Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Notes on references
- PART I LIFE AND AFTERLIFE
- PART II SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS
- 12 Popular culture
- 13 The rise of celebrity culture
- 14 The newspaper and periodical market
- 15 Authorship and the professional writer
- 16 The theatre
- 17 Melodrama
- 18 The Bildungsroman
- 19 Visual culture
- 20 The historical novel
- 21 The illustrated novel
- 22 Christmas
- 23 Childhood
- 24 Work
- 25 Europe
- 26 The Victorians and America
- 27 Educating the Victorians
- 28 London
- 29 Politics
- 30 Political economy
- 31 The aristocracy
- 32 The middle classes
- 33 Urban migration and mobility
- 34 Financial markets and the banking system
- 35 Empires and colonies
- 36 Race
- 37 Crime
- 38 The law
- 39 Religion
- 40 Science
- 41 Transport
- 42 Illness, disease and social hygiene
- 43 Domesticity
- 44 Sexuality
- 45 Gender identities
- Further reading
- Index
39 - Religion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Notes on references
- PART I LIFE AND AFTERLIFE
- PART II SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS
- 12 Popular culture
- 13 The rise of celebrity culture
- 14 The newspaper and periodical market
- 15 Authorship and the professional writer
- 16 The theatre
- 17 Melodrama
- 18 The Bildungsroman
- 19 Visual culture
- 20 The historical novel
- 21 The illustrated novel
- 22 Christmas
- 23 Childhood
- 24 Work
- 25 Europe
- 26 The Victorians and America
- 27 Educating the Victorians
- 28 London
- 29 Politics
- 30 Political economy
- 31 The aristocracy
- 32 The middle classes
- 33 Urban migration and mobility
- 34 Financial markets and the banking system
- 35 Empires and colonies
- 36 Race
- 37 Crime
- 38 The law
- 39 Religion
- 40 Science
- 41 Transport
- 42 Illness, disease and social hygiene
- 43 Domesticity
- 44 Sexuality
- 45 Gender identities
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
Dickens's current status as a warm-hearted but straight-thinking secular novelist derives as much from modern literary criticism's distrust of all things Christian as it does from current readings of his novels and comments on the subject of religion. Readers indifferent to the nuances of his allusions to the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and contemporary religious debate often choose to regard them as shallow literary reflections of, rather than comments on, Victorian religious culture. While twenty-first-century readers relate to Dickens as a benevolent humanist, his contemporary audience regarded him as a key defender of a New Testament Christianity under attack from sombre High Church and Low Church evangelising. Richard Henry Horne even considered Dickens a representative ‘spirit of the age’ due to his capacity for a particularised form of observation learned from Gospel parables; and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky simply referred to him as ‘that great Christian writer’. Manly and forthright, an image bolstered by his prophet-like beard, Dickens liberally declared that ‘the spirit of Christianity’ was love and community while rejecting what he regarded as the hypocritical orthodoxy – that ‘too tight a hand’ – of the Established Church. Some of his most sinisterly cartoonish characters – Mrs Jellyby, Mrs Barbary, Reverend Stiggins, Mrs Clennam – are mired within a Christian orthodoxy Dickens reveals to be either falsely preached (as is apparent in the town of Muggleton of the Pickwick Papers) or gravely abandoned (as in the case of the iniquitous Coketown in Hard Times).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Charles Dickens in Context , pp. 318 - 325Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011