Charles Dickens and Faith

I was reading about the 130th anniversary of Charles Dickens' death this past week and it got me thinking about the great English author. I knew that Dickens came to Canada and its capital at the time, Kingston. He visited Kingston Penitentiary and was impressed by its progressive design for its era, a sentiment I didn't share in the summer of 1979 as a chaplain intern.

I've also read that  the perennial seasonal favourite, A Christmas Carol, revived his flagging popularity and staved off financial troubles. A Christmas Carol made me wonder what his religious sensibilities were, given the emphasis on generosity and goodwill in the book which reflected his life-long commitment to the poor and oppressed. And of course there is Tiny Tim's Christmas dinner blessing "God bless us, everyone!", repeated by Dickens at the end of the story. 



It turns out that Dickens wasn't a conventional Christian in terms of his personal convictions and worship habits. He felt that lots of religious leaders were hypocritical and he was withering in his portrayal of clerics in his novels. According to The Dickens Project:

 In all his writings, Charles Dickens—a Christian of the broadest kind—is outspoken in his dislike of evangelicalism and Roman Catholicism, but, especially in his fiction, he is very reluctant to make professions of a specific faith beyond the most general sort of Christianity. Nothing more surely aroused his suspicions about a person's religious faith than a public profession of it, and this aversion formed a fundamental feature of his dislike of evangelicals and dissenters.

Apparently Dickens decided that his children should have some religious instruction so he came up with his own children's bible:

It was in these years too that Dickens first felt the need to impart some religious instruction to his children and, significantly, undertook to do this himself by writing a simplified version of the gospels designed for reading aloud (not published until 1934...

Dickens was a remarkable author and we can take the best of his sensibilities at heart, as well as his skewering of pretentious and insincere religion.

Any Dickens fans out there?