Why read Dickens?

In a day when relativism, individualism and the love of money are prevalent, it is interesting that the media should be engaged in re-examining and generally celebrating the works of a man who wrote so extensively and scathingly about such issues.

Charles Dickens, while universally admired, is not universally loved. His books are long, his plots thick, his denouements incredible, his descriptions very wordy and some modern readers lose the will to turn the page. But for comedy — his books contain some of the funniest scenes ever written — and for pathos, characterisation, dialogue and powerful storytelling, Dickens is matchless and his books well worth the effort. If this is to be a year when Dickens writings will be under general discussion, believers should not miss out. Dickens’s fiction is packed with truth and with large and serious themes.

Here are five reasons why Christians could benefit from reading Dickens:

1 His characterisation

Surely no writer has ever invented such memorable characters. Even Dickens’s minor characters walk off the page and into our heads, fully rounded, complete with mannerisms, peculiarities of speech, hair, clothes and gait. That is why Dickens works so well on the screen. Any Dickens role is a gift to an actor. Charles Dickens was himself a frustrated actor and there is evidence that every scene which included dialogue he himself rehearsed out loud, with all parts and voices, before committing it to paper.

One biographer has commented that Dickens saw the world more vividly than others. When he described people he enjoyed their diversity and peculiarities. His extensive perambulations around London fuelled his observations of people and place and gave him an ear for the extraordinary way people behave and converse. He used this frequently with hilarious effect. But it also made him the master of the tableau, scenes which have become part of British culture: Oliver Twist holding up his empty bowl — ‘Please, sir, I want some more...’; Sidney Carton on his way to the guillotine — ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done...’

You can learn more about the reasons for the way human beings think, choose and behave from Dickens than from many a psychology textbook. In these stories you see all that is glorious about humankind, made in the image of God: love, courage, compassion, endurance. You also see fallen human nature in all its foul degradation: greed, cruelty, revenge, self-interest. And, unlike many novels of later centuries, so sympathetically and realistically are the characters drawn, the reader actually cares what happens to them.

Dickens also had a heart for outsiders and rejects of polite society. Almost every novel has a few — people who were disadvantaged, perhaps disabled, who would in Dickens’s day have been classed as weird or even mad. Charles Dickens recognised the worth of every human creature. He celebrated individual difference and took a joyous delight in making eccentricity lovable. We can learn from his large, accepting and inclusive attitude.

2 His anger

Once Dickens found his stride, he used his novels frequently to address the reader. His early experiences, his work as a journalist, and his powers of observation of a teeming capital with a huge underclass combined to make him feel strongly about public injustice and the oppression of the poor. As he became more successful he mingled with and was honoured by the highest in the land. He had plenty of opportunity there to witness how complacent and indifferent the rich and privileged could be to those who by accident of birth lived in abject misery. He occasionally used what he called ‘the sledgehammer effect’ to create a diatribe against the powers who perpetuated the system. Hear him, for example, on the death of Joe, the pathetic, pushed-around crossing sweeper in Bleak House: ‘Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day’.

Christians still need to be shaken out of complacency with regard to the poor. This is righteous anger and deserves a hearing.

3 His compassion

Any reading of Dickens calls for a handy box of tissues. Especially when it came to the suffering of children, Dickens did not spare the emotions. From Oliver Twist to Little Nell to the young Pip and the put-upon Joe, a reader cannot be immune. It is not new for the fates of fictional characters to make headline news. Thousands waited at the docks in New England in the early 1840s for the next instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop with the question on their lips, ‘Will Little Nelly live?’ Dickens wrote tenderly and he made the reader care. But it’s not just the children, it is also the oddballs like Mr. Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend or the lonely like Tom Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit or the abused like Nancy in Oliver Twist. How can you read Dickens’s portraits and not feel for these frail human beings for whom life has been a very hard road indeed?

Even the villains occasionally draw our compassion. The returned convict Magwitch (in Great Expectations) is under sentence of death and dying in Newgate prison. As Pip’s unwelcome benefactor, he has been a thorn in Pip’s side. But a changing Pip softens towards him and learns the meaning of loyalty. Pip visits Magwitch and reads Scripture to him. As the convict breathes his last, Pip reflects: ‘Mindful, then, of what we had read together, I thought of the two men who went up into the temple to pray, and I knew there were no better words that I could say beside his bed, than “O Lord, be merciful to him, a sinner!”’

A book which makes us more tender to our fellow men and women, sinners like ourselves, is worth the read.

4 His parables

Although Dickens wrote, chiefly, about his own times and his stories have a context which is real and recognisable, they are rather more, especially the later works, than mere gripping yarns. They are also parables or, at the very least, moral fables. Take Great Expectations, for example. Here is a perfect unpacking of the theme of the deceitfulness of riches and the emptiness of materialistic ambitions. The whole story is under the shadow of death, from the gibbets on the Kent marshes to the condemned cell in Newgate. Pip gets what he wants and it isn’t what he wants. His love of money and position becomes a root of mean and foolish behaviour. Everything goes sour through the taint of sin and shame and the gallows. It is only the true hero Joe Gargery, the embodiment of grace, who brings love, light and healing plus the paying of debts and a new start.

Hard Times, a less popular work, perhaps because the story takes a while to get going, is Dickens’s condemnation of naturalism, which wants to reduce the world to facts. It shows what happens when children are raised with a complete denial of the spiritual side of human life — a parable for our times if ever there was one.

Our Mutual Friend has a theme of death and rebirth; Little Dorrit deals with captivity, beyond that which literal prison walls provide; Bleak House exposes the limitations of law ... and so on. And all within majestic stories which linger in the memory and give rich food for thought.

5 His worldview

It is impossible to say with certainty whether or not Charles Dickens was a Christian. He was certainly no friend of evangelicals. Being rather hot on hypocrisy, he found plenty of ammunition for his scathing invective in the professing church of his day.

But he was of his age. He was well versed in Scripture — allusions abound — and he had a worldview which held to absolute morality and that this life is not all. Dickens’s The Life of Our Lord, written for his children and only published in 1934 by the family, opens with a hope that they will all meet in heaven. His many deathbed scenes are bathed in awe, prayer and a proper seriousness. He was not afraid to quote Scripture outright, as in A Tale of Two Cities which ends with a man laying down his life for a friend. A young seamstress with whom Sidney Carton has conversed and encouraged in the tumbrel, goes to the guillotine before him. And Dickens comments: ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die’.

No doubt the points I have made will be downplayed by the secular media, but let us, as Christian believers, get involved in the discussion of the legacy of Charles Dickens and throw in our two penn’orth of truth. And in the meantime enjoy some terrific tales.

February is the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens's birth

1 His characterisation

2 His anger

3 His compassion

4 His parables

5 His worldview

Ann Benton

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