the present enjoyment of it, he is heartily welcome to keep it.

It is not that modern writing is more clear or in any way better than the styles of the past, it is more often the case that the audience for a modern author is a barely educated simpleton who has a hard time keeping track of a sentence with more than one subordinate clause. The problem is not with Dickens...

The beauty of good writing is the ability of the author to state things simply without requiring the reader to meander through all the half-filled closets of the author's mind.

Horses for courses. I don't enjoy overly complex business-speak but I do sometimes like reading novels where you even have to refer to footnotes to fully understand the word plays and cultural/historical connotations. Certain writers would have spent days and weeks crafting a single sentence to perfection and I appreciate the effort.

"Barely educated simpleton" is unnecessarily harsh. Historically speaking, living in an era with majority literacy is unusual (so as to dodge questions about the "true" level of modern literacy), as is living in an era with large numbers of people with the free time to read anything.

It is true that Dickens could assume a somewhat higher level of IQ in his readers of the time than we can today in books targeted for the "average" reader, but I think most of us would consider that an unfortunate thing if we really thought about it, rather than a virtue of the age.

If you want challenging books, there's no shortage of them today. You just need to know where to look.

Also, distraction. It doesn't matter how smart your readers are, if they only read your books 5 minutes at a time while on the shitter, you have better written simply.

Funnily enough, you can mark a stark difference between the Dickens example and the paragraph from GP. Dickens is easy to read and understand despite meandering, the GP example is not.

Theories as to why?

A mix of context and content. We are not reading this article for pleasure, but for information, so give us the information! Like this:

Isaacson’s latest book is a paean to cooperation, to the idea of force-multiplication through collective effort and, in particular, to the transformative power of the diamond triangle of industry, academia and government. This is surprising given it comes after his biography of Steve Jobs, who is generally, though not entirely correctly, understood to be the model of the radical (and congenitally irascible) American

This puts the meat of the sentence up front and loses the passive participle ("coming") which is weak and awkward. The second sentence could be a subordinate clause (", which is surprising...") but given the author thought the factor of surprise strong enough to lead with it should likely stand on its own. Using "feature" is unnecessary, and as the Bible (Strunk & White) tells us, "eliminate unnecessary words".

The Dickens sentence tells us what its about ("the hour of my birth") up front, tells us the source of the information, then tells us the information, which if we didn't source would seem simply ridiculous. By telling us the source first we learn something of the narrator's character as both a bit of a skeptic and keen observer of the less skeptical amongst us.

This is like complaining about the difference between Perl and Java. Use the right tool for the job. I for one relish the kind of writing that used to be normal before WW1 and Hemingway. I also like Hemingway and newer writing.

Maybe the writing asked more of the reader in the past because it was a proportionally larger share of their attention, in the days before electronic media.

Was Dickens being paid by the word?