The Hybrid Of Theology And Secularity

Charles Dickens (1812-1870), a prestigious writer in early modern England, not only once set the whole19th-century literary world on fire, but also has got international reputation and popularity. His deep vein of benevolence in human nature and intense hatred towards the brutal capitalist society turned him into a satirical social critic. What made Dickens stand out from other Victorian writers was his gift of imaginative insight and his persisting devotion to his art. Although his works aroused great social concern and enchanted innumerable readers immediately after their publication, they received quite mixed notices. Some gave negative evaluations of artistic merit about his writings and diagnosed them as marred by loose organization and pedestrian plot. But it is undeniable that Dickens reached the ne plus ultra of his skill while quite young. Only in his earlier days, however, was his art one of improvisation. He later developed into a conscientious literary craftsman striving to portray every character in delicacy and painstaking to perfect the minutest detail of style and structure. Dickens’s achievement is not of ephemeral importance, but has stood the test of time and will never fade into oblivion.Since the age of Dickens, scholars have been endeavoring to investigate the depth and profundity of the world of Charles Dickens. The modern Dickens studies are increasingly diversified and systematized and have scored substantial results by utilizing a wide variety of literary theory and criticism, for instance, structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, new historicism, etc. The compatibility of his thought calls for an openness to the breadth of both the novelist and discourses that one may expect to find in his art.Dickens’s novels which symbolize critical realism are reflective of revealing evil social practices of capitalism. Sparse critics, however, have touched upon the religious sources implied in his critical realism. The Christian aspect of Dickens’s works, actually an indispensible part of his blossom as a novelist has been sadly neglected for long, which usually erects partial judgments and false dichotomy. In Victorian age, the dense religious ambience deeply penetrated in every facet of social life. In the meantime, if revivals of theology stand at one pole, the unprecedented trends of secularization stood at the other. Under this circumstance, rather than necessitating the decline of Christian era, the drastic confronting of the opposite flows finally resulted in a mutual intergrowth, which cast a great influence on the contemporary artistic creation. Like other well-known mid-nineteenth-century writers, Dickens accepted and reinterpreted the religious thoughts he had inherited. The majority of his works, therefore, were inevitably engraved with the branding of that age. This paper sets forth under the religious panorama of Victorian England while applying the mass of comprehensive firsthand accounts in order to explore the interactions of literature and religion exhibited in Dickens’s fiction writing with the analyses of three typical novels of his distinct creation periods respectively in hoping of appreciating how Dickens’s writing embodies the religious and secular aspects simultaneously.