“Many a wintry hour did I hear the church clock strike, when I was sitting in my cheerless bedroom, wrapped in my little great-coat, poring over a book.”
Thus spoke a nine-year-old David Copperfield upon returning home from boarding school for a month-long holiday. The poor child’s weeks away at school had been plagued by constant unprovoked and unrestrained beatings by a tyrannical headmaster and his cane; yet his treatment at home bore him no relief.
His draconian stepfather berates him unrelentingly and punishes everything David does, from a fidget to an imperfectly memorized lesson, with a beating from his cane. Copperfield’s mother, pressured into marrying the abusive coward after David’s father died, is afraid to stand up for her son, due to the unceasing chastisement and belittlement she receives from her new husband and his sister every time she opens her mouth. Justice and mercy elude sweet David Copperfield at every turn, leaving him no solace save from the rare hours he is permitted to spend alone in his room reading.
Such undeservingly downtrodden souls inhabit the pages of every novel written by the great Charles Dickens. Before he appeared on the literary scene like a meteor streaking through the imaginations of the poor, most novels were written from the perspective of wealthy and privileged characters.
Dickens flipped that script and wrote best-selling novels featuring protagonists like the orphaned Oliver Twist, the crippled Tiny Tim, the wrongfully convicted Sydney Carton, and the beleaguered child of the marshes Pip. Such characters opened up the world of reading to millions of commoners who previously struggled to find relatable stories. And as for those who enjoyed the riches of the newly-industrialized world, these books opened their eyes to the sufferings of their fellow man and revealed to them that we owe it to each other to lend a helping hand.
In a society in which productivity and usefulness were prized above all else, Dickens declared, “No one is useless who lightens the burden of another.”
While Dickens enjoyed wealth and fame as a result of his book sales, he never lost sight of his compassion. He gave a coin to every beggar who crossed his path on the foggy streets of London and spoke at charity events to benefit the urban poor.
Much of his social awareness may be attributed to his difficult upbringing, in which his thriftless father was thrown into debtor’s prison, forcing young Charles to work tirelessly in a boot blacking factory at the tender age 12. Yet while many of the abuses of the Industrial Revolution like child labor and debtor’s prison have been banned, the messages of Charles Dickens’ books remain as relevant as ever.
In the aforementioned classics David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, readers are given vivid illustrations in which the words of Scripture are shown to matter. David and Oliver, as well as Pip from Great Expectations, are orphans. They are mistreated by nearly everyone in their path who has the power to help them until finally an unlikely benefactor (a Good Samaritan we might say) alleviates their anguish and comes to their aid.
The Bible has plenty to say on this matter of caring for orphans. James 1:27 reads, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” Psalm 68:5 calls God the “Father of the fatherless.” Psalm 10:17-18 says, “You, Lord, hear the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, defending the fatherless and the oppressed.” And Hosea 14:3 extols the Lord by proclaiming, “In you the orphan finds mercy.”
Time and again, the Word of God exhorts us to extend our compassion and generosity to the fatherless–something Mr. Copperfield, Mr. Twist, and Mr. Pirrip search far too long to find. Yet the message of Scripture is clear: God cares for the orphan. And he commands us to be the means through which he does so.
A Tale of Two Cities is Dickens’ historical fiction novel about the perversion of justice during the French Revolution. His protagonists Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton, along with countless side characters, are the recipients of horrendous blows they don’t deserve at the hands of revolutionaries who claim to be fighting for “justice” and “equality.”
Here, 21st-century readers can glean the lesson to be skeptical of those who justify violence and wrongful imprisonment in the name of virtues like equality and justice, and in doing so undermine the meaning of these sacred values.
The Bible reveals clearly to us how much God loves justice. In Amos 5:24, he says “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a never-failing stream.” But what is justice, according to the Lord? Justice comes when the guilty are convicted and the innocent are blessed (Proverbs 24:24-25). Too often, we confuse justice with revenge: something condemned by the Lord. Romans 12:19 states, “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.”
For our part, therefore, we seek justice by treating people justly. We don’t cheat people out of money, for example; for Proverbs 20:10 declares, “Unequal weights and unequal measures are both alike an abomination to the Lord.” A Tale of Two Cities speaks to us today by revealing the consequences of injustice. Let us never be a part of such treachery.
By brilliantly narrating the real-world consequences of greed, injustice, selfishness, and hard-heartedness, Dickens encourages his readers to treat their fellow man with love.
In no work of Dickens is this hammered home more intensely than A Christmas Carol. At this time of year, we are inundated by a barrage of adaptations of this timeless masterpiece, featuring every household name from Mickey Mouse to Jim Carrey. But the genius of the 1843 novel will never be matched by Hollywood.
In this brief story, the reader finds himself repulsed by the embittered and miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, only to discover–if we are perceptive enough–that Ebenezer Scrooge is us. We are the selfish ones. We disregard the poor. We withhold generosity from those in need and fail to live in gratitude and compassion.
A Christmas Carol reveals to us the sheer scale of harm or goodness we can bring about for the people around us based on how we live. And this lesson, like all lessons lapped up from the deep waters of the Dickensian well, is as true for us today as it was for those in 19th-century England. So pick up a Dickens novel this Christmas. Enjoy every wonderful word. And let his evergreen didactic tales do the work in your soul they were written to do.
Johnathan Kettler is a history teacher at Brandon High School.
