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’.
1 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.
2 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). This chapter will offer an overview of both Dickens’s critique of Victorian religion, notably evangelicalism and Roman
Catholicism, and also discuss his more positive reception of Unitarianism and the New Testament.
When Dickens was 4 years of age his family moved to Chatham, near London, and, despite their nominal Anglican sympathies,
began to attend a local Baptist church overseen by their neighbour, the Reverend William Giles. Dickens loathed the endless
sermons he endured there, writing
that he felt ‘steamed like a potato in the unventilated breath of Boanerges Boiler’, horrified by what he understood to be
a cruel and judgemental Old Testament Christianity.
3 His suspicions were confirmed when Sir Andrew Agnew, MP, attempted to pass the Sabbath Observances Bill in Parliament on
behalf of the Society for Promoting Due Observance of the Lord’s Day. This puritanical bill legislated against Sunday amusements
specifically enjoyed by the working classes – concerts in public parks, visits to coffee and tea shops, circuses, fairs, picnics
and so on – while refusing to comment on the private leisure pursuits of the middle and upper classes. Like temperance reforms,
aimed at the ‘abuse’ of drink by the poor rather than the high consumption of alcohol by the rich, these sabbatarian attempts
at controlling social behaviour derived from a harsh evangelicalism Dickens targeted throughout his work.
4 Dickens’s short but impassioned pamphlet
Sunday Under Three Heads (1836), for example, written under the pseudonym Timothy Sparks, was a direct attack on the class prejudices of the Sabbath
Observances Bill. Drawing attention to the extreme hypocrisy practised by the evangelical church, Dickens deems its guiding
ministers intent on converting ‘the day intended for rest and cheerfulness, into one of universal gloom, bigotry, and persecution’:
I would to God, that the iron-hearted man who would deprive such people as these of their only pleasures, could feel the sinking
of heart and soul, the wasting exhaustion of mind and body, the utter prostration of present strength and future hope, attendant
upon that incessant toil which lasts from day to day, and from month to month; that toil which is too often protracted until
the silence of midnight, and resumed with the first stir of morning. How marvellously would his ardent zeal for other men’s
souls, diminish after a short probation, and how enlightened and comprehensive would his views of the real object and meaning
of the institution of the Sabbath become!
5
Such virulent critique is similarly advanced through several of Dickens’s more incorrigible clergymen: the Reverend Stiggins
(also known as the Reverend Gentleman with the Red Nose) drunkenly advocates temperance throughout the
Pickwick Papers; Melchisedech Howler, similarly inebriated, rants about the end of the world in
Dombey and Son; and the Reverend Chadband preaches the ‘spiritual profit’ of ‘moderation’ while gorging himself at the Snagsbys’ dinner
party in
Bleak House (ch. 19). Chadband is a typical Dickensian clergyman, ‘attached to no particular denomination’, and having ‘nothing so very
remarkable to say on the greatest of subjects’ (ch. 19). Lacking any kind of sustained conviction or integrity, he symbolises
that ‘indolent temporizing’ that formed the rotten core of the Established Church for Dickens, a manipulative and
bankrupt institution whose ‘dark and dingy’ buildings blackened the skyscape of Britain, suffocating its inhabitants with
‘an air of mourning’ and ‘death’ (
Our Mutual Friend, ch. 15).
6 Like
Great Expectations’s Mrs Joe, who has ‘an exquisite art of making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself’ (ch.
4), Dickens’s ‘godly’ characters are often more unnerving than his most malevolent villains.
Dickens struggled with the dogmatic aspect of religion, but he refused overtly to target one faith system in his novels, aware
that his audience comprised a diversity of believers (Christian and Jew), and also considering sectarian debate little more
than a series of ‘unseemly squabbles about the letter which drive the spirit out of hundreds of thousands’.
7 Nevertheless, he bore a particular distrust towards Roman Catholics and evangelicals. He shows some sympathy towards persecuted
Catholics in
Barnaby Rudge, but caricatured what anti-Catholic commentators called ‘Romanism’ in both
Pictures from Italy(1846) and ‘A Crisis in the Affairs of Mr John Bull’ (1850). Here, Catholicism is rendered a degraded, superstitious, ignorant
and ascetically unhealthy religion, obsessed with relics and dead saints and intent on virally spreading the ‘Bulls of Rome’
throughout Britain.
8 Dickens implicitly mocks Catholicism in the ritual evils of Chancery in
Bleak House (where he also makes several negative allusions to the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement); demonises the rosary-bead-counting
Citoyenne Défarge as a murderous tricoteuse in
A Tale of Two Cities; and denounces Catholic religious communities in the tale ‘The Five Sisters of York’ in
Nicholas Nickleby through his portrayal of a wicked monk intent on luring five sisters to ‘shun’ ‘earthly things’ and take the veil (ch. 6).
It is in
A Child’s History of England (1851–3) that he most vociferously denounces Catholicism, however, his commentary on the Reformation declaring that many
of the Catholic monasteries were ‘religious in nothing but name’:
and were crammed with lazy, indolent, and sensual monks. There is no doubt that they imposed upon the people in every possible
way; that they had images moved by wires, which they pretended were miraculously moved by Heaven; that they had among them
a whole tun measure full of teeth, all purporting to have come out of the head of one saint, who must indeed have been a very
extraordinary person with that enormous allowance of grinders; that they had bits of coal which they said had fried St Lawrence,
and bits of toe-nails which they said belonged to other famous saints; penknives, and boots, and girdles, which they said
belonged to others; and that all these bits of rubbish were called Relics, and adored by the ignorant people.
9
We might note that Dickens’s anger towards Catholicism was heightened following both the public ‘Papal Aggression’ case of
1851 (wherein Rome attempted to establish a church hierarchy in Britain) and also after a private vision of Mary Hogarth,
his beloved, but deceased, sister-in-law, who appeared to him dressed in a Madonna-like ‘blue drapery’ to advise him that
the religion he most deplored was also most suited to his sensibility. Dickens awoke from the dream with tears running down
his face, suggesting that his feelings of intense aversion to Rome were at the least complex if not compelling.
Dickens also fiercely critiqued evangelicalism, an umbrella term for belief systems that favoured an intensely personalised
faith derived from a direct and emotional relationship with Christ enabled by repeated study of the Gospels and a focus on
the Cross. Evangelicalism is often associated with dissent and Nonconformism, which, while doctrinally diverse, share a wariness,
if not antipathy, towards the authority of the Church of England. Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, Baptism, the Society
of Friends (Quakers) and Unitarianism, for example, directly challenged the cornerstones of Anglicanism (the writings of the
Patristic Fathers, the Nicene, Apostolic and Athanasian creeds, the Thirty-Nine Articles and
Book of Common Prayer). Many evangelicals, however, reconciled themselves to working within the Established Church, Anglican evangelicals regarding
their belief system as an authentic expression of Christianity rooted in the Reformation. Methodism too, which recruited around
half a million believers in Britain between 1740 and 1840, insisted that it had not dissented from the established doctrinal
laws of the Church of England.
10 Yet its strong emphasis on the energy and emotion of the conversion experience left it open to the charge of enthusiasm,
a term that connoted an extreme, near dangerous, fervour of feeling close to madness. Overcome by a furious religious passion,
‘the stern and gloomy enthusiasts’, wrote Dickens, who made ‘earth a hell, and religion a torment’, would fall to the ground,
calling out ‘in tongues’ to God like wild ‘animals’.
11 Dickens despised such extremities of religious feeling, belittling Mrs Jerry Cruncher’s enthusiastic experience as ‘flopping’,
her acts of prayer extending even to the breakfast table where Mr Cruncher fears that his wife’s ardently expressed grace
might bless him ‘out of house and home’ (
A Tale of Two Cities, book 2, ch. 1). Susan Weller similarly commands the Reverend Stiggins to bless his ‘round of toast’, a snack he consumes
with the same ‘fierce voracity’ (
Pickwick Papers, ch. 27) he shows for alcohol. She eventually dies from her misplaced investment in Stiggins (she catches a cold after ‘settin
too long on the damp grass’ waiting for
him), while other believers are mentally and emotionally crushed by their faith, suggesting as they do that the fanaticism
inherent to evangelicalism materialised as doctrinal zeal and emotional excess. Kit Nubbles’s gentle mother is ‘overpowered’
by ‘the arguments’ of an evangelical ‘preacher’ (
The Old Curiosity Shop, ch. 41); Edward and Jane Murdstone are sullenly locked within their disciplinarian Christian beliefs in
David Copperfield; and
Little Dorrit’s Mrs Clennam professes a religion marked by ‘Austere faces, inexorable discipline, penance in this world and terror in the
next – nothing graceful or gentle anywhere’ (book 1, ch. 2).
Dickens abhorred the punitive and Calvinistic side of evangelicalism, and presented its excesses in the curt and spiky figure
of Miss Barbary in Bleak House. Intent on making the young Esther feel ‘so poor, so trifling’ against her ‘goodness’ (testified to only by endless visits
to church rather than benevolent action or feeling), Miss Barbary refuses even to celebrate Esther’s birthday, a day the young
girl assumes is associated with her mother’s death. ‘Crying and sobbing’, Esther dares to explore her hypothesis:
I put up my trembling little hand to clasp hers or to beg her pardon with what earnestness I might, but withdrew it as she
looked at me, and laid it on my fluttering heart. She raised me, sat in her chair, and standing me before her, said slowly
in a cold, low voice – I see her knitted brow and pointed finger – ‘Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers
… For yourself, unfortunate girl, orphaned and degraded … pray daily that the sins of others be not visited upon your head,
according to what is written’. (ch. 3)
Shattered by Miss Barbary’s invocation that ‘Submission, self-denial, diligent work, are the preparations for a life begun
with such a shadow on it’ (ch. 3), Esther works to transform her dejection into an ‘industrious, contented, and kind-hearted’
(ch. 3) life, preserving the ‘spirit’ (rather than the letter) of the biblical rules her godmother has imposed upon her. Drawn
from the Old Testament figures of Esther and Job, Esther Summerson is, like them, tested, not because she is a sinner but
because she is good (‘all my good people are humble, charitable, faithful, and forgiving’, Dickens wrote, claiming that he
drew all his ‘strongest’ characters from the Bible).
12 Esther uses her suffering to engage with the feelings of others, compassionately working with the communities around her
and finally developing a deep friendship with Jarndyce; a close sisterly bond with Ada; an intimate understanding of Richard;
a maternal relationship with her own girls and Ada’s son; and a contented marriage to Woodcourt. The Genesis-like ‘Full seven
happy years’ she describes at the Yorkshire Bleak House reverses the failed Creation story smothered by
apocalyptic fog at the beginning of the novel and also foreshadows the redemptive narrative of
Great Expectations. Opening on Christmas Eve,
Great Expectations follows the Christlike Pip in his journey from sin (his pompous abandonment of Joe and Biddy) to redemption (his attempt
to atone for his actions through various acts of self-sacrifice) and resurrection (through his escape from the waters of Old
Orlick’s sluice-house). The novel is characteristically dependent on biblical allusion: Matthew Pocket and John Wemmick bear
the names of two of the Apostolic Evangelists; Jaggers recalls Pontius Pilate by overlooking a persecutory judicial system
he obsessively washes his hands of; and the Evelike Estella, Abel Magwitch and ‘gentle Christian’ (ch. 57) Joe all signify
through their association with biblical characters.
Dickens’s particular interest in the New Testament – a book ‘accessible to all men’, he said – is illustrated in his beginner’s
guide to the Gospels,
The Life of Our Lord (1846), or ‘The Children’s New Testament’.
13 Written for his children (and not for publication), Dickens’s account subscribes to a sentimentalised rather than theologically
or doctrinally consistent depiction of Christ, elevating him as ‘full of compassion’ and teaching ‘people how to love God’
through example rather than dogma.
14 Omitting the more supernatural events of the Gospels (such as the virgin birth),
The Life functions as a moral guide to life rather than a religious manual, instructing its readers to ‘Remember! It is Christianity
to do good always – even to those who do evil to us. It is Christianity to love your neighbour as yourself, and to do to all men as
we would have them do to us. It is Christianity to be gentle, merciful, and forgiving and to keep those qualities quiet in
our own hearts.’
15 Many critics see a Unitarian message in
The Life of Our Lord, ‘that religion which has sympathy for men of every creed and ventures to pass judgment on none’, Dickens wrote. His fascination
with this religion, increasingly popular within literary and intellectual circles in London, derived from his visit to America
in 1842, where he met the Unitarians Forster and William Ellery Channing.
16 Returning home, Dickens attended a series of Unitarian chapels, including Edward Tagart’s parish in Little Portland Street,
where he explored a belief system that preached religious tolerance, questioned Christ’s divinity and proposed that the message
of true Christianity could be found in Christ’s parables and celebrated ‘Sermon on the Mount’ (Matthew 5–7).
17 Dickens was attracted to faith systems that centralised Christ, because, he wrote to Emmely Gotschalk, ‘Our Saviour did not
sit down in this world and muse, but laboured and did good’, practising rather than theorising about Christianity. Despite
satirising the pious aspects of philanthropy in
characters such as Mrs Jellyby, Dickens acknowledged that religion (then as now) was the main force behind most charitable
activity, including the abolition of the slave trade.
18Despite Dickens’s ostensible dissent, he remained dependent on the Bible and the
Book of Common Prayer (the Victorians used the revised 1611 edition) as an archive from which to borrow ideas already familiar to his readers.
He frequently refers to the Burial Service, Solemnization of Matrimony, Order for Evening Prayer, Catechism, Litany, Prayer
Book Psalter and Ten Commandments in his novels, both affectionately and ironically. The opening quotation of the Burial Service,
for example, ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord’ (John 11.25–6), appears to comfort Sydney Carton at the
end of
A Tale of Two Cities, but it serves only to deepen David Copperfield’s dejection and grief by augmenting the ‘Sabbath stillness’ that entombs
Clara’s early funeral (ch. 9). Dickens’s references to scripture or the prayer book are most powerful, however, when they
are employed to highlight the hypocrisy of those who claim to practise their tenets, such as in chapter 11 of
Bleak House: ‘Our Dear Brother’.
19 The words of the Burial Service, intended to remind believers that the deceased are actual brothers and sisters to whom the
living owe respect, are shown to be hollow when Nemo (‘Nobody’) is buried in a slum wriggling with disease, physical (smallpox)
and social (disregard for others) alike:
Then the active and intelligent … comes with his pauper company to Mr Krook’s and bears off the body of our dear brother here
departed to a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our
dear brothers and sisters who have not departed, while our dear brothers and sisters who hang about official back-stairs –
would to heaven they HAD departed! – are very complacent and agreeable. Into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination
and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring our dear brother here departed to receive Christian burial. (ch. 11)
At the same time, many of Dickens’s most human and compassionate characters – Samuel Weller, Sissy Jupe, the transformed Ebenezer
Scrooge – are exemplary ‘fellow-Christians’, believers who, as John Schad argues, find themselves lodged ‘in Queer Street!’
because of their willingness to practise Christianity in an age increasingly hostile to its values and practices (
Our Mutual Friend, book 3, ch. 1).
20 Dickens’s attention to religious questions ultimately suggests that it was not secularisation that the Victorians had to
confront, but their own inability to put into practice the array of doctrines to which they variously
subscribed.