Fruitful Exactitude

In 1906 G.K. Chesterton summed up the spirit of Dickens’s Christianity as “rowdy benediction”, a phrase that respects both the seriousness and the vitality of Dickens’s “popular religion”. As the twentieth century wound its secular path through war and depression, Dickens’s critics found his religion increasingly unpopular, too easily reduced to conventional piety; so much so that in 1940 George Orwell, card-carrying Dickensian that he was, wrote a substantial essay on Dickens that sidestepped religion altogether. The tide turned dramatically in 1953, when Lionel Trilling read Little Dorrit as a search for ultimate religious truth. Since then, this novel has come into focus as Dickens’s most powerful exploration of Christianity, both socially and existentially.

In Dickens and the Bible, Jennifer Gribble brings specificity to the general topic of Dickens’s religion. Her book is a rigorously text-based study, in which the delight is in the detail, bringing the novels and the scriptures into mutual illumination. What truly mattered to Dickens was the word of Christ as recorded in the “all-sufficient” (Dickens’s phrase) New Testament, and especially the parables and the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7). His holy of holies was the Beatitudes, but, as Gribble demonstrates, Dickens also had a thorough-going knowledge of the Old Testament, and of the Book of Common Prayer. The Bible, to Dickens, was of course the King James or Authorised Version.

As Professor Gribble shows, the Beatitudes’ inversion of cultural values presents Christ at his most discomforting. This remains true. In our culture of self-esteem and self-help, “Blessed are the meek” may ring hollow. Gribble’s telling example of Dickens’s application of this Beatitude is Dombey and Son’s John Carker, castigated by his brother Carker the Manager as hypocritical, hypocrisy being the essence of the passive aggression into which modernity has translated “meekness”. John’s meekness associates him with Florence Dombey, offered here as a vibrant personification of this quality. In terrifying contrast stands John’s brother, an ugly premonition of the managerial class, not generally celebrated, then or now, for meekness. Gribble’s insights get you thinking beyond Dickens to wider social questions, both historical and contemporary.

Professor Gribble’s most substantial chapters are devoted to detailed readings of three of Dickens’s major, “social” novels, Dombey and Son (1848), Bleak House (1853) and Little Dorrit (1857). They are anticipated by superb readings of Pickwick Papers and A Christmas Carol, and followed by brief discussions of Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend (abbreviated, presumably, by the publisher’s requirement), so that the book’s final chapter is more taster than conclusion.

“What Providence Meant”, Gribble’s subtitle, is an adapted quotation from Our Mutual Friend, and the clue to her interpretive vision of Dickens’s engagement with the Bible. “Providence”, familiar to Dickens from eighteenth-century novels as a Christian signpost, is expanded by his own novels into what Gribble calls the Judeo-Christian grand narrative of creation, fall, incarnation and redemption, various aspects of which are revealed, in Dickens’s novels, through networks of biblical allusion and typology. Thus Professor Gribble convincingly reads the birth of the Child of the Marshalsea as “a vernacular nativity story” recreating the birth in Bethlehem. Dickens’s apocalyptic register in Dombey and Son, casually dismissed by many critics, is, in Gribble’s reading, amplified by the moral authority of scripture. Florence Dombey is reconfigured in terms of hope rather than of pathos; and this refreshed Florence, together with the novel’s several death-scenes, is rescued from the Victorian “sentimentality” to which they have regularly been consigned. Gribble’s discussion of Bleak House (in which the inherited Chancery suit at the centre of the novel gets a bold biblical reboot as original sin) includes a riveting account of the terrible conflict between Esther and her godmother as a “battle of proof-texts” concerning the woman taken in adultery (John 8). Judicious use of the parables, and The Life of Our Lord (which Dickens wrote for his children), here establishes a dialogue between compassion and apocalyptic warning. Bakhtin’s dialogic theories, effectively applied beyond the double narrative of Bleak House, help Professor Gribble unpack the “intersubjectivities” of Esther and Jarndyce.

The accumulation of such detailed readings is the basis of Professor Gribble’s claim for Dickens’s providential vision. On the surface, this is unexceptionable: because Dickens worked within comedic structures, his novels tend naturally to resolution. But, as Gribble points out, most commentators have resisted the theological implications of Dickens’s providential Christianity, which they see as conventional overlay, rather than the structural underpinning that Gribble believes it to be. Her detailed readings bring specifics of biblical Christianity to the core of Dickens’s social vision; this is her book’s major contribution. I find her further claims for Dickens’s “theology” more contentious, and also more hesitant. The final sentence of the introduction promotes both “the genre of narrative theology” and “a theology of ‘existential encounter’”, but the repeated, or doubled “theology”, however insistent, remains elusive. While her strong readings surely imply the Judeo-Christian grand narrative to which Gribble is committed, any relationships subsequently inferred between theology and fiction are more tenuous, less creative, and, because they put the fiction at the service of “theology”, less balanced than those between scripture and fiction.

In pursuing her arguments, Professor Gribble enlists the philosophical assistance, particularly, of Mikhail Bakhtin and Paul Ricoeur. Her key theoretical terms—Anamnesis, Chronotype, Event, Superabundance—are taken from one or other of Bakhtin and Ricoeur, and some of them are evidently common to both. Alongside Bakhtin’s Chronotype Professor Gribble sets Wordsworth’s “spots of time”, and for me, Wordsworth stands in more useful and illuminating relationship to Dickens than does Bakhtin. The philosophical framework may have been more important to Gribble’s thinking about her subject than it need be to her readers (although many will disagree). Sometimes I found myself musing, “It’s all right, Mr Dickens, you can come out again soon”, and he always does; indeed, in idiosyncratic reversal of the author’s intention, for me it’s Dickens who illuminates Bakhtin and Ricoeur. A significant problem is that the ideas of these philosophers are often not sourced directly to their writings, which are too often cited, quoted or even paraphrased by other commentators. This mediates and therefore compromises their authority. 

Professor Gribble’s “Note on Texts” doesn’t explain the principle on which the several editions—Penguin, OUP, Clarendon Press, Norton—were selected. Nor does she explain the principle of inclusion in her bibliography, which falls well short of a list of works cited. The omission of Humphrey House’s The Dickens World (1941) and Kathleen Tillotson’s Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (1954), seminal studies that anticipate her own work, is strange. And the relationship among notes, bibliography and index occasionally becomes incoherent. 

Professor Gribble’s scholarly apparatus comes to crisis in her use of Essays and Reviews (1860), a controversial collection of theological essays now seen as a manifesto for the Broad Church movement. Dickens read it. Gribble pays particular attention to an essay by Benjamin Jowett (Master of Balliol and Oxford Professor of Greek), “On the Interpretation of Scripture”. Jowett advocates liberal interpretation: to get close to “the original spirit and intention of the authors of the New Testament”, he says, readers should confine themselves “to the plain meaning of words and the study of their context” (I quote from the first edition). Professor Gribble enlists Jowett’s essay as an example of “the dynamic nature of Christianity” advanced by Dickens.

Because Jowett is never quoted directly by Professor Gribble, her claim rests on sand. Words offered as his “the self-evolving powers of nature”, are from another essay in the Essays and Reviews collection, Baden Powell’s “On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity” (Baden Powell, father of the Scout, was Oxford Professor of Geometry). This significant misattribution is compounded when Jowett is eventually quoted, not from his own essay, but from one of the introductory essays by the editors of the University Press of Virginia’s modern edition of Essays and Reviews (2000), “Benjamin Jowett and Biblical Hermeneutics”. I noted three references to Jowett in Gribble’s book, the index to which lists two, one of which is mistaken.

Primary material is too often cited through secondary material—Darwin and Paley via Gillian Beer, for example. As with the quotation and paraphrase of Bakhtin and Ricoeur, this compromises the authority of such material. Most books are dogged by errata and omissions. Here, it is Joseph, not William Banks, who brought exotic specimens back from Tahiti (and elsewhere). Fielding called his Joseph Andrews (1742) not a “comic epic in prose” but a “comic epic poem in prose” (emphasis added): the omission of “poem” loses the traction of the poem/prose paradox. William Whitla, one of the editors of the modern edition of Essays and Reviews cited, becomes William White, notifying us that the misprint imp, that literal mischief-maker, has been out of his bottle.

Authors should not be expected to edit their own work, to which their attachment precludes necessary objectivity. The two editors of Routledge’s The Nineteenth Century Series, in which Dickens and Religion is included, should have overseen the production of this book more carefully. And the publisher, Routledge, should have supported their own book and its author with the services of a professional editor properly schooled in the conventions of academic presentation.

David Trotter, emeritus professor of literature at Cambridge, has recently said: “Dickens’s exactitude can be exacting: it requires us not simply to notice but to acknowledge significance of all kinds” (London Review of Books, December 17, 2020). The analysis of such exactitude, such attention to detail, is the finest point of Professor Gribble’s reading, as when she identifies Dickens’s opposition of the “innocent breast” of Amy to the “capital bosom” of Mrs Merdle, thereby marshalling the anodyne “innocent breast” into a line of battle. Gribble’s writing is as exacting as her reading. In explaining how Christ’s commendation of poverty “is played out in Amy Dorrit’s espousal of poverty”, Gribble’s sentence turns on “espousal”; this winning word invokes both relationship and loneliness, and makes Amy Dorrit, in her poverty, and with no partner in prospect, crucial to Dickens’s critique of marriage and materialism.

No wedding in Dickens’s fiction carries more significance than that of Arthur and Amy. Little Dorrit, often dubbed the darkest of Dickens’s novels, is also the most deliberately lit, from the staring Mediterranean light of its opening, through the blazing sunset at Twickenham where Arthur watches his love for Minnie Meagles drift away, to the sunlit nuptial in St George’s church. The depiction of this scene by Phiz (Hablot Browne), in his illustration for the novel’s final chapter is, literally, illuminating. We see the couple, not at the altar, but signing the Marriage Register. Amy sits at the desk, pen in hand, Arthur standing beside her, while the sun’s rays stream diagonally through the window from the right—a reminder that the novel’s dominant symbol of “the bars of the prison of this lower world” is also an image of light, and an allusion to the divine, defining fiat: “Let there be light.” Professor Gribble points out that “blessed” in “inseparable and blessed” invokes the Beatitudes. Its bisyllabic power is also supported by the negative prefix of “inseparable”, a word charged with legal meaning in 1857, when the Divorce Act became law. The Marriage Register, like the Bible, is a book for the ages. So is Little Dorrit.

As Professor Gribble says, when Pip reads the gospel to the dying Magwitch in Great Expectations, Dickens is drawing on a lifetime’s creative engagement with the Bible. It is so with her own book, which draws too on a lifetime’s creative engagement with Dickens. I’ve taken Routledge to task for failing to give their author proper editorial support, but I commend them for publishing this book, and I thank the author for the exactitude with which she has sent me back to Dickens. 

Dickens and the Bible: “What Providence Meant”
by Jennifer Gribble
Routledge, 2021, 228 pages, about $200

Simon Petch taught in the English department at the University of Sydney from 1973 until his retirement in 2006