Charles Dickens on Religion

My conception of Christianity stresses the broad-church message of love and forgiveness, rather than concentrating - as some of my contemporaries did - on the minute and desiccated analysis and application of Biblical scripture.

It is the difference, if you like, between the charity and goodness of the child-like Little Dorrit, and the gloomy apocalyptic text-obsessed religion of Arthur Clennam’s mother.

In chapter 3 of Little Dorrit Arthur remembers the “dreary Sunday of his childhood” when he was “scared out of his senses by a horrible tract which commenced business with the poor child by asking him in its title, why he was going to Perdition?” and “had a parenthesis in every other line with some such hiccupping reference as 2 Ep. Thess. C. iii, v. 6 & 7.”"

"I always considered religious faith to be a fundamentally personal business, and accordingly I had a lifelong distrust of those who were too showy in their profession of Christian ideals.

Both Evangelical religion (as practised by Mr Chadband in Bleak House) and Roman Catholicism, were the subject of my personal and printed scorn, and in general I detested all the ''unseemly squabbles about the letter'' of Christian doctrine, ''which drive the spirit out of hundreds of thousands'' (letter to Rev R H Davies, 31 Dec 1856).

My view was that the minutiae of faith was unimportant, if the heart be in the right place. Love, charity and duty are the core of my religious life.

My parents were Anglican (which is to say, Church of England), and my first church services were in the Anglican church in Chatham.

But they were not dogmatic, and I also attended services in a local Baptist chapel.

For much of my life I was drawn to a Unitarian faith."

I have no time for doctrinal disputes, but I believe strongly that Jesus is a moral example to us all.

So although I satirize canting religious types again and again in my works, my moral and social views are steeped in Christianity. I rewrote the New Testament for the private use of my children, never intending it to be published for the general public, although it was, many years after I died, under the title The Life of Our Lord.