Dickens and the Bible: “What Providence Meant” by Jennifer Gribble (review)

In Dickens and the Bible: “What Providence Meant,” Jennifer Gribble explores the intricate ways that Charles Dickens engages with the Bible, drawing attention not only to the many allusions that appear throughout his works but also to the “verbal echoes, typology, parable, and biblical themes” that she argues work together with a “prophetic narrative voice” to convey the essentially Christian framework of Dickens’s moral vision (4). Moving chronologically from The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) through Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), Gribble contends that “the Judeo-Christian grand narrative provides the master-plot” that anchors the complexities of his stories throughout his career even as Dickens develops a more nuanced perspective of the working of providence (196). Arguing against scholars like George Levine, who in Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science (2008) asserts that the realist impulse of the nineteenth-century novel is thoroughly secular, Gribble argues that Dickens ultimately explores how God’s will may be “lived out in the lives of characters redeemed by Christ” (199).

As she crafts her argument, Gribble engages well with the historical context, establishing not only the complexities of the debates surrounding science and religion during Dickens’s life but also the various ways that Dickens himself responded to these controversies. She argues persuasively that Dickens’s engagement in these controversies reveals not an abandonment of a belief in God’s providence but rather an interest in exploring new ways that God’s providence may be understood. Using not only Thomas Vargish’s ideas on the ways that the Judeo-Christian narrative is used to convey a sense of God’s providence in the Victorian novel, but also Mikhail Bakhtin’s and Paul Ricoeur’s reflections on how individuals engage in ethical thinking, Gribble then proceeds to explore Dickens’s increasingly complex engagement with providence throughout his works. As she crafts her argument, she does an excellent job providing in-depth analysis of key moments from each work that highlight how Dickens moves from a fairly simple representation of Creation, Fall, and Redemption in The Pickwick Papers to a more complex representation of providence represented by the Beatitude values of characters like Florence Dombey and Amy Dorrit and finally to hopeful visions of a future Kingdom of God in Little Dorrit (1855–57) and Our Mutual Friend.

Overall, Gribble’s argument is persuasive, and her insightful close reading of a number of passages is masterful. One particularly strong example is her analysis of the narrator’s “apocalyptic vision” of the sunset as Amy Dorrit and Mrs. Clennam walk through the streets of London on their way to confront Rigaud (181). By highlighting not only the ways in which Dickens emphasizes the transformation of the cityscape from his earlier descriptions in the novel but also the ways in which he combines his allusions to Wordsworthian transcendence with Christian imagery of the cross and resurrection, Gribble crafts a compelling argument for interpreting this moment as a vision of hope in the Kingdom of God even in the midst of the very real problems of society that have been revealed throughout the novel. Given how well Gribble’s analysis works at moments like this, it is disappointing that she fails to develop her analysis quite as strongly at other points in her argument. Throughout the book, the conclusions of her chapters seem rushed, particularly in the later chapters where she focuses on simply wrapping up the analysis of her final point rather than clearly drawing together the ideas in the chapter and connecting them all to her overarching argument. While this is a fairly minor point for most of the chapters, it becomes a larger problem in her final chapter in which she not only analyzes Great Expectations (1860–61) and Our Mutual Friend but also, in the last few paragraphs, pulls together her overall argument. Given the complexities of what Gribble has been discussing throughout the book, her argument...