Editing Charles Dickens (section)

====Religious views====

As a young man, Dickens expressed a distaste for certain aspects of organised religion. In 1836, in a pamphlet titled ''Sunday Under Three Heads'', he defended the people's right to pleasure, opposing a plan to prohibit games on Sundays. "Look into your churches—diminished congregations and scanty attendance. People have grown sullen and obstinate, and are becoming disgusted with the faith which condemns them to such a day as this, once in every seven. They display their feeling by staying away [from church]. Turn into the streets [on a Sunday] and mark the rigid gloom that reigns over everything around."<ref name=Callow2012p63>{{harvnb|Callow|2012|p=63}}</ref><ref name=Dickens1836>{{cite web |url=http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/dickens/sun_3hea.pdf |last=Dickens |first=Charles |title=Sunday under Three Heads |publisher=Electronics Classics Series |year=2013 |orig-year=1836 |access-date=25 February 2019 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140925203511/http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/dickens/sun_3hea.pdf |archive-date=25 September 2014}}</ref>

[[File:Portrait of Charles Dickens (4671094).jpg|thumb|175px|Portrait of Dickens, {{c.}} 1850, [[National Library of Wales]]]]
Dickens honoured the figure of [[Jesus Christ]].<ref>Simon Callow, 'Charles Dickens'. p.159</ref><!-- which Callow book is this? 2009 or 2012? --> He is regarded as a professing Christian.<ref>{{cite book |first=Gary |last=Colledge |year=2012 |title=God and Charles Dickens: Recovering the Christian Voice of a Classic Author |page=24 |publisher=Brazos Press |isbn=978-1441247872}}</ref> His son, [[Henry Fielding Dickens]], described him as someone who "possessed deep religious convictions". In the early 1840s, he had shown an interest in [[Unitarianism|Unitarian Christianity]] and [[Robert Browning]] remarked that "Mr Dickens is an enlightened Unitarian."<ref>{{cite magazine |last=Rost |first=Stephen |title=The Faith Behind the Famous: Charles Dickens |url=http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-27/faith-behind-famous-charles-dickens.html |magazine=Christianity Today |url-access=subscription |access-date=20 December 2016 |archive-date=31 December 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161231051244/http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-27/faith-behind-famous-charles-dickens.html |url-status=live}}</ref> Professor Gary Colledge has written that he "never strayed from his attachment to popular lay [[Anglicanism]]".<ref>{{harvnb|Colledge|2009|p=87}}.</ref> Dickens authored a work called ''[[The Life of Our Lord]]'' (1846), a book about the life of Christ, written with the purpose of sharing his faith with his children and family.<ref>{{cite web |first=Stephen |last=Skelton |url=https://www.cbn.com/spirituallife/churchandministry/Skelton_Christmas_Carol_A.aspx |title=Reclaiming 'A Christmas Carol' |work=Christian Broadcasting Network |access-date=25 February 2019 |archive-date=15 January 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190115031402/https://www.cbn.com/spirituallife/churchandministry/Skelton_Christmas_Carol_A.aspx |url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.chucknorris.com/Christian/Christian/ebooks/dickens_life.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121107040114/http://chucknorris.com/Christian/Christian/ebooks/dickens_life.pdf |url-status=dead |title=The Life Of Our Lord |archive-date=7 November 2012}}</ref> In a scene from ''David Copperfield'', Dickens echoed [[Geoffrey Chaucer]]'s use of [[Sayings of Jesus on the cross#Luke 23:34|Luke 23:34]] from ''[[Troilus and Criseyde]]'' (Dickens held a copy in his library), with [[G. K. Chesterton]] writing, "among the great [[Gospel#Canonical gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John|canonical]] English authors, Chaucer and Dickens have the most in common."<ref>{{cite book |last=Besserman |first=Lawrence |title=The Chaucer Review |date=2006 |publisher=Penn State University Press |pages=100–103 |url=https://www.academia.edu/20310557}}</ref>

Dickens disapproved of [[Roman Catholicism]] and 19th-century [[evangelicalism]], seeing both as extremes of Christianity and likely to limit personal expression, and was critical of what he saw as the hypocrisy of religious institutions and philosophies like [[Spiritualism (movement)|spiritualism]], all of which he considered deviations from the true spirit of Christianity, as shown in the book he wrote for his family in 1846.<ref name="KSmith">{{cite book |last=Smith |first=Karl |title=Dickens and the Unreal City: Searching for Spiritual Significance in Nineteenth-Century London |date=2008 |publisher=Springer |pages=11–12}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/religion1.html |title=Dickens and Religion: ''The Life of Our Lord'' (1846) |date=June 2011 |publisher=Victorian Web |editor-first=Philip V |editor-last=Allingham |access-date=25 February 2019 |archive-date=15 March 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190315073824/http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/religion1.html |url-status=live}}</ref> While Dickens advocated equal rights for Catholics in England, he strongly disliked how individual civil liberties were often threatened in countries where Catholicism predominated and referred to the Catholic Church as "that curse upon the world."<ref name="KSmith"/> Dickens also rejected the Evangelical conviction that the Bible was the infallible word of God. His ideas on Biblical interpretation were similar to the Liberal Anglican [[Arthur Penrhyn Stanley]]'s doctrine of "[[Progressive revelation (Christianity)|progressive revelation]]".<ref name="KSmith"/> [[Leo Tolstoy]] and [[Fyodor Dostoyevsky]] referred to Dickens as "that great Christian writer".<ref>{{cite book |editor1-first=Sally |editor1-last=Ledger |editor2-first=Holly |editor2-last=Furneaux |year=2011 |title=Charles Dickens in Context |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |page=318 |isbn=978-0521887007}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |first=Cedric Thomas |last=Watts |year=1976 |title=The English novel |publisher=Sussex Books |page=55 |isbn=978-0905272023}}</ref>