Dickens and Evangelicalism

Abstract

Charles Dickens died on 9 June 187o; three days later a country preacher labelled him a writer ‘who never ceased to sneer at and vilify religion.’ One week after this a Baptist publication asked why it was that Dickens’s ‘snivelling, red-nosed hypocrites invariably hail from Ebenezer chapel?’¹ When the Methodist Quarterly appeared in September, its obituary on Dickens was generally more favourable, but the periodical felt obliged to protest against Dickens’s habit of deprecating ‘what we, at any rate, deem the essentials of true piety’:

Throughout, when dealing with these subjects, he takes it for granted that where there is any manifestation of evangelical piety there is vulgarity and hypocrisy… He has endeavoured to make ridiculous, and even worse, by his sarcasm and caricaturing, all expression in words or acts of inward consciousness of sin, or repentance, of faith in the Saviour, and especially as these views are held by evangelical Christians.²