Charles Dickens was by far the most popular of Victorian novelists, and he is one of the widest-read English authors of all time. Scenes from many of his stories were set in London, and a number of the City’s historic churches are mentioned by characters or described by the author. During the Dickens Centenary in 1970 the London Transport published a guide to the remaining Dickens landmarks, and twenty-six churches were included.
Wherever Dickens gives any detail of London’s churches he tends to show us scenes of gloom and dreariness, of stuffy pews, mouldering gravestones and uninspiring clergymen droning sermons over the heads of small audiences of unimportant people. One of the sketches in The Uncommercial Traveller is entitled ‘City of London Churches’. In this essay the Traveller (Dickens himself) indicates that his childhood memories of churchgoing disposed him to an ‘unwholesome hatred’ of preachers of a certain sort but that, being unacquainted with the churches in the City, he is determined to make the rounds for a year. Predictably, he finds them universally dull and uninviting, subjects merely for satire. His conclusion: ‘They remain like the tombs of the old citizens who lie beneath them and around them, monuments of another age’.
Paradoxically, Dickens holds at the same time a very high view of Christianity and Jesus Christ. He speaks frequently in his novels of the loving Saviour and the hope of Heaven, though in sentimental rather than orthodox terms. Who will ever forget Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities walking the streets of Revolutionary Paris while the immortal words from the Church of England burial service echo through his mind: ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life. He who believes in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live’?
A book written in manuscript form for his children and not published until 1934, The Life of Our Lord, bears out the earnestness of Dickens’s convictions, as does his genuine concern in his novels for the forgotten poor of London’s streets: the waifs, the widows, the disenfranchised prisoners languishing in debtors’ prisons. These lines from Domby and Son, where Harriet reads the Bible to the dying Alice, illustrate his consistent view of Jesus Christ as the hope of the world:
Harriet... read the eternal book for all the weary and the heavy-laden, for all the wretched, fallen, and neglected of this earth... read the ministry of Him who, through the round of human life and all its hopes and griefs, from birth to death, from infancy to age, had sweet compassion for, and interest in, its every scene and stage, its every suffering and sorrow.