Dickens and religion: A tale of two views

Britain’s Prince Charles kicked off a yearlong celebration of Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday on Tuesday (Feb. 7) with a wreath-laying ceremony at London’s Westminster Abbey.

It seems a fitting gesture, given that the Abbey’s Poets’ Corner houses the famous writer’s remains. But it is also ironic in light of Dickens’ distaste for religious structures and rigid dogma.

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

Dickens, a member of the Church of England, believed deeply in Jesus as savior and in his moral teachings, but many of the novelist’s most avowedly Christian characters represent the worst in religion: greed, hypocrisy, indifference to human suffering, arrogance, self-righteousness and theological bullying.

“He was more interested in the general spirit than the specific letter of the faith,” said Brian McCuskey, who teaches English at Utah State University. “Holding broad, loose beliefs, he had little patience for either institutional or evangelical Christianity.”

Dickens’ wildly popular Victorian novels, McCuskey said, “criticize evangelicals as being meddlesome at best and hypocritical at worst.”

To Dickens, says Barry Weller, a professor of English at the University of Utah who specializes in 19th- and 20th-century British literature, “any sectarian commitment got in the way of essential Christianity.”

It was Christian zealots’ attitude toward the poor that bothered Dickens the most.

“What we find again and again in the novels is that (these Christians) want to do charity in a wholesale rather than individual way,” Weller said. “They are not sensitive to the needs of individual families and their situations. Instead of giving them what they need, they hand out a bunch of (religious) pamphlets. When they visit the poor as representatives of religion, they seem more eager to impress (on the needy) a certain doctrine than try to help them.”

So where did Dickens’ get his wariness toward Christian institutions?

The novelist’s father, John Dickens, was “loquacious, feckless, grandly theatrical,” writes Kenneth Benson in a biographical sketch for the New York Public Library, “and highly skilled at amassing debts.”

After a somewhat idyllic childhood, the 12-year-old Charles was sent to work for 12 hours a day, Benson writes, “pasting labels on bottles at a tumbledown, rat-overrun shoe polish factory on the Thames.”

The elder Dickens landed in debtors’ prison, where he was joined by his family. The future novelist had to walk three miles a day to the prison from his factory job. Eventually, the family went free, but the young Dickens never forgot the trauma.

“These cruel turns of fate — his humiliating enslavement to menial labor and his father’s imprisonment and disgrace — would haunt Dickens for the remainder of his life,” Benson writes. “Abandoned children and orphans like Pip — the hero of ‘Great Expectations’ — are everywhere in his work, and abandonment of course need not be literal to wound deeply and permanently.”

The experience also gave him an instinctual empathy for the suffering masses and an antipathy for those proclaiming the Christian gospel who failed to care for them.