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Dickens loved to denounce Catholicism. But then he had an extraordinary dream

Charles Dickens died 150 years ago this month, on June 9, 1870. A few months before, he told his friend and future biographer John Forster that the Catholic Church was a “curse upon the world”.

Dickens was certainly a Christian: brought up an Anglican, he flirted with Unitarianism for a time, but seems never to have abandoned his belief in the divinity of Christ, the Resurrection, and the immortality of the soul. In 1868 he wrote to Edward, his youngest son, of “the truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from Christ Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but heartily respect it …”. What he disliked was any kind of religion which seemed to him too extreme: as well as his longstanding antipathy to Catholicism, he especially disliked Sabbatarianism and Evangelicalism.

Yet despite his view of the Catholic Church as backward, superstitious and reactionary, there are few, if any, negative portrayals of Catholicism in his novels. Barnaby Rudge, which deals most with religion – or at least an aspect of it – shows Catholics as victims of prejudice, persecution and violence unleashed by the Gordon Riots of 1780. (This was when Lord George Gordon attempted to oppose the Papists Act of 1778, which relaxed some of the penal laws against Catholics.)

Praise the Lord

Read the Whole Article at https://catholicherald.co.uk/