Dickens and grace

My dear children, I am very anxious that you should know something about the History of Jesus Christ. For everybody ought to know about Him. No one ever lived, who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong, or were in anyway ill or miserable, as he was.

Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord

Charles Dickens wrote The Life of Our Lord not for general circulation but for the sake of his own children. He was more subtle in his novels and stories, yet the same gospel message can be found there, as well. Sin, grace, compassion for the sick, poor and needy — all can be found in abundance in his work.

To prove that point, Gina Dalfonzo, editor of Dickensblog, has assembled a number of excerpts from his work for a new book called The Gospel in Dickens. It is one in a series of similar books from Plough Publishing House highlighting the Christian message found in the work of such writers as Dorothy L. Sayers, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

Dickens novels are often critical of Christians, something Dalfonzo describes in her introduction as "policing his own side." Dickens had no problem with Christianity, just with those hypocrites whose own actions do not conform with their supposed beliefs. And Dickens counted himself among those hypocrites. His own actions toward his wife and family hardly matched the Christian ideal, and he knew it. At the core of the Christian faith, however, is not so much righteous living as grace for flawed living. This idea is perhaps most famously illustrated by Dickens in A Christmas Carol, when miserly Scrooge discovers both grace and joy. If God can forgive Scrooge, then why not Scrooge's creator?

Dalfonzo mines for gospel gold in the writer's best-known books, such as Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, as well as in some lesser-known stories, such as The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain. She divides these excerpts into three categories: Sin and Its Victims, Repentance and Grace and The Righteous Life. Out of context, these excerpts do carry the same impact they have when reading the novels themselves, although the editor does a good job of explaining the situation in each case. In all there are 36 excerpts from Dickens's fiction, as well as two letters the author wrote.

In all the book makes a good case that Dickens, whatever his own sins, had the gospel of Christ on his mind while writing his enduring stories.