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Sounds like a question of the quality of the writing, to me. There's absolutely no excuse for wasting the reader's time and attention with a dull, functional description of place, weather etc. before the real story can begin. Speaking of the nineteenth century...
'LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.'
Not only do you have a description of place that is a spectacular and very concise piece of writing - the setting and weather have a dramatic influence on how the reader interprets the plot. We already have the sense of what it's like to feel crushed under the weight of an interminable court case, and Dickens even manages to sneak words from the lexicon of the debtor surreptitiously into this short opening paragraph: 'deposit' and 'compound interest'.
An awesome tour de force of writing, and a scene-setting description that no one would begrudge taking the time to read. Mind you, Dickens wrote for money and to entertain; probably the best way to ensure your reader will decide that your novel is worth dedicating valuable time to.
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