Dickens and the Bible

'What Providence Meant'

Jennifer Gribble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000289664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria moderna

At a time when biblical authority was under challenge from the Higher Criticism and evolutionary science, 'what providence meant' was the most keenly contested of questions. This book takes up the controversial subject of Dickens and religion, and offers a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary area of religion and literature. In a close study of major novels, it argues that networks of biblical allusion reveal the Judeo-Christian grand narrative as key to his development as a writer, and as the ontological ground on which he stands to appeal to 'the conscience of a Christian people'. Engaging the biblical narrative in dialogue with other contemporary narratives that concern themselves with origins, destinations, and hermeneutic decipherments, the inimitable Dickens affirms the Bible's still-active role in popular culture.The providential thinking of two twentieth-century theorists, Bakhtin and Ricoeur, sheds light on an exploration of Dickens's narrative theology.

1 Contexts

I ‘Progressive Revelation’: The Bible in Victorian England

There can be no doubt that for Dickens himself the Bible had unique importance as moral guide and source of comfort. Although Dickens the letter-writer and speechmaker was inclined to repudiate the Old Testament, in his less polemical moments the God of love is to be found dwelling there. It was the more portable New Testament, however, that he presented to each of his sons as he left home, as ‘the best book that ever was, or will be known in the world’,¹ commending to them habits of daily bible-reading and prayer formed in his own childhood. In 1846, he had written, ‘for the education of my growing family’,² a ‘harmonization’³ of the gospels, A Children’s New Testament. Contrary to his instructions, this was published long after his death as The Life of Our Lord.⁴ By 1847 he was arranging readings from the New Testament for the women of Urania Cottage.⁵ In 1861, in a letter to the Reverend David Macrae, he looks back on its role in his development as a writer:

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.⁶

The tendentious note sounded throughout this letter reflects his awareness that not all readers, including Macrae, saw him as a defender of religion. His trenchant satire of hypocritical pastors and religious bigotry was thought to bring religion into disrepute and to call into question the integrity of Dickens’s beliefs. The qualifying ‘unostentatiously’ bolsters his self-defence: while he has ‘never proclaimed his faith from the housetops’, he has been motivated by an apparently simple didactic intention of devising ‘a new kind of book for Christmas years ago… absolutely impossible, I think, to be separated from the exemplification of Christian virtues and the inculcation of Christian precepts. In every one of these books there is an express text preached on, and that text is always taken from the lips of Christ.’⁷ His account of the Christmas Books as ‘preaching’ on an ‘express text’ is a reminder that Dickens the public defender of his Christian credentials cannot always be allowed to speak for Dickens the artist. The theological importance of A Christmas Carol (1843) lies in his discovery of the resources of the providential narrative: not only in leading his readers to ‘the teachings of our great Master’, but as an interpretative lens through which to see the times in which they lived. The Carol’s remarkable success encouraged him to write the Christmas Books and stories published over the following three decades in his family magazines Household Words and All the Year Round. Dickens’s exchanges with Macrae call to witness those devoted readers, and the enthusiastic audiences up and down the country who came to hear him read the Carol, among other favourite performance pieces. Nonetheless, the Carol is a work that demonstrates ‘the business of art’: not to preach, but to lay out the ground carefully, ‘but with the care that conceals itself.’

The 1851 Census Report on declining church attendance, especially among the working class, has been widely interpreted as a sign of Victorian England’s loss of faith. The blackening deserted churches of Hard Times and the defeated dissonant bells of Little Dorrit – ‘they won’t come, they won’t come’ – indicate Dickens’s sense of the failing power of institutional religion. The growth in sales and distribution of the Bible, however – from 150,000 in 1800 to 1.5 million in 1880, and close to 3 million by 1900⁸ – supports the confidence with which his novels make their appeal to Victorian bible-readers. The London City Mission, founded in 1835, aimed to supply every poor family in London with its own copy of the Bible.⁹ Penny instalments of Cassel’s Christian Family Bible, and ‘penny readings’ distributed by religious tract societies, continued to make the biblical narrative accessible. The high visibility of the Bible in the Dickens world – as cherished possession, provider of wise counsel or inexorable precept – testifies to its continuing importance in the life of its times. Elizabeth Jay notes that it is indispensable for family prayers, as a place of record for family genealogies and events, extracted for samplers, held on walls in Gothic picture frames, ‘on china, pottery, applied in frieze form to public buildings, painted on rural gates and barns, or chalked on college walls’.¹⁰ Church of England parishioners would have heard it read Sunday by Sunday, and excerpted in the Book of Common Prayer. It was fundamental to the education provided by Sunday Schools and in schools sponsored by non-denominational organizations, as well as by the Established Church. In Great Expectations, the role of the Bible in the acquisition of literacy is observed in Pip Pirrip’s learning to read, under the tutelage of Mr Wopsle’s great aunt, from one of three defaced Bibles, ‘illegibly printed’ and ‘speckled all over with ironmould, and having various specimens of the insect world smashed between their leaves’¹¹ – a graphically Dickensian emblem of culture’s perennial battle with nature. In addition to the work it performed on the home front, its export under the aegis of the British and Foreign Bible Society, as Jay further notes, ‘became associated with an imperial mission to spread British values’.¹² Beyond what the Book of Common Prayer describes as ‘the Church militant here on earth’,¹³ however, is the ‘church’ Dickens brings into being as ‘the people of God’, the interpreting community addressed by scripture and thematized in the Bible.¹⁴

Not only did the Bible sanctify the domestic space of Dickens readers. It became a vital inspiration in political life, and for politicians of every class.¹⁵ Chartist churches springing up in the 1830s and 1840s, like the Christian Socialism emerging in 1848, were suspicious of the Bible’s use as an instrument of political oppression (‘a mere opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded – a mere book to keep the poor in order’).¹⁶ They often claimed it, instead, for the empowerment ‘of that religion which Christ taught and which very few in authority practice – if one might judge by their conduct.’¹⁷

II ‘What Is the True Religion?’

In Genoa in 1844, the spirit of Mary Hogarth, perpetually mourned sister-in-law of Dickens, appears to him in a dream-vision. ‘In an agony of entreaty’, he asks it:

What...