Orion Compact Classics Various authors Orion Books, £6.99 each

Prepare your indignation. Six classic novels - Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Melville's Moby-Dick, Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, Gaskell's Wives and Daughters and Dickens's David Copperfield - have been edited so they can be read (the cover informs us) "in half the time". But who would dare prune Tolstoy - and who would touch the remains?

The answer is Orion Books. Spurred on by research revealing that readers are put off classic novels by their length, a team of (anonymous) editors have slimmed them down to create the "Compact Classics" series. Far from being the truncated mutants that any purist would imagine, the books read fluently. Vanity Fair is still hilarious; Anna Karenina is still unbearably sad. And which right-minded lover of these writers - a number of whom were passionate about education and progress - would not want them to be experienced by as many readers as possible?

But the suggestion that these sacred cows can be carved up is unsettling. These novels were often first published as serials, and their authors were paid per word. Orion uses this to justify the project: instead of using his quota to make his work richer, for instance, Thackeray got bored and added an extra carriage scene. It could sometimes be true - but such an interpretation leaves our novelists' imaginations undervalued.

While narrative is well preserved, the imaginary worlds that the authors invite us into have been reduced; the walls brought in, the ceiling lowered. In the first chapter of Anna Karenina, Stiva Oblonsky awakes in his study from a dream, a comic fantasy of "decanters that were really women". If, in the abridged version, we find out why he has slept in his study, we never discover the content of his dream. Actions, inevitably, matter more than thoughts.

There is a similar pattern in The Mill on the Floss, where Maggie Tulliver is, in part, doomed by her own fierce imagination. In the "compact" version, her mind is less on show - ironically, just as her small-minded family would like. When the young Maggie tries to run away, only one version betrays the sad incongruity of her thinking:

If her father would but come by in the gig and take her up! Or even if Jack the Giantkiller or Mr Greatheart or St George who slew the dragon on the half-pennies, would happen to pass that way! But Maggie thought with a sinking heart that these heroes were never seen in the neighbourhood of St Ogg's - nothing very wonderful ever came here.

Here is another of the classics' difficulties: few modern readers have heard of Mr Greatheart, or know what these half-pennies refer to. And Eliot is, frankly, a prime candidate for excision. When she quotes Greek principles of tragedy to describe Maggie pushing her cousin into the mud, we need to keep a tongue in our cheek and a dictionary at our side. But to deny Mary Ann Evans the intelligence of her writing is to take away the whole point of "George Eliot". She wrote her greatest novels in her forties and fifties; it is women in this age group who are now the key demographic for Orion. It is sad that, well over a century after she was published, she is deemed inaccessible to her peers.

The worry is that these editions further widen the gap. Screen and stage may abridge classics, but they provide other languages - cinematography, scenery, acting, music - that make up for the lost text. In abridging the reading experience, we have no form of compensation - just the satisfaction of doing something more quickly and easily. At best, these "half the time" editions can convince readers that the novels, and they themselves, are in fact worth the whole.

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