Follow-up on Dickens’s Christian Message

Thinking over what I wrote last month about Dickens’s Christian message, I realize that I followed my train of thought down two avenues only: Dickens’s use of allegory and his explicit portrayal of the moral characters as Christians. Today I want to trace two other paths.

Sometimes Dickens just blatantly offers a Christian message in his narration. The example I think of first has to do with Jo, the little crossing sweeper from Bleak House. Jo is a homeless orphan. He has never known a day of education or a day of love (that he remembers). Dickens describes his illiteracy thus:

It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language—to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think (for perhaps Jo DOES think at odd times) what does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me?

One day, Jo is called upon to testify at an inquest, but the officers of the court find that he doesn’t know what it means to swear to the truth or what truth is or what the Bible says about truth. They are completely stymied by the question of what to do with such an uncooperative boy! But it never occurs to anyone in the court (representing the Christian state of the United Kingdom, remember) that what they should do is to give Jo a home and teach him to read.

Later Jo comes across a charlatan preacher named Chadband, who, as a minister in the Church, has even less reason than the bailiff at the court to wonder what to do with a boy wholly ignorant of the Bible. But Chadband leaves Jo just as unenlightened as he found him. After their initial conversation, Dickens’s narration addresses this apostrophe (I learned this use of the word from Dickens himself!) directly to the neglected child:

It may be, Jo, that there is a history so interesting and affecting even to minds as near the brutes as thine, recording deeds done on this earth for common men, that if the Chadbands, removing their own persons from the light, would but show it thee in simple reverence, would but leave it unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without their modest aid--it might hold thee awake, and thou might learn from it yet!

There’s nothing hidden about this message. If you are a Christian individual, organization, institution, or country, take care of children and teach them to read, because our religion depends on revelation found in a Book. Don’t be a Chadband! (By the way, “Chadband” is one of Dickens’s most successfully expressive names. As soon as the narration presents you with “Rev. Chadband,” you know you’re meeting pomposity and hypocrisy. And the beauty of it is, I don’t know exactly how the name conveys the idea so well. But how can any good come out of “Chadband”?)

I alluded to the other kind of Christian message I want to mention in one confusing sentence near the end of the earlier post. But it deserves more space. This message is all-pervasive in Dickens’s books and stories. It is simply this. In Dickens, as in no other author whatsoever, every character – businessmen and lawyers, landowners and urchins, moneylenders and spendthrifts, belles and streetwalkers, butlers and innkeepers, parents and children, teachers and students, eccentric aunts and boring office mates, cart drivers and coal diggers, bashful grooms and jilted brides, clerics and showmen, aristocrats and scullery maids, conservatives and revolutionaries, doctors and nurses, detectives and engineers, criminals and judges, sailors and tailors and jailers, French and English, American and Indian – all are presented as humans and individuals, not merely plot points.

Most authors in a situation where a runaway boy needs money would simply report that he sold his jacket for a few shillings at a resale shop, perhaps mentioning a shopkeeper, maybe even giving him a generic line or two: “I can give you ’alf a crown at most.” Dickens, however, gives the man who buys David Copperfield’s jacket a weird rattle in his throat and makes him so strange and so memorable, I believe Tolkien found inspiration here for Gollum. The clear message is that the children of God in all their infinite variety of forms are worthy of our attention. The hypocrites and self-servers Dickens dignifies by scolding them. (Our contemporary society doesn’t understand that thought, but what good parent doesn’t know that loving the child sometimes means telling her she is very wrong?) Those characters with a heart, on the other hand, find their author’s mercy for all their doubts and missteps and hilarious foibles, and receive his honor and admiration for their best moments.

Were you to ask me for examples of people who treated prostitutes as dignified beings fashioned in the image of God, only three people would immediately come to mind: Jesus and, in their writing, Cervantes and Dickens. If we could each learn to treat every real person we meet on the road of life as Dickens treats the creations of his prolific imagination, we would have nothing to be ashamed of when we meet our own even more prolific Creator.