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A major source for this thesis is the book Dickens wrote for his own children and which was unpublished until the 1930s, after the last of Dickens’s offspring had died.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.
Most thinking Christian readers of Charles Dickens, while they will recognise a Christian worldview in the great man’s novels – the redemption stories, the strong emphasis on reconciliation, even conversion, and the tenderness for the outcast, the poor and the vulnerable – might doubt whether Dickens had a personal faith.
A telling letter
Certainly some of his most scathing and vitriolic prose is reserved for evangelicals, dissenters and Bible-quoters: the Revd Chadband in Bleak House, Mrs Clennam in Little Dorrit, the Murdstones in David Copperfield, to name some notorious examples. Dickens saw such people as the very antithesis of what a Christian should be, with their attachment to a view of God as Lawgiver and Judge wreaking vengeance on the unwary, and he held in particular contempt those who pressed this view of God on children. For Dickens, God is primarily Father, loving and compassionate, and Jesus is our inspiring example. When Dickens was challenged by a correspondent as to why all the Christians he portrayed in his novels were so nasty, his response was telling. He wrote: ‘All my good people are humble, charitable, faithful and forgiving. I claim them in express words as disciples of the Founder of our religion.’ By this reckoning Paul and Florence Dombey, Esther Summerson, Joe Gargery, Agnes Wickfield and Amy Dorrit all exemplify real Christianity, of the Matthew 6 kind, who might fast and pray in private but put oil on their heads and wash their faces so that it is not obvious to men. Their real Christianity is demonstrated in their gentle compassion, forbearance and forgiveness. In other words Dickens’ brutal, canting, hypocritical ‘Christians’ are drawn to show precisely what a Christian is not, something like Jesus’s denunciation of the Pharisees in Matthew 23.
How can one know if there was genuine saving faith in Charles Dickens? His life was full of contradictions. On the one hand he was untiringly generous with his money, time and effort on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged; on the other he was not at all kind to his wife.
His infamous ‘affair’ with the young actress Nelly Ternan is played down by Colledge as speculation, but for many there will remain a case to be answered. Be that as it may, this book is a stimulating and fascinating read. Colledge unashamedly indulges in a wonderful selection of quotes from the novels, which just made this reader want to read the whole canon over again.
