Is there any tense from reader's time?

Question

A crusty old grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold, why should he preach to us?
(Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse)

I. ‘Should’ is the past from reader’s present time.

II. ‘Should’ is the present or future from past reference time. Or, ‘should’ is the past from speech time. (There isn’t any tense from readers)

Which one is right?

Answer 1

Digging a little deeper into the context shows that this is a very complicated interaction of tense, register, backshifting and modality:

It was for that reason, he said, that the young don’t read Carlyle. A crusty old grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold, why should he preach to us? was what Mr. Bankes understood that young people said nowadays. It was a thousand pities if you thought, as he did, that Carlyle was one of the great teachers of mankind.

In the first place, this is backshifted indirect speech which contains an internal direct-speech passage: elderly Mr. Bankes “quotes” what he understands young people to be saying. Let's recast this into the present, what (we can guess) Mr. Bankes actually said:

‘It’s for that reason that the young don’t read Carlyle. “A crusty old grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold, why should he preach to us?” is what I understand young people say nowadays. It’s a thousand pities if you think, as I do, that Carlyle was one of the great teachers of mankind.’

Note in particular that Woolf does not consistently backshift Bankes’ presents into pasts (he said that the young don’t read Carlyle) and never backshifts his pasts into past perfects. She is trying to preserve the colloquial register of this conversation, to maintain a dramatic sense of her characters speaking naturally in their own “presents”.

This is further complicated by the fact that author of whom Mr. Bankes and the young speak is not a contemporary: Thomas Carlyle’s most famous works were written in the 1830s, nearly a century before To the Lighthouse was written. Consequently, the speech imputed to the young people exhibits a tension between references to

• the “historical” Carlyle, the actual past-tense Carlyle who lost his temper if the porridge was cold, and
• the “authorial” present-tense Carlyle who still preaches to contemporary readers long after his works were written.

And then on top of that the young people are represented as employing a past-form modal with present reference: “Why should he preach to us?”, meaning “Why should we listen to him, why should we allow him to preach to us?” Woolf has to let that should stand as it is: there’s really nothing else she can do with it that won’t distort its intended meaning.

In complicated situations like this conventional grammatical analysis breaks down. The passage illustrates marvellously the differences between formal and colloquial registers, even among quite highly educated speakers, and demonstrates the extraordinary craftsmanship and delicacy of touch a really good writer brings to a very difficult technical challenge.