Biblical Allusion in the Opening Numbers of Three of Charles Dickens’s Serialized Novels

Abstract

Biblical Allusion in the Opening Numbers of Three of Charles Dickens’s Serialized Novels Zhu Yuanyuan (bio) Charles Dickens’s allusive and thematic use of the Bible in his novels and other writings has caught critical attention over the past four decades, resulting in studies that either explore his personal belief and his attitude towards religious and theological issues,1 or interpret his texts’ themes, characters, or narratives by examining their connections with biblical counterparts.2 Most recently, Jennifer Gribble’s Dickens and the Bible: “What Providence Meant” (2021) has explored how Dickens engages the Judeo-Christian grand narrative in his novels in dialogue with other contemporary narratives. However, critical examination of biblical allusion in Dickens’s novels has overlooked the aspect of serial publication that shaped how his contemporary readers would have approached and read his works. Each of the three novels under consideration in this article was serialized either in Dickens’s weekly magazine Household Words (Hard Times) or in separate monthly instalments (Bleak House and Little Dorrit). This article aims to theorize both explicit and implicit use of biblical allusion and its workings in the opening numbers of these three novels as structural and thematic tools that help organize oppositional stances embodied in characters and institutions and that foster active reading by drawing upon the reader’s familiarity with the Bible.3 [End Page 155] My analysis of biblical allusion in the opening numbers of these serialized novels is based on the assumption that Dickens’s contemporary readers were indeed familiar with the Bible, in spite of the fact that the nineteenth century witnessed the process of secularization, with the status of the Bible being challenged by a number of factors, including the Higher Criticism and the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species.4 In fact, by the mid-eighteenth century, communal and individual readings of the Bible together with Bunyan’s Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress and Milton’s Paradise Lost had become common in many families. In the nineteenth century, in addition to the practice of family prayers, daily Bible study, and exegesis in family circles, Bible readings became part of the curriculum in grammar schools.5 Therefore, we may assume that Dickens and his readers shared a biblical literacy that was the prerequisite for the novelist to incorporate biblical allusions and stimulate the reader’s participation in the process of interpretation. An “imagined community,” to borrow Benedict Anderson’s term (46),6 can be thought of as existing between the novelist and his readers, as well as among the readers themselves, because of the cultural resonance realized by reading and sharing common cultural discourses.7 Each instance of allusion to the Bible engages the reader’s judgment through their efforts in recognition and interpretation. The aesthetic appreciation of an allusion involves an effective “exchange” and forges “intimacy and community” between the novelist and his reader, to use William Irwin’s terms (530). The use of biblical allusions in the opening numbers of serial fiction intensifies such cultural experience. My analysis has also been informed by the concept of biblical typology, defined by George P. Landow as “a Christian form of scriptural interpretation [End Page 156] that claims to discover divinely intended anticipations of Christ and His dispensation in the laws, events, and people of the Old Testament” (3). As Landow shows how the Victorians transfer “habits of mind derived from interpreting the Bible” to “contemporary politics, literary characterization […] and other areas of thought apparently far distant from theological studies” (15), my article will show such typological habits of mind are also transferred to Dickens’s literary production. I shall argue that in the opening numbers of Hard Times, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit, novels about contemporary social problems, Dickens draws on biblical allusions to construct “types” that foreshadow and prefigure certain aspects; or, put differently, “types” that the novels will fulfil. Dickens’s novels of the 1850s critique social problems and individual failings, and suggest their connection. The criticism of the Court of Chancery in Bleak House and of utilitarian educational theories in Hard Times set up these novels’ moral stance in opposition to idolatrous practices, similar to Little Dorrit’s...