So far, in attempting to identify some of the strands in the fabric of this novel and perhaps to indicate something of the author’s ultimate pattern, I have taken: his known intentions as to plot; the character of Edwin Drood, created as it was to impinge on the character of ]ohn Jasper; the character of Jasper himself (with some conjecture) as it might have been expected to develop; and the influence of the Cathedral on that character and on the whole fragment as it stands. In bringing forward supportive evidence I have relied less on modern scholarship than on Dickens’s own previous work and expressed opinions, his own life and the background of readers in the 1860s, against which this novel was written. A definite part of that background was religion, attendance at church and the manner of worship therein. If the thesis I proposed on page 22—that the underlying social or moral comment in Edwin Drood was to be of religious significance—is to be maintained, something must now be said of Dickens’s own religion, his attitude to church worship and the frequency of the theme’s appearance in his works.
  To attempt any sort of detailed account of the complexity of nineteenth-century religion in England, even from the limited point of view of a single contemporary author, would throw this short study completely out of balance. The present purpose is to indicate as clearly as possible the nature and strength of Dickens’s attitude to religion and its administration in his time. In general terms it can be said that by 1829, when he was 17 and the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed, he would, like most Englishmen, feel himself to be firmly Protestant—an attitude vaguely rooted perhaps in

the events of 1688 and 1780. In dealing with the latter (the Gordon Riots) in Barnaby Rudge twelve years later, he is fair to the Catholics, but they are honourable soldiers on the other side. The Catholic Mr. Haredale is a decent man who has been deeply wronged; the Protestant Gabriel Vardon is the salt of the earth.
  A comprehensive picture of the troubled seas of Victorian religion is to be found in Owen Chadwick’s The Victorian Church (1); I cannot do better than quote its opening words:

Victorian England was religious. Its churches thrived and multiplied, its best minds brooded over divine metaphysic and argued about moral principle, its authors and painters and architects and poets seldom forgot that art and literature shadowed eternal truth or beauty, its legislators professed outward and often accepted inward allegiance to divine law, its men of empire ascribed national greatness to the providence of God and Protestant faith. The Victorians changed the face of the world because they were assured.

If art and literature shadow eternal truth or beauty, that phrase itself shadows the two oldest questions in civilization: what is truth? and what is beauty? And these questions give rise to interpretation, which leads to dogma, and sect, and schism. Quite apart from the broad partition of Catholic and Protestant, the nineteenth century saw Protestantism itself divided into a bewildering variety of sects and intellectual standpoints, each held with conviction and sincerity. Doubt about the truth of Christian faith itself, about the wisdom of an established lawful Church with its probable concomitant, intolerance, ran side by side with total acceptance of every word in both Testaments of the Bible and a horrified antagonism to Darwin’s Origin of Species of 1859. And all this genuine concern and debate on religion co-existed with a great deal of the nineteenth century’s most well-remembered aspect of it—humbug. Dickens in several novels satirizes the humbug unforgettably; but he is also deeply concerned with truth and beauty as he finds them in the expression of his own religious convictions.
  That he had religious convictions and that they were strongly and sincerely held is quite certain. He appears to

have devised in his youth an interpretation of most of the New Testament and maintained it without essential alteration for the rest of his life. But exactly what that interpretation was is as impossible to define in any sort of theological terms as it is to indicate confidently the end of Edwin Drood. From his early pamphlet, Sunday Under Three Heads (1836), written in anger against the attempt by Sir Andrew Agnew and others to curtail the recreations of the poor on the Sabbath, and the creation a few months later of his first religious buffoon, Stiggins, he inseparably intertwined social, moral and religious modes of thought into a clearly recognizable pattern of ideal behaviour and attitude to life which carried a tremendous appeal to the mass of his readers but which defied definition in the terms of any known religious sect. But whatever his inner religious convictions are, they are to be taken seriously:

Lest there should be any well-intentioned persons who do not perceive the difference... between religion and the cant of religion, piety and the pretence of piety, a humble reverence for the great truths of scripture and an audacious and offensive obtrusion of its letter and not its spirit... let them understand that it is always the latter, and never the former, which is satirized here. (Preface, The Pickwick Papers, Cheap Edition, 1847)

If the above stood by itself, it might be merely the public face of the author disclaiming irreverence; but it is reinforced and confirmed by everything he is known to have said and written on the subject. In his novels, journalism and correspondence, it can be clearly seen that when he touches on religion he is expressing his own strongly felt truth; in exposing religious hypocrisy more thoroughly than any other nineteenth-century writer he is not a hypocrite himself. Throughout his work he makes, implicitly or explicitly, the statement that he has derived a code of behaviour from the teaching of Christ in the New Testament (whether he applies it to his own life is another matter) and holds certain firm beliefs which, he hints in more than one place, have little or nothing to do with the thirty-nine articles to be found in the Book of Common Prayer. He has his own ideas of religious

observance and religious belief, most clearly seen because most simply expressed in The Life of Our Lord, written by him for his own children and unpublished until 1934. (2) This rather under-estimated work is a unique piece of Dickensiana in that its writer is for once not striving for literary excellence or even for literary effect, save in the one strictly disciplined sense of a narrator anxious to make his story clear. There is no exhortation to tears, not the slightest attempt at jocularity or writing down to his young readers, nothing grotesque, no shudder of horror and, above all, no touch of sentimental pathos. And when one thinks of what Dickens in his earlier manner (it was written before he began Dombey) could have made of the daughter of Jairus or Mary Magdalene, the simple force of the writing strikes one with something like astonishment. It is a clear factual narration in plain English readable by a reasonably well—educated child, and while his (Dickens’s) message is implicit throughout, he leaves the statement of it until the last paragraph:

REMEMBER!—It is christianity TO DO GOOD always-—even to those who do evil to us. It is christianity to love our neighbour as ourself, and to do to all men as we would have them do to us.

  These are unquestionably his own idealized beliefs on Christianity and they appear unmistakably in all the major novels and the Christmas Books; but any attempts to understand, pigeon-hole or classify them always fail, for as a Chris- tian he is emotionally powerful and intellectually vague. A comparison with Johnson’s comment on Milton is not inapt:

He had determined rather what to condemn, than what to approve. He has not associated himself with any denomination of Protestants: we know rather what he was not, than what he was. (3)

  Not very surprising perhaps if it be recognized that for centuries men’s religious thought has been concentrated quite as much on hotly attacking that of others as on calmly expressing their own. Dickens was no exception. He attacked, using the full strength of a satiric tongue, the preachers and teachers of any form of religion he thought false to the ’teaching

of the New Testament in its broad spirit', as he wrote in his will. Dr. Dennis Walder (4) has quoted Lord Acton’s stress on Dickens’s hatred of ’intolerance, exclusiveness, positive religion', and has gone on to say that it

implies a close link between anti-sectarianism and anti- formalism. Dickens tends to reject, or at least ignore, ’positive religion', but this does not mean his faith is negative. For Dickens, as for men such as Herder, ’positive religion' represented a sterile reliance upon the merely credal or doctrinal element in belief, and his opposition to it sprang from a Romantic sense of Christianity as a religion of the heart, a religion based upon deep feelings about man, nature and God. These feelings by definition transcend sectarian barriers, and offer a unifying rather than a divisive faith. (Walder, Ch. 4).

  Philip Collins (5) in dealing with Dickens’s sojourn with the Unitarians in the 1840s quotes him as writing that it was ’a religion which has sympathy for men of all creeds and ventures judgement on none'. Professor Collins comments: ’The moral rather than theological emphasis is typical, and it is probably useless to try to define some consistent position or development in his religious beliefs.’ And later:

In his religion, as in the rest of his life and work, Dickens was lacking in intellectual rigour. He naively skirted the difficulties he found in the Bible, by the simple device of writing off the Old Testament, and he seems to have been almost unaware of those disputes about Christian Evidences which made ’honest doubt' so familiar to his generation. (Collins, Ch. III)

  Certainly Dickens rejected the Old Testament as being any sort of touchstone or criterion for moral behaviour; and in opposition to him, nineteenth-century Britain was only too well-stocked with people who, far from writing it off, used it to the full, as Humphry House (6) observes:

The acceptance of the whole Bible as equally and wholly the exact word of God put the Old Testament on a par with the New, and made it possible for those who preferred to do so to draw their morality from the sternest parts of the non-Christian books . . . with an almost literal acceptance of the text it was possible to use the Old Testament to justify almost anything, and not merely to justify it but to indulge

all the arrogance and self righteousness in the identification of personal desires with the will of God. (House, Ch. V)

  House goes on to identify this kind of Bible religion with Mrs. Clennam (Little Dorrit). Mr. Murdstone (David Copperfield) has a similar religious view; and there is, at least, no doubt of Dickens’s rejection of the gospel according to these two. Indeed, gospel is a misnomer, for they bring bad news, and Dickens’s message, like Beethoven's, is nearer to hope and the expectation of ultimate triumph than to gloom and despair.   No church could claim Dickens as a true disciple; few probably would have wished to, though many would claim some affinity. The Bishop of Manchester said of him:

Possibly we might not have been able to subscribe to the same creed in relation to God, but I think we should have subscribed to the same creed in relation to man. (Quoted in House, Ch. V)

  Theologians might have said of him, in the manner of a Headmaster’s report, that he meant well, but had no real grasp of the subject. He had nevertheless a strong interest and profound emotional involvement in it, seen most clearly (leaving Edwin Drood aside for the moment) in A Tale of Two Cities.   The themes of burial and resurrection—physical or spiritual—have an attraction for Dickens and appear in his work in both sacred and secular form, often running in parallel with the prison motif, from the time of the Chancery prisoner in Pickwick—’Twenty years, my friend, in this hideous grave!’—to the sexton metaphor employed for ]ohn Harmon/Rokesmith (Our Mutual Friend) who, assumed to be dead, accepts the situation and piles weights upon weights of earth upon his own (metaphorical) grave. Sometimes the prisoner is allowed release or resurrection. In the case of Rokesmith resurrection is alleged to be complete, and the fairy tale has a happy ending. In the case of William Dorrit the body is released, but the spirit remains imprisoned. In the case of Sydney Carton the body is imprisoned (voluntarily), but the spirit is released—the release being linked strongly with the hope of resurrection and eternal life. Prison and grave are

seen alike as tainting, corrupting agents, whose defeat is only possible by love, faith and hope; and in this, Dickens is only paraphrasing St. Paul.   In A Tale of Two Cities the resurrection theme is stated so plainly at the opening that no one can doubt its deliberate use and therefore its profound significance in the structure of the book: the cryptic message 'RECALLED TO LIFE' is given to Ierry Cruncher amid an equally cryptic hint or two that his business is that of body-snatcher or 'Resurrection-Man'; and Iarvis Lorry in the next chapter, on his way to oversee the release of Dr. Manette from prison, has a half-awake dream that he is on his way to dig someone out of a grave, and holds in imagination this dialogue with him:

’Buried how long?’
The answer was always the same: ’Almost eighteen years.'
’You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?’
’Long ago.’
'You know that you are recalled to life?'
'They tell me so.’ (A Tale of Two Cities, Ch. III)

  The theme is heard from time to time and with increasing strength as the book develops, and at the end is insistently sounded in Christian terms as Carton takes his sacrificial path to the scaffold: 'I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.' But as Dr. Walder has said:

. . . it is hard to know how far Dickens really holds the belief expressed at the end, or indeed, what it is, exactly, that he is trying to convey. The repetition of the famous refrain from the Gospel of St. ]ohn in itself reveals little. (Walder, p. 198)

  All that Dickens does succeed in conveying in this novel is that resurrection has some sort of Christian meaning for him as narrator. But does he simply mean, with Thomas Campbell, that 'to live in hearts we leave behind! Is not to die'? Or has he some vague half-formed theory like Williams in Henry V that 'when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day', justice will be done, right and wrong be separated and the truly unselfish

be rewarded? Or has he a theory of regeneration? Will a purified Carton live again in Lucie Darnay’s children? It is unclear. A Tale of Two Cities is not today regarded as one of Dickens's great novels; and one of its weaknesses lies in the probability that the author himself was unsure of the precise significance of his invocation of scripture in this context. A similar call is made on behalf of ]o, the dirty, ragged road-sweeping boy in Bleak House, between whom and Carton there is a world’s difference; but they both die with the Book of Common Prayer sounding in their ears. ]o, ignorant because untaught and neglected by all the Churches and Societies, is somehow sent on his way to the Celestial City by the mere repetition of the opening phrases of the Lord’s Prayer; Carton has two memorable verses from St. ]ohn. It is almost as though Dickens, unable to distinguish between religion and superstition, uses scripture to set a seal of virtue on the departing.
   Whether he actually and literally believed, as he probably stated many times in church, in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, is impossible to say. Such resurrection may indeed be religiously believed in, known even, with the calm certainty of ]ob and Handel (Messiah)—'I know that my Redeemer liveth . . . and though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God’—though the event is usually expected to happen, not next week nor next year, but in some vague unspecified future. Nor can it be known how, in his own mind, he would have interpreted St. Paul: '. . . for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incor- ruptible, and we shall be changed’ (1 Corinthians 15: 51-2).
  The only certainty (apart from the obvious presence at the back of his mind of that other famous quotation from St. Iohn, 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends') is that the theme of resurrection, often in a religious connotation and in the sense of escape from or triumph over the grave or prison, is recurrent in Dickens. Some of the evidence for this I have cited above; there is a great deal more throughout his work. Also recurrent, and often closely bound up with the burial/resurrection theme, is his idea of Truth emergent and triumphant, having a separate power of its own to defeat the malefactor. But

before going on to deal with the appearance in Edwin Drood of these themes, it should be stated at once that I have no intention of conveying that Drood himself was to be raised from the dead, still less that he was to be presumed dead and later returned to life with a flourish of novelistic trumpets; the theme of resurrection in this book has nothing to do with the reanimation of a corpse but underlines symbolically the statement that there are certain truths that will defy and outface death. Death is the common lot of the physical body; and for most of us, as Durdles says, the common lot is to be 'merely bundled up in turf and brambles . . . a poor lot, soon forgot'. But as Dickens has it (Ch. III), Hodge the peasant shares the common lot of monks, abbots, abbesses, nuns, Lord Treasurers, Archbishops, Bishops and such like in providing dirt-pies for the present-day children of Cloisterham. Who then, or what, survives or triumphs over death, according to the beliefs of the author?
  I have suggested already (p. 22) that there may well have been an intended and symbolic parallel between the jewel on Drood’s body surviving burial and the eternal truth of (Dickens’s) Christianity surviving men’s efforts to bury it under layers of dogma, ritual, sect and so on, the burial place of each being the Cathedral. It has been noted many times that Edwin Drood is heavy with images of death and corruption, but less often noted, perhaps, that these are nearly always accompanied by images of hope and resurrection. The dirt-pies made of the bodies of old monks are made by young children; the nuns who might have been ’walled up alive in odd angles and jutting gables of the building' are paralleled with Miss Twinkleton’s very lively young ladies. Miss Rosa Bud’s name speaks for itself; she is the hopeful reincarnation of her dead mother, as seen by Grewgious (Ch. XX): ’My child, my child! I thought you were your mother!'
  Resurrection and its religious significance is not the sole theme, perhaps not even the major theme, in Edwin Drood. But there is enough evidence in the text and in Dickens's past work to justify the theory that it formed an essential thread in the whole tapestry of the novel as he (and only he) would have seen it. The two most oft-quoted passages

from the novel surely support such a theory. Here is the first:

  'Dear me,’ said Mr. Grewgious, peering in, 'it’s like looking down the throat of Old Time.’
  Old Time heaved a mouldy sigh from tomb and arch and vault; and gloomy shadows began to deepen in corners; and damps began to rise from green patches of stone; and jewels, cast upon the pavement of the nave from stained glass by the declining sun, began to perish. Within the grill-gate of the chancel, up the steps surmounted loomingly by the fast darkening organ, white robes could be dimly seen, and one feeble voice, rising and falling in a cracked monotonous mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard. In the free outer air, the river, the green pastures, and the brown arable lands, the teeming hills and dales, were reddened by the sunset; while the distant little windows in windmills and farmsteads, shone, patches of bright beaten gold. In the Cathedral, all became grey, murky, and sepulchral, and the cracked monotonous mutter went on like a dying voice, until the organ and the choir burst forth, and drowned it in a sea of music. Then, the sea fell, and the dying voice made another feeble effort, and then the sea rose high, and beat its life out, and lashed the roof, and surged among the arches, and pierced the heights of I the great tower; and then, the sea was dry, and all was still. (Ch. IX, p. 73)

  Many critics, in rightly calling attention to this passage as fine poetic prose, have noted that the imagery here is quite deliberately of the Cathedral as a place of decay and slow corruption in burial. I suggest that it also indicates what is being buried. The vocabulary sets the tone: mouldy—tomb-——vault—gloomy——damps-green patches— perish. Then come the white robes, only dimly seen, and the feeble voice, only faintly heard: these represent the original message of Christianity, the gospels of the New Testament, the statement of faith and belief, buried deep in time's throat as in a prison, choked for lack of air, to the narrator’s present consciousness almost inaudible and invisible. Contrasted with the free outer air which holds today’s life, the Cathedral grows murky and sepulchral in the setting sun, while the feeble voice, promulgating a message in a form and manner centuries out of date, is dashed aside by the tremendous

power of real passion expressed in music from the organ and choir.
  The last time Dickens had used a church to convey a message was in The Chimes (1844). The Goblin of the Great Bell has it:

  ’The voice of Time,’ said the Phantom, ’cries to man, Advance! Time is for his advancement and improvement; for his greater worth, his greater happiness, his better life; his progress onward to that goal within its knowledge and its view, and set there, in the period when Time and he began. Ages of darkness, wickedness, and violence, have come and g0ne——millions uncountable have suffered, lived, and died—t0 point the way before him. Who seeks to turn him back, or stay him on his course, arrests a mighty engine which will strike the meddler dead; and be the fiercer and the wilder, ever, for its momentary check!’ (Third Quarter)

  The Cathedral in Edwin Drood is deaf to the voice of Time and has not advanced; the greater happiness, the better life, lie in a clearer understanding of the gospel, but the gospel is being presented to the people in hopelessly archaic dress. The clergy—in the person of the Dean—complacently believe that the message being eternal and unchanging, the manner of its presentation may be eternal and unchanging likewise. The City supports them:

A drowsy City, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem to suppose, with an inconsistency more strange than rare, that all its changes lie behind it, and that there are no more to come. A queer moral to derive from antiquity, yet older than any traceable antiquity. (Ch. IH, p. 14)

  The search for a pseudonym for Rochester was probably not a long one; the cloistered City nods to the Cathedral in sleepy agreement, shutting its eyes to its own stagnation and blinding itself to the atrophy which must follow:

In those days there was no railway to Cloisterham, and Mr. Sapsea said there never would be. Mr. Sapsea said more; he said there never should be. And yet, marvellous to consider, it has come to pass, in these days, that Express Trains don't think Cloisterham worth stopping at, but yell and whirl through it on their larger errands, casting the dust off their

wheels as a testimony against its insignificance. (Ch. VI, pp. 42-3)

Modernize, or atrophy, is what Dickens is saying. Cloisterham and its Cathedral must either change with the times or wither away. Both have had their changes in the past and must change in the future. The comfortable stagnation which the ass, Sapsea, is offering the City will end in desiccation: a dried up, mummified Cloisterham. In their ineffable self—satisfaction Sapsea and young Drood really do believe that British is best in the best of all possible worlds; and Sapsea in particular sees Cloisterham (with himself at its head) as having achieved perfection. Any change must be a change for the worse. All developers, builders, railway cutters, intruders—those who seek to alter the shape of the City in any way—are to be resisted as a national enemy would be resisted. He seeks to wrap the City in a cocoon (he has no notion that it may become a shroud) and preserve it in its present form for ever, forgetting or being too obtuse to see that embalming preserves only the outward form of a body and not the inner life. It is by no accident that Dickens has chosen ancient Egypt as the field of the Droods' commercial activity. Its ’Isises, and Ibises, and Cheopses, and Pharaohses’ (Ch. III) have their parallel in more aspects than one with ancient Cloisterham in England, which has its tombs, its sarcophagi, its great stone Cathedral and its archaic form of worship, in which Time has apparently been arrested for centuries. A fine note of irony is struck by young Drood:

[Landless:] ’Are you going abroad?’ ’Going to wake up Egypt a little,’ is the condescending answer. (Ch. VIII, p. 55)

   Waking up Cloisterham a little might be more to the purpose, in Dickens’s view; but if he wanted a symbol for the encapsulation of time by burial and a suggestive counterpart for ancient Cloisterham, a better one than ancient Egypt could hardly have been adopted. The pyramids and the embalmed princes within them are an attempt to arrest time’s mutations: to achieve eternity and the defeat of death through preservation of the body. It is easy to see the affinity of the two cultures in the novelist’s mind; and his

disapproval of both—particularly in the aspect of funereal death trappings and ceremonies, satirized earlier in that ridiculous epitaph of Sapsea’s——is implicit not only in Drood but in all his writing. In Drood, the burial motif is underlined effectively in the juvenile quarrel of Edwin and Rosa in Chapter III (quoted above), with its references to Miss Twinkleton ’boring on' about the tiresome old burying grounds, the pyramids, Belzoni the archaeologist and Egypt generally. It cannot be known whether any development of the Egyptian theme in the second half of the book would have emphasized this parallel further, but the repeated references to burial and burial places in the half we have seem at least to invite the speculation that Egypt was not a random choice.
  The other much-quoted passage is this:

A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquities and ruins are surpassingly beautiful, with the lusty ivy gleaming in the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air. Changes of glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from gardens, woods, and fields—or, rather, from the one great garden of the whole cultivated island in its yielding time—penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach the Resurrection and the Life. The cold stone tombs of centuries ago grow warm; and flecks of brightness dart into the sternest marble corners of the building, fluttering there like wings. (Ch. XXIII, p. 215)

  As the first passage breathes corruption and death, so does the second breathe resurrection and life. A few hours after writing this, Dickens died. There are some who have found it difficult to remember that he did not know this was about to happen. So many sentimental tears have been shed in the past over this piece that its purpose has often been lost. But it states quite clearly the writer’s belief in the eternity of the soul through the eternal re-growth of the body, and that with the manifestation of nature before him he needs no intellectual argument to sustain his faith, which can exist without intellectual understanding and which will, like Shakespeare’s powerful rhyme, outlive the marble and the gilded monuments of princes. And the passage is placed in its position—about half way through the book—quite deliberately, setting the tone of the second half of the novel

he hoped to complete, as the earlier passage set it for the first. Death and decay—followed and defeated by hope in eternal life. In the discovery of Edwin Drood’s body by means of the survival of the ring would be shown the resurgence of the eternal Truth, that love triumphs over hate and death. The jewelled pledge of her father’s love for her dead young mother was to be the means of giving Rosa her own lover and at the same time of defeating the hatred and jealousy of the wicked man, jasper. The theme of resurrection has been used again, but with far more subtlety and with a closer relationship to ordinary domestic life, than in A Tale of Two Cities.


NOTES

1. Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (A. & C. Black, 1966; reissued S.C.M. Press, 1987), Pt. 1.
2. Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord (Vision Press, 1987).
3. Samuel Johnson, Lives ofthe Poets, ed. A. Waugh (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner &: Co., 1896), Vol. 1.
4. Dennis Walder, Dickens and Religion (Allen 8: Unwin, 1981): quotations by kind permission of Unwin Hyman Ltd.
5. Philip Collins, Dickens and Education (Macmillan, 1965), Ch. III, pp. 53-69.
6. Humphry House, The Dickens World (Oxford University Press, 1941).