39 - Religion

Summary

Dickens's current status as a warm-hearted but straight-thinking secular novelist derives as much from modern literary criticism's distrust of all things Christian as it does from current readings of his novels and comments on the subject of religion. Readers indifferent to the nuances of his allusions to the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and contemporary religious debate often choose to regard them as shallow literary reflections of, rather than comments on, Victorian religious culture. While twenty-first-century readers relate to Dickens as a benevolent humanist, his contemporary audience regarded him as a key defender of a New Testament Christianity under attack from sombre High Church and Low Church evangelising. Richard Henry Horne even considered Dickens a representative ‘spirit of the age’ due to his capacity for a particularised form of observation learned from Gospel parables; and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky simply referred to him as ‘that great Christian writer’. Manly and forthright, an image bolstered by his prophet-like beard, Dickens liberally declared that ‘the spirit of Christianity’ was love and community while rejecting what he regarded as the hypocritical orthodoxy – that ‘too tight a hand’ – of the Established Church. Some of his most sinisterly cartoonish characters – Mrs Jellyby, Mrs Barbary, Reverend Stiggins, Mrs Clennam – are mired within a Christian orthodoxy Dickens reveals to be either falsely preached (as is apparent in the town of Muggleton of the Pickwick Papers) or gravely abandoned (as in the case of the iniquitous Coketown in Hard Times).