Dickens at 200

As a nineteen year old kicking around London in 1973 I spent hours in Westminster Abbey. I was surprised to find the grave of Charles Darwin and intrigued to find the marker for another Charles -- Dickens -- in what is called Poet's Corner. Yesterday was the 200th anniversary of Dickens' birth and while I gave precedence to the queen, I will mention him today. I did a little sleuthing into his religious sensibilities because religion does show up in his novels, along with some memorable themes pointing out the disparity between rich and poor in Victorian England.

I found this is the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper via the National Post:

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."

Obviously what we might consider modern-day concerns that faith issue in action are much older than we might imagine.

Any Dickens fans out there? Do you have a favourite novel? Did you know he visited Canada and his son Francis became a Mountie? What about his sense of social justice?