Dickens And The Broken Scripture

In Dickens and the Broken Scripture, Janet Larson examines the paradoxical role of the Bible in Dickens' novels, from such early works as Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son, in which the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer were drawn upon for the most part as stable sources of reassurance and order, to the far more complex novels of Dickens' maturity, such as Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend. In these later works, biblical allusion performs an increasingly contradictory and dissonant role that brings into question not only the moral character of Victorian society but also the sanctity of received religious traditions. Critics have tended to view Dickens' extensive use of the Bible as a not particularly complex or admirable aspect of his artistry--as a device he used primarily as a means of reassuring and building solidarity with his Victorian public. But as Larson demonstrates, Dickens' use of biblical allusion was as sophisticated and multifaceted as his use of character, narrative, description, and plot. In Dickens' novels, the Bible is a broken book, in need of revitalization and reinterpretation for his time, but also desperately vulnerable to attack from the tempestuous Victorian society of his day.

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.

The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens is a comprehensive and up-to-date collection on Dickens's life and works. It includes original chapters on all of Dickens's writing and new considerations of his contexts, from the social, political, and economic to the scientific, commercial, and religious. The contributions speak in new ways about his depictions of families, environmental degradation, and improvements of the industrial age, as well as the law, charity, and communications. His treatment of gender, his mastery of prose in all its varieties and genres, and his range of affects and dramatization all come under stimulating reconsideration. His understanding of British history, of empire and colonization, of his own nation and foreign ones, and of selfhood and otherness, like all the other topics, is explained in terms easy to comprehend and profoundly relevant to global modernity.

Charles Dickens once commented that in each of his Christmas stories there is “an express text preached on . . . always taken from the lips of Christ.” This preaching, Linda M. Lewis contends, does not end with his Christmas stories but extends throughout the body of his work. In Dickens, His Parables, and His Reader, Lewis examines parable and allegory in nine of Dickens’s novels as an entry into understanding the complexities of the relationship between Dickens and his reader. Through the combination of rhetorical analysis of religious allegory and cohesive study of various New Testament parables upon which Dickens based the themes of his novels, Lewis provides new interpretations of the allegory in his novels while illuminating Dickens’s religious beliefs. Specifically, she alleges that Dickens saw himself as valued friend and moral teacher to lead his “dear reader” to religious truth. Dickens’s personal gospel was that behavior is far more important than strict allegiance to any set of beliefs, and it is upon this foundation that we see allegory activated in Dickens’s characters. Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop exemplify the Victorian “cult of childhood” and blend two allegorical texts: Jesus’s Good Samaritan parable and John Bunyan’s ThePilgrim’s Progress. In Dombey and Son,Dickens chooses Jesus’s parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders. In the autobiographical David Copperfield, Dickens engages his reader through an Old Testament myth and a New Testament parable: the expulsion from Eden and the Prodigal Son, respectively. Led by his belief in and desire to preach his social gospel and broad church Christianity, Dickens had no hesitation in manipulating biblical stories and sermons to suit his purposes. Bleak House is Dickens’s apocalyptic parable about the Day of Judgment, while Little Dorrit echoes the line “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” from the Lord’s Prayer, illustrating through his characters that only through grace can all debt be erased. The allegory of the martyred savior is considered in Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens’s final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, blends the parable of the Good and Faithful Servant with several versions of the Heir Claimant parable. While some recent scholarship debunks the sincerity of Dickens’s religious belief, Lewis clearly demonstrates that Dickens’s novels challenge the reader to investigate and develop an understanding of New Testament doctrine. Dickens saw his relationship with his reader as a crucial part of his storytelling, and through his use and manipulation of allegory and parables, he hoped to influence the faith and morality of that reader.

Dickens, Religion and Society examines the centrality of Dickens's religious attitudes to the social criticism he is famous for, shedding new light in the process on such matters as the presentation of Fagin as a villainous Jew, the hostile portrayal of trade unions in Hard Times and Dickens's sentimentality.

This book explores the ideas of children and childhood, and the construct of the ‘ideal’ Victorian child, that developed rapidly over the Victorian era along with literacy and reading material for the emerging mass reading public. Children’s Literature was one of the developing areas for publishers and readers alike, yet this did not stop the reading public from bringing home works not expressly intended for children and reading to their family. Within the idealized middle class family circle, authors such as Charles Dickens were read and appreciated by members of all ages. By examining some of Dickens’s works that contain the imperfect child, and placing them alongside works by Kingsley, MacDonald, Stretton, Rossetti, and Nesbit, Malkovich considers the construction, romanticization, and socialization of the Victorian child within work read by and for children during the Victorian Era and early Edwardian period. These authors use elements of religion, death, irony, fairy worlds, gender, and class to illustrate the need for the ideal child and yet the impossibility of such a construct. Malkovich contends that the ‘imperfect’ child more readily reflects reality, whereas the ‘ideal’ child reflects an unattainable fantasy and while debates rage over how to define children’s literature, such children, though somewhat changed, can still be found in the most popular of literatures read by children contemporarily.

Dickens and Victorian Psychology: Introspection, First-Person Narration, and the Mind positions Charles Dickens's fiction in the midst of Victorian psychological debate, tracking Dickens's increasing reliance over the course of his career on the introspective mode, those moments--from free indirect discourse to first-person narration--in which Dickens attempts to represent the inner view of his characters' minds. In the middle of the nineteenth century, introspection remained the central investigative method for dualist psychologies, theories that tied the mind's immortality to its immateriality. Because those psychologies found evidence of the mind's ontological difference from the body in the subjective experience of consciousness, this book argues that the moments of inwardness in Dickens's fiction, in both their form and their content, constitute efforts to resist the encroachment of psycho-physiology by making a case for the mind's transcendence of the body. Yet Dickens and Victorian Psychology also shows the consequences of a material psychology's appropriation of such an inward view--as well as the results of the efforts by psycho-physiologists to redefine the terminology of a mainstream dualism--by tracing the ambiguities and contradictions that find their way into Dickens's representations of the mind. In these ways, this book reveals an overlooked context for Dickens's experiments with narrative point of view and broadens our understanding of the strategies that a material psychology used to assuage the anxieties of those who saw psycho-physiology as a threat to immortality.