Blackwell Reference Online

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Dickens is, of course, a Christian writer. A very English, Protestant, and Anglican-inflected one. He is steeped, as most Victorian writers were, in the knowledge, the words, the stories, the rhetoric, the practices of the national religion, but to a quite outstanding degree. His parents, worldly theater-lovers, notoriously did not go much to church, but he, it would seem, could hardly stay away. Wherever he was, in London, in Europe, in America, he was drawn to Christian assemblies. Sermon-tasting was what he did a lot of on Sundays. He was baptized conventionally into the Church of England, and, like his beloved sister Fanny, was sent regularly to church. Church of England on Sunday morning, chapel on Sunday evening. Whichever female it was who scrubbed him up and dragged him off on a Sunday evening to some Chatham chapel to “sit under” the powerful preaching of the Rev. Boanerges Boiler - a servant maybe, but nobody knows - the recollection in “City of London Churches” has the ring and vehemence of personal experience about it, for all the Dickensian conventions of its satirical thrusts - being “steamed like a potato in the unventilated breath” of the Boiler and his congregation, and so forth ( Journalism 4: 108). On weekdays, the young Dickens attended the school in Chatham run by the local Baptist minister, William Giles. It was Giles who gave Dickens his nickname “The Inimitable.” ... log in or subscribe to read full text