Dickens, Religion and Society

Robert Butterworth

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137558718
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Dickens, Religion and Society examines the centrality of Dickens's religious attitudes to the social criticism he is famous for, shedding new light in the process on such matters as the presentation of Fagin as a villainous Jew, the hostile portrayal of trade unions in Hard Times and Dickens's sentimentality.

1

Dickens’s Engagement with Religion

In April 1869, in the middle of a series of public readings, ill-health forced Dickens to abandon the remainder of the tour. Some weeks later, in one of his final Uncommercial Traveller pieces, ‘A Fly-leaf in a Life’,¹ Dickens reported indignantly some of the reactions to this development:

I had experiences of spiritual conceit, for which, as giving me a new warning against that curse of mankind, I shall always feel grateful to the supposition that I was too far gone to protest against playing sick lion to any stray donkey with an itching hoof. All sorts of people seemed to become vicariously religious at my expense. I received the most uncompromising warning that I was a Heathen: on the conclusive authority of a field preacher, who, like most of his ignorant and vain and daring class, could not construct a tolerable sentence in his native tongue or pen a fair letter. This inspired individual called me to order roundly, and knew in the freest and easiest way where I was going to, and what would become of me if I failed to fashion myself on his bright example, and was on terms of blasphemous confidence with the Heavenly Host. He was in the secrets of my heart, and in the lowest soundings of my soul – he! – and could read the depths of my nature better than his ABC, and could turn me inside out, like his own clammy glove. But what is far more extraordinary than this – for such dirty water as this could alone be drawn from such a shallow and muddy source – I found from the information of a beneficed clergyman, of whom I never heard and whom I never saw, that I had not, as I rather supposed I had, lived a life of some reading, contemplation and inquiry: that I had not studied, as I rather supposed I had, to inculcate some Christian lessons in books; that I had never tried, as I rather supposed I had, to turn a child or two tenderly towards the knowledge and love of our Saviour; that I had never had, as I rather supposed I had had, departed friends, or stood beside open graves; but that I had lived a life of ‘uninterrupted prosperity,’ and that I needed this ‘check, overmuch,’ and that the way to turn it to account was to read these sermons and these poems, enclosed, and written and issued by my correspondent! (pp. 389–90)

These correspondents were not alone in their opinion. Three days after Dickens’s death, for instance, a country preacher described him as a writer ‘who never ceased to sneer at and vilify religion’.²

My position in this book is that these critics could not have been more wrong, and that Dickens’s religion is absolutely central to his work. I am writing in the tradition of commentators ranging from the contemporary critic of Little Dorrit who described the author as a ‘deeply religious writer’³ to modern commentators such as Angus Wilson and his contention that Dickens ‘thought of himself as centrally a Christian … in profound ways the Christian religion make sense of his work’;⁴ I think Dickens’s interest in religion goes to the very core of his work and shall be arguing that it underpins and determines the social criticism that is one of the most famous and important aspects of his work. Approaches to criticism that have developed over recent decades have brought to prominence such concepts as the intentional fallacy, distinguishing between what writers set out to achieve in their works and what they actually do achieve. Before such approaches can be applied successfully to Dickens, however, it is necessary to bring fully into focus what Dickens intends to do in his works; and this is my aim here. Writing about Dickens as a reformer, Hugh Cunningham observes that

There were others with a claim to the title of reformer who had much clearer diagnoses for and solutions to British ills than did Dickens. Dickens stood on shifting and uncomfortable ground amongst such reformers, his responses to situations often seeming to attract the label of ‘conservative’ as much as ‘radical’.⁵

My contention is that Dickens’s position is not at all shifting, and that he does have a clear diagnosis of what is wrong with society and an established view as to how to set things right: namely, that Christianity is the solution to all society’s problems, and a failure to follow its precepts is the cause of all that is wrong. Evidence that such was Dickens’s own view of his work is provided in a rare statement of his position written in response to criticism from Rev. David Macrae of his portrayal of Christians in his writings:

With a deep sense of my great responsibility always upon me when I exercise my art, one of my most constant and most earnest endeavours has been to exhibit in all my good people some faint reflections of the teachings of our great Master, and unostentatiously to lead the reader up to those teachings as the great source of all moral goodness. All my strongest illustrations are derived from the New Testament: all my social abuses are shown as departures from its spirit; all my good people are humble, charitable, faithful and forgiving. Over and over again, I claim them in express words as disciples of the Founder of our religion; but I must admit that to a man (or woman) they all arise and wash their faces, and do not appear unto men to fast. Furthermore, I devised a new kind of book for Christmas years ago … absolutely impossible, I think, to be separated from the exemplification of the Christian virtues and the inculcation of the Christian precepts. In every one of those books there is an express text preached on, and the text is always taken from the lips of Christ.⁶

Not only does the author explicitly place Christianity at the centre of his work here; he also makes it clear that his diagnosis of the ills of society is made from a religious perspective and with a religious solution: the ‘social abuses’ are ‘departures’ from the ‘spirit’ of the New Testament. I shall return to this letter later, when I shall be arguing that, in the aspects of this statement relevant to our study, we can take Dickens at his word.

At Dickens’s funeral, Dean Stanley declared him to have had ‘a simple but sufficient faith’.⁷ A simple faith, can, of course, be of more than one type: it might be naïve, superficial and relatively uninformed; or it might be a faith that is considerably more sophisticated and well-informed but in which all that is not essential is stripped away. Critics have disagreed about which of these was nearer the truth, and how cognisant about and engaged with religion Dickens was. To Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Dickens ‘simply disregarded’ it.⁸ In Dickens and Education, Philip Collins argues that ‘his theology was not rigorous … he might … be described as a “New Testament”, a “Four Gospels”, even a “Sermon on the Mount” Christian … it is probably useless to try to define some consistent position or development in his religious beliefs’.⁹ As far as Dickens was concerned, ‘for adults as well as children, theological niceties seemed … of secondary importance, a distraction from the clear moral doctrine and spirit of Christ’s ministry’¹⁰ and ‘his was an ethical Christianity, hardly touched by the sacramental or supernatural’.¹¹ It would be wrong to look for deeply considered positions on religion in Dickens:

In his religion, as in the rest of his life and work, Dickens was lacking in intellectual rigour. He naively skirted the difficulties he found in the Bible, by the simple device of writing off the Old Testament, and he seems to have been almost unaware of those disputes about Christian Evidences which made ‘honest doubt’ so familiar to his generation.¹²

More recent commentators have found greater sophistication in Dickens’s religious outlook In her book Literature and Religion in Mid-Victorian England, as Carolyn Oulton explores the impact of evangelicalism on Dickens and Wilkie Collins, her emphasis from the start is on the ‘complexity’ of their response.¹³ Of the final passage by Philip Collins quoted above she remarks that it is ‘unfair to Dickens, who held strong views on the question of Biblical criticism’,¹⁴ and her discussion presents Dickens as having thought-out, developed positions on a range of religious issues, including such theological matters as Original Sin and Providence. Gary Colledge examines Dickens’s theology as revealed in The Life of Our Lord in detail, and warns against being misled by what Dickens chose to concentrate on in his religious writings: if he seems unconcerned about ‘Purity of doctrine, perfecting formulations of theology, and a preoccupation with ecclesiastical polity’, it is because these are relatively unimportant to him: ‘What mattered to Dickens was the practice of Christianity, and that meant imitating Jesus and following his teaching’.¹⁵ He may not have been a ‘serious theologian’, but he was a man who ‘thought carefully about his faith’.¹⁶

My aim here is to underline that Dickens did indeed have a sophisticated understanding of and engagement with his religion. We may examine, to begin with, a passage from one of the letters Dickens sent to the Daily News on the subject of capital punishment, which he regards as contrary to Christianity. There can be no doubt about the matter he claims:

The case is far too plain. The Reverend Henry Christmas, in a recent pamphlet on this subject, shows clearly that in five important versions of the Old Testament (to say nothing of versions of less note) the words ‘by man,’ in the often-quoted text, ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed,’ do not appear at all. We know that the law of Moses was delivered to certain wandering tribes, in a peculiar and perfectly different social condition from that which prevails among us at this time. We know that the Christian Dispensation did distinctly repeal and annul certain portions of that law. We know that the doctrine of retributive justice or vengeance, was plainly disavowed by the Saviour. We know that on the only occasion of an offender, liable by the law to death, being brought before him it was not death. We know that He said, ‘Thou shalt not kill’. And if we are still to inflict capital punishment because of the Mosaic law (under which it was not the consequence of a legal proceeding, but an act of vengeance from the next of kin, which would surely be discouraged by our later laws if it were revived among the Jews just now), it would be equally reasonable to establish the lawfulness of a plurality of wives on the same authority.¹⁷

The case here is closely argued, in quite a scholarly way. Dickens shows himself to be well-informed about the latest theological thinking. Even if he has derived his points from the pamphlet he mentions, he nevertheless shows a grasp of the arguments. This is not a passage written by somebody with only a superficial engagement with religion.

Dickens is often, though not uncontroversially, associated with the Broad Church party in the Victorian Church of England, reflected, for instance, in his reaction to A.P. Stanley’s Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold: as he wrote to Forster, ‘I respect and reverence his memory beyond all expression … Every sentence that you quote from it is the text-book of my faith’.¹⁸ This again may have caused some misapprehension: by no means was adherence to Broad Church principles a default position rather than an adopted one, neither were members of the Broad Church party people casual and therefore vague about their religion. That as religiously literate a man as F.D. Maurice subscribed to Broad Church principles reflects that it was not a refuge for the relatively unthinking, only generally and loosely committed Christian B.G. Worrall identifies five characteristics of members of the Broad Church: ‘toleration of breadth of opinion within Christianity’; the influence of German theology ‘generally thought to be rationalistic and hostile to traditional faith’; a ‘willingness to adopt a critical attitude to Scripture’ in the light of modern science and Biblical criticism: ‘the appeal to morality’ for ‘authoritative guidance’, with its ‘moral ideal’ as ‘the heart of Christianity’; and ‘a remarkable optimism and belief in progress’, in which education would free people ‘from superstition and fear of authority’ and facilitate their being guided by ‘the moral law within’.¹⁹ In examining Dickens’s religious position, we shall see how the ideas important to him among these principles weave together in his religious outlook, and that he engages in a sophisticated rather than superficial way with Christianity.

I want to suggest that there are five aspects to Dickens’s engagement with religion. He is alert to and well-in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Dickens’s Engagement with Religion
• 2 Dickens and Early Victorian Christian Social Attitudes
• 3 Oliver Twist and Fagin’s Jewishness
• 4 Christian Social Vision in the Novels of the 1850s: Bleak House, Hard Times and Little Dorrit
• 5 Bleak House: Law, Religion and Civilisation
• 6 ‘Oh my Friends and Brothers’: Industrialism and Trade Unionism in Hard Times
• 7 Little Dorrit: Serving Mammon
• 8 Dickens and Politics: Temporary and Permanent Revolution
• 9 Barnaby Rudge and the Struggle for Brotherhood
• 10 A Tale of Two Cities and the Persistence of Evil
• 11 A Note on Dickens and Sentimentality
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index