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A yearlong celebration of Charles Dickens' life and works will begin on the 200th anniversary of his birth, Feb. 7, with a wreath-laying at London's Westminster Abbey.
It seems a fitting gesture, given that the Abbey's Poets' Corner houses the famous writer's remains. But it is also ironic in light of Dickens' distaste for religious structures and rigid dogma.
Dickens, a member of the Church of England (Anglican), believed deeply in Jesus as savior and in his moral teachings, but many of the novelist's most avowedly Christian characters represent the worst in religion: greed, hypocrisy, indifference to human suffering, arrogance, self-righteousness and theological bullying.
"He was more interested in the general spirit than the specific letter of the faith," says Brian McCuskey, who teaches English at Utah State University. "Holding broad, loose beliefs, he had little patience for either institutional or evangelical Christianity."
Dickens' wildly popular Victorian novels, McCuskey writes in an email, "criticize evangelicals as being meddlesome at best and hypocritical at worst."
To Dickens, says Barry Weller, a professor of English at the University of Utah who specializes in 19th- and 20th-century British literature, "any sectarian commitment got in the way of essential Christianity."
It was Christian zealots' attitude toward the poor that bothered Dickens the most.
"What we find again and again in the novels is that [these Christians] want to do charity in a wholesale rather than individual way," Weller says. "They are not sensitive to the needs of individual families and their situations. Instead of giving them what they need, they hand out a bunch of [religious] pamphlets. When they visit the poor as representatives of religion, they seem more eager to impress [on the needy] a certain doctrine than try to help them."
So where did Dickens' get his wariness toward Christian institutions?
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Empathy began early • The novelist's father, John Dickens, a clerk in the naval office, was "loquacious, feckless, grandly theatrical," writes Kenneth Benson in a biographical sketch for the New York Public Library, "and highly skilled at amassing debts."
After a somewhat idyllic childhood, the 12-year-old Charles, was sent to work for 12 hours a day, Benson writes, "pasting labels on bottles at a tumbledown, rat-overrun shoe polish factory on the Thames."
The elder Dickens landed in debtors' prison, where he was joined by his family. The future novelist had to walk three miles a day to the prison from his factory job. Eventually, the family went free, but the young Dickens never forgot the trauma.
"These cruel turns of fate — his humiliating enslavement to menial labor and his father's imprisonment and disgrace — would haunt Dickens for the remainder of his life," Benson writes. "Abandoned children and orphans like Pip — the hero of Great Expectations — are everywhere in his work, and abandonment of course need not be literal to wound deeply and permanently."
The experience also gave him an instinctual empathy for the suffering masses and an antipathy for those proclaiming the Christian gospel who failed to care for them.
In Dickens' novels, McCuskey says, many scenes illustrate the churches' institutional neglect of the poor, including a parish's cruel treatment of Oliver in Oliver Twist and Jo, the crossing sweeper in Bleak House staring up "uncomprehendingly at the cross at the top of St. Paul's cathedral, which seems very, very far away."
Many Christian characters symbolize negative values, he says, noting the "gluttonous Rev. Chadband in Bleak House, who spouts platitudes and sweats train oil, or the fanatical Mrs. Clennam in Little Dorrit, who keeps secret from her son the fact that she is not his real mother."
Dickens, though, also enjoyed positive experiences with religion.
The first person who taught him to read," Weller says, "was an Anglican clergyman in Rochester where the family was living."
As a successful writer, Dickens became involved in many charitable causes, including homes for "fallen women" and orphanages, he says.
Dickens connected his intense empathy for children's suffering with Jesus' own receptiveness to the young and innocent, Weller says, and alludes frequently to the Christian savior's example in the New Testament.
The novelist believed strongly in "the moral values of Christianity — self-sacrifice, charity, compassion, forgiveness," McCuskey writes, "and his heroes and heroines embody those values."
One of those values is a kind of conversion. The clearest exemplar?
Ebenezer Scrooge.
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Changing your life • Here's a question that comes up over and over for Dickensian characters: Is there a possibility of genuine transformation?
"People turn themselves into caricatures by becoming mechanical," Weller says. "It's breaking free of incrustation of habit that enables a good life."
One of Weller's favorite passages is on the last manuscript page of Dickens' final and unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
"A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquities and ruins are surpassingly beautiful, with a lusty ivy gleaming in the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air. Changes of glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from gardens, woods, and fields — or, rather, from the one great garden of the whole cultivated island in its yielding time — penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odor, and preach the Resurrection and the Life. The cold stone tombs of centuries ago grow warm; and flecks of brightness dart into the sternest marble corners of the building, fluttering there like wings."
Dickens uses religious language, Weller says, "to talk about a sense of renewed cities and ruins."
Yet, he shuns Christian terms like "conversion" to describe what happens to his characters.
The novels can be read as "secularizing Christianity," McCuskey says, "wresting those values away from institutional religion and making them individual and personal."
In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is visited by ghosts, not angels, but the pilgrimage through his own past, present and possible future has the same effect: He is eager to alter his destiny.
"I am not the man I was," Scrooge says to the Last Spirit. "I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse."
Even Dickens' most overtly religious work, The Life of Our Lord, emphasizes Christ's "humanity and moral lessons," McCuskey says, not his divinity.
In this small volume, the novelist penned a simplified version of the New Testament for his children, which retells the Gospels' familiar stories and parables.
"It outlines his faith," great-great-grandson Gerald Charles Dickens writes in the introduction, "which was simple and deeply held."
The book concludes with a plea to "do good, always" and to live, without boasting, the "quiet" Christian qualities of love, gentleness, meekness and humility.
Perhaps Dickens' view of bifurcated religion is best illustrated by the character of Joe Gargery, the blacksmith in Great Expectations.
Pip calls him a "gentle Christian man," McCuskey says, and he is "probably the most Christian of all Dickens' characters."
But Joe, the scholar adds, "is not comfortable in his Sunday church clothes."
Dickens on Christian faith and morality
" I hope you say your prayers every night," said another gentleman in a gruff voice, "and pray for the people who feed you, and take care of you, like a Christian."
"Yes, sir," stammered the boy. The gentleman who spoke last was unconsciously right. It would have been very like a Christian, and a marvelously good Christian, too, if Oliver had prayed for the people who fed and took care of him. But he hadn't, because nobody had taught him."
Oliver Twist
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"The blessing was from a young child's lips [Little Dick — fellow sufferer], but it was the first that Oliver had ever heard invoked upon his head; and through all the struggles and sufferings of his after life cq, through all the troubles and changes of many weary years, he never once forgot it."
Oliver Twist
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"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."
A Tale of Two Cities
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"In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong."
Great Expectations
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"Remember! — It is Christianity to do good, always — even to those who do evil to us. It is Christianity to love our neighbors as ourself, and to do to all men as we would have them do to us. It is Christianity to be gentle, merciful, and forgiving, and to keep those qualities quiet in our own hearts, and never make a boast of them, or of our prayers or of our love of God, but always to show that we love Him by humbly trying to do right in everything. If we do this, and remember the life and lessons of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and try to act up to them, we may confidently hope that God will forgive us our sins and mistakes, and enable us to live and die in peace."
The Life of Our Lord —
Lecture in Logan
P Utah State University English professor Brian McCuskey will discuss Charles Dickens' life and works at 7 p.m. Feb. 7 in the Logan Library's Jim Bridger Room. The event is free.