GOD AND CHARLES DICKENS
By Gary L. Colledge
Brazos Press, 2012. 202 pages. £10.99
ISBN 978 1 587 433 207
Can Charles Dickens be considered to be a Christian novelist? ‘No’, says Dickens scholar, Gary Colledge, but he was a Christian who wrote unapologetically as a Christian. This book is all about how Colledge comes to that conclusion, drawing not just from Dickens’s major works, but from his letters and other writings.
A major source for this thesis is the book Dickens wrote for his own children and which was unpublished until the 1930s, after the last of Dickens’s offspring had died. The book was titled The Life of Our Lord and was Dickens’s own harmony of the gospels for children. The book reveals the great admiration Charles Dickens had for the life and teaching of Jesus. It contains a strong commendation to his children that they always ‘remember the life and lessons of our Lord Jesus Christ, and try to act up to them’, an exhortation also not infrequently found in Dickens’s personal letters to his children.
