Charles Dickens

The Argument

Charles Dickens is the great moral novelist of the Victorian era, and his moral framework is explicitly Christian even when his targets are explicitly Christian institutions. He loathed the Chancery courts, the workhouses, the debtors' prisons, and the hypocritical piety that blessed all of them — but he loathed them in the name of the values Christianity was supposed to produce: mercy, compassion, the dignity of the poor, the wickedness of grinding the faces of the weak.

His novels are structured around conversion — not religious conversion in a narrow sense, but the transformation of vision that allows a character to see others as fully human. Scrooge is the paradigm case, but the same arc runs through Dombey and Son, through Our Mutual Friend, through Bleak House. The question each novel asks is: what does it take for a person to stop treating other people as instruments and start treating them as ends?

For literary apologetics, Dickens demonstrates that the moral imagination of a culture shaped by Christianity cannot simply be detached from its theological roots and transplanted into secular soil without loss. His anger at injustice, his insistence on the worth of every individual, his conviction that the powerful are accountable for what they do to the weak — these are not self-evident secular values. They are the Gospel wearing the clothes of the Victorian novel.