Features
What the Dickens?
Andrew Tate
Christmas without Charles Dickens seems almost unthinkable,
but what
spiritual understanding did he bring to his work? On the eve of
the great
novelist's bicentenary, Andrew Tate sorts the
holy from the humbug.
The Victorian era began in 1837 but did not, as logic would
suggest, end with the death of its great royal matriarch in 1901.
Indeed, even now in the 21st century those earnest folk, with their
frock coats and improbable whiskers, are like party guests failing
to take the hint at yawns and polite offers of coffee.
In truth though, we don't seem particularly eager for our
ancestors to leave.
Many aspects of contemporary life - Sarah Waters' novels of
pastiche Victoriana; the plethora of Wuthering Jane Eyre's Great
Bleak House style film adaptations; even the disputed revival of
civic values mooted by David Cameron's Big Society - reveal our
obsession with 19th-century culture. And no spectre in this long,
loquacious Victorian afterlife is as vivid as that of Charles
Dickens (1812-70).
2012 is the bicentenary of Dickens' birth, a literary landmark
that will be marked by a vast number of critical volumes (Claire
Tomalin's major biography has already been published), academic
conferences, films and television series (the BBC will screen new
versions of Great Expectations and The Mystery of
Edwin Drood).
Everybody has an opinion of this most eminent of English
novelists. Like Jesus, Lady Gaga and Simon Cowell, people don't
need a thorough knowledge of his oeuvre to know where they
stand.
Dickens is variously viewed as a sentimental storyteller,
reforming liberal, judgemental moralist, architect of Christmas
custom and comic genius. More recently, biographical work focusing
on the scandal of the writer's relationship, in late middle-age,
with a young actress - coupled with shoddy treatment of his family
- has encouraged the view that he is yet another skilled
practitioner of 'Victorian virtue': a public preacher whose private
life whiffs, with depressing inevitability, of hypocrisy.
A QUEER FISH
But as disappointed (or pleased) as we might be to discover the
personal failings of a crusading author, it is a mistake to dismiss
his writing, Scrooge-like, as moral humbug. Dickens is a complex
figure and his rich body of work bears witness to a creative life
spent wrestling with angels. Novels including Oliver Twist,
David Copperfield, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two
Cities depend on Christian concepts of sin and redemption.
Although Dickens despised ostentatious professions of piety, the
writer was a quiet but determined man of faith. Dennis Walder,
author of Dickens and Religion (1981), describes his
subject as 'a liberal Protestant with radical, Romantic leanings'.1
This is a useful classification, though it perhaps tells us more
about what Dickens did not believe than what he did. Dickens is, in
the words of John Schad, a 'queer fish': an eccentric Christian,
often at odds with the visible Church and, yet, quite in keeping
with its disparate body of oddities, misfits and sinners (I believe
they are called disciples).2
His religious upbringing was conventional and included some
attendance at Anglican services but, unlike his near contemporaries
George Eliot and John Ruskin, he was not exposed to rigorous,
Evangelical Bible learning. In adult life, he expressed enthusiasm
for Unitarian worship (a legacy of his trip to the United States in
the early 1840s) but some biographers claim that he ultimately
identified with the doctrines of the Church of England.
In early June 1870, in one of the last letters that he was to
write, he made a clear connection between his work and Christian
belief: 'I have always striven in my writings to express veneration
for the life and lessons of Our Saviour; because I feel it ... But
I have never made proclamation of this from the house tops'.3
COMIC OR VICIOUS
In Dickens' fiction, religion is often either a comically
theatrical or horribly vicious affair. The Pickwick Papers
- the picaresque collection of illustrated stories that became his
first novel - includes a pompous and hypocritical dissenting
minister. The early sections of Great Expectations, by
contrast, satirize the pseudo-Calvinist harrying of young children
in the name of faith.
Authentic Christlike behaviour in the world according to Dickens
is reflected in practical attitudes to the poor and destitute. In
Bleak House (1852-3), for example, the (apparently)
orphaned Esther Summerson's quiet, self-sacrificial life is
represented as a holy alternative to the self-righteous behaviour
and spiritual hogwash of those who punish and exploit her.
Dickens' antipathy for aspects of the ascendant Evangelical
subculture - its perceived triumphalism, self-righteousness and
showy devotion - exists in tension with a recurrent motif of
conversion that structures many of his novels. In fact, the old
Puritan narrative of the awakening conscience haunts one of his
most famous narratives: A Christmas Carol, first published
in December 1843.
In Dickens' various glowing accounts of seasonal festivities,
Peter Ackroyd finds a suspicion that 'he is trying to revive the
benevolence of his lost childhood'.4 Yet A Christmas
Carol, the first and most popular of Dickens' five
novella-length seasonal stories, also has traces of this pervasive
Evangelical culture.
PENITENCE & CONVERSION
This fable, one that plays on materialist and supernatural
understandings of poverty, draws very explicitly on a theology of
penitence and conversion. Although Ebenezer Scrooge's radical
transformation from miserly, misanthropic exploiter of the working
poor to born-again patrician philanthropist is enacted without
reference to the church or divine belief, it does echo the
structure of the call to conversion at work in Evangelical
culture.
The use of the supernatural, though deeply symbolic, indicates
Dickens' sense of a world beyond the present darkness: each ghost
becomes an advocate for transformation, a fragment of some greater
spiritual truth. John Ruskin, the influential art critic and social
reformer, was privately rather dismissive of Dickens' Christmas
narratives: 'He knew nothing of the nobler power of superstition -
was essentially a stage manager, and used everything for effect on
the pit. His Christmas meant mistletoe and pudding - neither
resurrection from dead, nor rising of new stars, nor teaching of
wise men, nor shepherds'.5
Yet the Christmas setting is vital: Dickens explores the way in
which a festival intended to celebrate God made flesh has fallen in
a world of commercial greed. The writer's attitude to the
complacency of the wealthy, ruling classes as represented in the
Carol and its successor, The Chimes, foreshadows the
social critique developed more thoroughly in Hard Times and Bleak
House.
A SPIRITUAL INDEX
Dickens deployed folkloric fascination with the supernatural to
examine material problems. A Christmas Carol suggests that
the absurd extremes of wealth and abject poverty prevalent in 1840s
Britain were an index of the nation's spiritual malaise. The
redemption of Scrooge - a kind of prodigal son narrative, in which
the errant character must rediscover a child-like faith in God and
man - foreshadows later plots of non-supernatural narratives
including Pip's story in Great Expectations and the
transformation of the titular misanthropist in Dombey and
Son.
Almost a decade later, Dickens reflected on similar themes in 'A
Christmas Tree', a short piece for Household Words: 'What
images do I associate with the Christmas music as I see them set
forth on the Christmas Tree? ... An angel, speaking to a group of
shepherds in a field; some travellers, with eyes uplifted,
following a star; a baby in a manger ... [the same] dying upon a
Cross, watched by armed soldiers, a thick darkness coming on, the
earth beginning to shake, and only one voice heard, "Forgive them,
for they know not what they do''.'6 The explicit connection that
Dickens makes between the nativity and crucifixion challenges the
rather simplistic notion that the writer was big on festive cheer
but lacked theological depth.
DICKENS' GOSPEL
At a time when many of his peers were wrestling with the
distinction between the 'Jesus of history' and the 'Christ of
faith', Dickens seems to have been largely untroubled by such
doctrinal minutiae. In the late 1840s, the author wrote a composite
version of the gospel narratives for his own children: the volume,
later titled The Life of Our Lord, was strictly limited to
his immediate family. Indeed, the family would not allow
publication of this intriguing volume until the last of Dickens'
children had died. It was eventually published, in a deal with the
Daily Mail, in 1934, more than 60 years after its author's
death and close to a century after The Pickwick Papers and
Oliver Twist established his reputation.
The narrative celebrates the goodness of Jesus (referred
throughout as 'Jesus Christ') but it does not move towards a
demythologized version of the gospels: The Life of Our
Lord avoids questions of atonement but does not rationalize
the miracles and strongly emphasises the hope of heaven. This is a
tantalising insight into Dickens' domestic life but the novels, for
all their outward hostility to much organized religion, tell us
more of the author's spirituality.
In his homage to Dickens, 'The King of the Novel' (1986), the US
novelist John Irving explores the way in which the writer helped to
shape his own understanding of fiction. He offers a powerful
defence of what, from Oscar Wilde to the present day, is regarded
as Dickens' most habitual artistic failure. Sentimentality,
suggests Irving, in the hands of the truly great artist, is a
crucial element of storytelling: 'To the modern reader, too often
when a writer risks being sentimental, the writer is already
guilty. But as a writer it is cowardly to so fear sentimentality
that one avoids it altogether'.7
SENTIMENTAL SLUR
In an earlier essay, 'In Defense of Sentimentality' (1979), Irving
stated 'when we writers ... escape the slur of sentimentality, we
should ask ourselves if what we are doing matters'.8 Thomas Hardy
embraced tragedy in a way that the creator of Pickwick, Uriah Heep,
and Micawber never really could. Dickens' fiction is full of sorrow
- and sometimes it is embarrassingly lachrymose - but the universe
is, ultimately, a place of justice and divine compensation.
For some sceptical readers, even Dickens' most vivid social
critiques are regarded as politically suspect because they don't
finally call for radical social change. The emphasis is always on
the renovation of the human heart. And nostalgic appropriations of
Dickens airbrush the uncomfortable truth that elements of his
worldview were all too typical of his age: his novels can be
punitive, hostile to difference and, on occasion, somewhat bigoted.
These failings, however, are not the whole story. We might possess
more sophisticated political perspectives now but can we truly say
that Dickens' challenge is any less chastening in today's world of
excess and desperate poverty than it was in the 'Hungry
Forties'?
NOTES
1 Dennis Walder, Dickens and Religion (London:
George Allen, 1981), xiii.
2 See John Schad, Queer Fish: Christian unreason from
Darwin to Derrida (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press,
2004).
3 Dickens to John M. Makeham, 8 June 1870. The Letters
of Charles Dickens, volume 12: 1868-1870 edited by Graham
Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 547-8.
4 Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: QPD, 1990) p.
33.
5 Letter to Charles Eliot Norton, 19 June 1870. Letters
of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, quoted in Robert
Newsome, 'Religion', Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens,
edited by Paul Schlicke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
pp.493.
6 Charles Dickens, 'A Christmas Tree' Household
Words, 21 December 1850.
7 John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (London:
Black Swan, 1994), p. 197.
8 John Irving, 'In Defense of Sentimentality', New York
Times, 25 November 1979.