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Rowan Williams, Baron Williams of Oystermouth, is best known for his tenure as the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, from 2002 to 2012. Many Dickensians were greatly impressed by his speech at the Dickens bicentenary ceremony at Westminster Abbey on 7 February 2012. It seemed considerably longer – in a good way – than its c. 1,200 words, and gave us a bit more to think about than Prince Charles’s silent wreath-laying. Lord Williams kindly agreed to the publication of the speech in Dickens Quarterly (vol. 29, no. 2, June 2012). It is reprinted, with only very minor changes, in the collection that is the subject of this review.
Dickens is one of Williams’s twenty “luminaries,” a company whose other members include eight actual saints, starting with St. Paul (c. 5–67 ce) and ending with St. Óscar Romero (1917–80), as well as uncanonized theologians and martyrs ranging from Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) to Etty Hillesum (1914–43). The only other literary author to be included is John Milton.
Dickens’s appearance in such company is to some extent accidental: Williams explains that he could have chosen other individuals, and that most of those included were the subjects of sermons or addresses that he was invited to give (xi). However, there are strong themes running through this book that show why Dickens is a central figure for Williams, who is perhaps unique in our time for his polyglot immersion and scholarship in both theology and secular literature.
The main focus of the Dickens speech was on Bleak House, especially the figure of Sir Leicester Dedlock. But there is no doubt that Williams knows the whole novel (and Dickens’s work in general) intimately. Dickens “portrays human beings excessively and extravagantly”; he “portrays human beings in hell; and yet, when we read him, it does not read like bad news” (92). There “is a tension again and again in his books between a carefully, neatly resolved, happy ending and an immense burden of recognized, almost unbearable, unresolved suffering” (93). Williams relates this split to the double narrative of Bleak House, which he sees as dividing finished from unfinished business. This is also the way Christianity works, for Williams, in a paradoxical balance between ongoing suffering and perpetual redemption. The “theological”...