Charles Dickens wasn't a good Christian – but he's turned Jesus into box office gold

Telegraph

15-04-2025

Angel Studios' new animated film The King of Kings is an unusual Biblical biopic that depicts the life of Jesus in the form of stories told by Charles Dickens – voiced by Kenneth Branagh – to his young son Walter. I am not surprised that it has done record-breaking business for a Biblical animation in its opening weekend, taking almost $20 million in the US alone.
It's not just that those two bearded master-storytellers, Jesus and Dickens, are both always good box-office in their own right. It's that the combination of the two is so appropriate: anyone with even a glancing knowledge of Dickens's works will feel that few novelists were more attuned to the values of Christ.
Dickens would have thoroughly approved of this film as a means of familiarising children with the life of Jesus. The tots who spent Sunday enjoying the colourful animation and the exuberance of its voice cast – Oscar Isaac as Jesus, Mark Hamill as Herod, Pierce Brosnan as Pontius Pilate, Ben Kingsley as Caiaphas – will have very different memories of their childhood introduction to the Bible than those of Arthur Clennam, the hero of Dickens's Little Dorrit.
'His mother, stern of face and unrelenting of heart, would sit all day behind a Bible – bound, like her own construction of it, in the hardest, barest, and straitest boards, with … a wrathful sprinkling of red upon the edges of the leaves – as if it, of all books! were a fortification against sweetness of temper, natural affection, and gentle intercourse.' The young Arthur is left with 'no more real knowledge of the beneficent history of the New Testament than if he had been bred among idolaters'.
Dickens despised the acts of wrath and spite that pervade the Old Testament: 'Half the misery and hypo­crisy of the Christian world (as I take it) comes from a stubborn determina­tion to refuse the New Testament as a sufficient guide in itself, and to force the Old Testament into alliance with it', he once wrote. The New Testament was his constant companion – 'It was the book of all others he read most and which he took as his one unfailing guide in his life,' recalled George Dolby, the manager of his reading tours.
'One of my most constant and most earnest endeavours has been to exhibit in all my good people some faint reflections of the teachings of our great Master, and unostentatiously to lead the reader up to those teachings as the great source of all moral goodness,' he wrote in a letter in 1861. 'All my strongest illustrations are derived from the New Testament: all my social abuses are shown as departures from its spirit.'
Such was Dickens's reverence for the New Testament that in the late 1840s he wrote his own version of the narrative: a document of 100-odd pages entitled The Life Of Our Lord, which is the basis for the new film. As he boasted to a friend, he would read it to his children 'long before they could read, and no young people can have had an earlier knowledge of, or interest in, that book. It is an inseparable part of their earliest remembrances.'
A Child's History Of England, another work that began as something Dickens wrote for his own children, became a published book. But Dickens not only refused to make money out of The Life Of Our Lord, but seemed to feel that something of its sacred nature would be spoiled if anybody outside his family so much as glimpsed it: he stipulated that after his death nobody should 'even hand the manuscript, or a copy of it, to anyone to take out of the house'.
The manuscript was left to Dickens's son Sir Henry Fielding Dickens on condition that he not publish it in his lifetime. Sir Henry died in 1933 after being hit by a motorcycle and, just seven weeks later, Time magazine reported that his widow had sold the manuscript to the Daily Mail for $210,000; it became a bestseller when published in book form in the US.
With its narrative largely derived from the Gospel of Luke and the Sermon of the Mount in Matthew, the book is not always theologically sound: 'And because He did such good, and taught people how to love God and how to hope to go to Heaven after death, he was called Our Saviour', Dickens writes at one point, skipping over the fairly important detail that Jesus saved us by atoning for our sins through his own death. The emphasis throughout on Jesus as a source of wisdom and a doer of good works rather than a divine figure was perhaps a necessary simplification for children, but also seems to have reflected Dickens's own priorities.
He seems to have wrestled with his faith far less than most intelligent people of his age. If he would have found his contemporary Tennyson's notion of 'faith in honest doubt' incomprehensible, this may have been because he regarded Christ as an exemplar rather than a redeemer. Jesus's wisdom was not valuable as a proof of his divinity; his divinity was of value in that it was the origin of his wisdom.
Unlike Arthur Clennam's mother, Dickens's parents had had little taste for Biblical instruction or anything much to do with religion, and what seems to have drawn him to Christianity were the kindnesses he witnessed carried out in the name of faith, not least by the Anglican clergyman who taught him to read as a boy. A prodigiously energetic philanthropist, with an especial zeal for assisting in the reformation of fallen women, he regarded the doctrinal disputes that preoccupied the clergymen of his era as wasting time that could be spent on practical good works.
Of course, Dickens could not always live up to his Christian ideals. He treated his wife Catherine abominably (incidentally, as voiced by Uma Thurman, she is depicted in the new film as a wasp-waisted, contented helpmeet to Dickens rather than the usual put-upon drudge) and committed adultery with his much younger girlfriend Nelly Ternan. Far from honouring his father and mother, he caricatured them mercilessly as the selfish Mr Dorrit and the wittering Mrs Nickleby. And his insistence on Christ-like forbearance even towards the wicked did not stop him calling the police on people for swearing or urinating in the street.
Still, there was more than a practical aspect to his Christianity. He said his prayers twice a day and was a far more regular churchgoer as an adult than he had been in childhood. For a time he attended the Essex Street Unitarian chapel in the Strand, although his waxing and waning Unitarianism seems to have depended on his admiration for various specific ministers.
For the bulk of his life he practised as a conventional Anglican. He did not much care for Roman Catholicism, even – despite his personal loathing of Henry VIII – making the Pope the villain of the piece in his account of the Reformation in A Child's History of England. (He wrote the book, he said privately, to prevent his son from getting 'hold of any conservative or High Church notions'). He had little time for dissenters too.
However much he intended to promulgate New Testament teachings through the 'good people' in his novels, the fact is that nobody takes much notice of his 'good people'; we read Dickens for the comic characters, the hypocrites, villains and self-deceivers, and so the characters who go about religion the wrong way are often far more vivid than those who practise his ideals.
He came up with one of his most memorable examples in his very first novel: Stiggins, the perpetually drunk Methodist preacher in The Pickwick Papers. (On being offered a drink by Sam Weller: 'I despise them all. If – if – there is any one of them less odious than another, it is the liquor called rum. Warm, my dear young friend, with three lumps of sugar to the tumbler'). It is a sure sign of Stiggins's misplaced values in the eyes of Dickens, who believed very much that charity begins at home, that he has established a 'society for providing the infant negroes in the West Indies with flannel waistcoats'.
Then there is the Reverend Mr Chadband, the gluttonous, penny-pinching, blackmailing Evangelical clergyman in Bleak House, with his surreal sermons about the need to find inner truth (emphatically pronounced 'Terewth'). Rather than give practical help to young Jo, the orphaned crossing-sweeper, he attributes his lack of money, and indeed parents, to his impiety: 'I say this brother present here among us is devoid of parents, devoid of relations, devoid of flocks and herds, devoid of gold, of silver, and of precious stones because he is devoid of the light that shines in upon some of us. What is that light? What is it? I ask you, what is that light?... It is the light of Terewth.'
People who use religion as an excuse for cruelty are satirised by Dickens in the form of the Murdstones in David Copperfield; David recalls going to church with Miss Murdstone as a boy, she 'mumbling the responses, and emphasising all the dread words with a cruel relish … If I move a finger or relax a muscle of my face, [she] pokes me with her prayer-book, and makes my side ache.' This is not at the level of the terrifying cruelty carried out in the name of religion by, say, the schoolmaster Mr Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre, but in its low-key way it reminds us how easily religious hypocrisy can make a child's life a misery. 'What such people miscall their religion, is a vent for their bad humours and arrogance,' observes kindly Dr Chillip to David, 'And do you know I must say … that I DON'T find authority for Mr and Miss Murdstone in the New Testament?'
Such mockery of religious hypocrisy led, as it always does, to accusations that Dickens was mocking religion itself. He defended himself, with the prickliness typical of his responses to any criticism, in a preface to a reissue of Pickwick: 'Lest there be any well-intentioned persons who do not perceive the difference between religion and the cant of religion, piety and the pretence of piety… let them understand that it is always the latter, and never the former, which is satirised here.'
It is perhaps easier to laugh at Dickens's religious hypocrites than it is to take seriously the gobbets of pious reflection with which his novels are flecked. There is something repellent about Dr Woodcourt badgering Jo into reciting the Lord's Prayer as he lies dying in Bleak House ('Jo, can you say what I say? … Our Father…' 'Our Father! Yes, that's wery good, sir').
Some people will find it touching when the dying Dick cries 'God bless you!' to Oliver Twist ('it was the first [blessing] that Oliver had ever heard invoked upon his head; and through … his after life, he never once forgot it'); others will find it emetic. There will be similar mixed responses to the religious framing of Pip's belated recognition of decent values, including the worth of good old Joe, in Great Expectations ('I lay there, penitently whispering, 'O God bless him! O God bless this gentle Christian man!'')
But most readers will be won over by Dickens's conspicuously decent Christian characters: the church organist Tom Pinch, whose delight in music as an expression of faith recalls that of Trollope's Mr Harding as a rejection of puritanism; the kind clergyman who rescues Little Dorrit when she gets lost in London's mazy streets and is rewarded hundreds of pages later by being permitted to marry her to Arthur.
Dickens's most church-centred novel was his last, the uncompleted Mystery of Edwin Drood. His ambiguous attitude to organised religion is summed up in his portrayal of those who work at Cloisterham Cathedral, a troubled and forbidding place. But if the choirmaster John Jasper turns out to be an opium addict, sex pest and probable murderer, the muscular Christianity of the Minor Canon of Cloisterham, Mr Crisparkle, is presented as wholly admirable, especially when dealing with the grasping professional philanthropist Mr Honeythunder.
Politically radical in so many ways, Dickens nevertheless believed that it was at least sometimes possible for the established church to embody the true values of Christ. 'This curious and sentimental hold of the English Church upon him increased with years,' noted GK Chesterton. 'In the book he was at work on when he died he describes the Minor Canon, humble, chivalrous, tender-hearted, answering with indignant simplicity the froth and platform righteousness of the sectarian philanthropist. He upholds Canon Crisparkle and satirises Mr Honeythunder. Almost every one of the other Radicals, his friends, would have upheld Mr Honeythunder and satirised Canon Crisparkle.'
Cloisterham is the name Dickens used in the book for Rochester, where he spent his final years and died in 1870; although he had expected to be buried in the cathedral there, public opinion demanded that he be interred in Westminster Abbey.
As for The King of Kings, I think Dickens would have been very pleased with it. He had an ego to match the size of his genius, and could even brag about the depth of his humility: 'There cannot be many men, I believe, who have a more humble veneration for the New Testa­ment, or a more profound awareness of its all-sufficiency, than I have,' he wrote to a clergyman acquaintance in 1856. The idea of 21st-century children learning about Jesus through Dickens would have delighted him; the idea of them learning about Dickens through Jesus perhaps even more.