Ivanhoe and the White Company

Are these books, like dickens and shakespeare, just the equivalent of ivanhoe? Are these things that we as a child, as children, loved and enjoyed and profited from, and now, to day's generations, they're just not interested? So really, what's the loss? I think some are in some art. Let me throw out some texts that i don't think are in that category. But let's take another text. What about the declaration of independence? There is a text that recedes farther and farther from us every year because of the archaic nature of its language. It gets harder and harder to read for, well, first a twentieth century and then