Finding Hope in the “Radical Ordinary”: Charles Dickens’s Perspectives on Christianity in Bleak House and Little Dorrit

When Charles Taylor published A Secular Age in 2007, he entered into the growing interdisciplinary discussion of postsecular studies and provided an insightful way of thinking about our current age as well as its ostensibly secular development. Questioning the traditional evolutionary narrative in which the West gradually becomes more secular, Taylor offered a new framework within which to explore nineteenth-century literature as we begin to reflect more deeply on how individual writers grapple with religious and secular changes. While he still sees the nineteenth century as the period in which “unbelief comes of age,” he is particularly interested in exploring the persistent longing for transcendence (the experience of God’s supernatural presence in the world) that may be seen even in secular authors like Thomas Carlyle or Matthew Arnold, whose works reveal their attempts to combat the “fragmentation and loss of depth” that characterized their experiences of this new, disenchanted, immanent world in which any sense of the supernatural had been eliminated (374, 381). Using this immanent/transcendent binary and revealing the complex ways it manifests itself in different ages, Taylor continually complicates the idea that society has undergone a neat, orderly progress from belief to unbelief. Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles provide an interesting challenge to Taylor’s use of this binary as a means of articulating the differences between faith and unbelief. In their response to A Secular Age, they express their concern that by equating Christianity with moments of transcendent escape from the immanent frame of the secular world, Taylor minimizes the power of the immanent, incarnational work of Christians’ daily lives. In contrast to Taylor, they believe that “directing attention to the ‘radical ordinary’ may offer a more variegated account of the possibilities in our ‘age’ . . . than do Taylor’s depictions of the irruptions of transcendence that the immanent frame cannot control” (350). While Hauerwas and Coles focus on the real lives of contemporary Christians, their thoughts have important implications for the ways we conceive of Christian characters in literature, particularly in novels, for this concept of the “radical ordinary” enables us to explore the complexities of what authors may be illustrating when they craft characters who still faithfully practice their Christianity in fictional worlds that have often been seen as secular.