It is an honor to be included in the fabulous collection of essays that Alisa Clapp-Itnyre and Julie Melnyk have put together in “Perplext in Faith”: Essays on Victorian Beliefs and Doubts.
The book grew out of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association’s 2013 conference, which focused on the flourishing and changing nature of Victorian faith. From Eric Michael Reisenauer’s essay that traces the widespread influence of millenarian beliefs in conjunction with the Crimean War to Robert C. Koepp’s work on Eliot’s treatment of chance as simultaneously a form of faith and a “lack of belief in one’s self” the collection demonstrates the widespread influence of religious faith in Victorian England. The work is part of an newish-scholarly trend that treats religion—that is the the matrix of practices, beliefs, objects and texts (oral, written, sung and said) that create and are used to create identity and provide a sense of/or connection to the Divine (variously defined)—as a way of being in the world not subordinated to other interests.
My chapter, “Charles Dickens’s The Life of Our Lord and the Problem of Jesus,” examines a retelling of the gospels that Dickens wrote for his children between 1846-48. I argue that Dickens’s artistic commitment to idealization, deep respect for Jesus, and sentimental view of his young audience undermine his ability to represent Jesus as a sympathetic character, resulting in a disembodied, static, and sentimentalized icon. As a result, Dickens’s fails to create a community of characters around Jesus within the text, and fails to foster sympathy between the reader and Jesus, rendering Jesus an ineffective moral example that might inspire a child’s imagination.
While the nineteenth century is a remarkable period of secularization in Britain, as scholars like Callum Brown and Timothy Larsen have illustrated, secularization can only happen in a context of religious belief, otherwise there is nothing to “secularize.” As such, Victorianists are increasingly turning to religious topics as subjects for investigation. It is not enough, however, to simply recognize that many Victorians were Christians and, as such, read the Bible and believed in particular doctrines. We are increasingly aware that we can only understand Dickens, Eliot, the Brontë’s and Victorian culture at large, if we can see the world through the perspectives and practices of religious faith, taking seriously the preoccupations that shape such lives. The essays that Clapp-Itnyre and Melnyk have edited are a significant piece of scholarship establishing just such an understanding.
“Perplext in Faith”: Essays on Victorian Beliefs and Doubts is available from Cambridge Scholars Publishing and Amazon.