Theological Dickens

This is the first collection to investigate Charles Dickens on his vast and various opinions about the uses and abuses of the tenets of Christian faith that imbue English Victorian culture. Although previous studies have looked at his well-known antipathies toward Dissenters, Evangelicals, Catholics, and Jews, they have also disagreed about Dickens’ thoughts on Unitarianism and speculated on doctrines of Protestantism that he endorsed or rejected. Besides addressing his depiction of these religious groups, the volume’s contributors locate gaps in scholarship and unresolved illations about poverty and charity, representations of children, graveyards, labor, scientific controversy, and other social issues through an investigation of Dickens’ theological concerns. In addition, given that Dickens’ texts continue to influence every generation around the globe, a timely inclusion in the collection is a consideration of the neo-Victorian multi-media representations of Dickens’ work and his ideas on theological questions pitched to a postmodern society.

Brenda Ayres, now retired from full-time residential teaching, currently teaches online for several universities. Besides the listing of publications below, her additional works can be found at Amazon, and they include her first book on Dickens Dissenting Women in Dickens’ Domestic Novels: Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Praeger, 1998). She published two other books by Routledge: Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash (2019) and Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture (2020).

Sarah E. Maier is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of New Brunswick. Besides the works listed below as coeditor and coauthor, she has published extensively on the Brontës; edited special issues on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Neo-Victorian Considerations and Charlotte Brontë at the Bicentennial as well as published articles on biofiction, neo-Victorian vampires, Penny Dreadful, transmedia adaptations; Anne Lister, and neo-Victorian narratives.

Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier coedited and contributed chapters to the following: Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media (Palgrave, 2020); Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past (Anthem, 2020); Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture (Routledge, 2020); and Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-first Century (Anthem 2019). The two cowrote A Vindication of the Redhead: The Typology of Red Hair Throughout the Literary and Visual Arts (Palgrave 2021) and will be publishing Neo-Victorian Things: Re-Imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures with Palgrave in 2021 (adding Danielle Dove as coeditor).