A Christmas Surprise From Charles Dickens

It’s hard to imagine Christmas without Charles Dickens. Stagings of “A Christmas Carol” are a sure sign of yuletide, and so are screenings of the movies that the Dickens story has inspired, ranging from “It’s a Wonderful Life” to “Scrooged!” Even those strolling carolers in Victorian garb who proliferate in shopping malls are meant to evoke a purely Dickensian vision of Christmas.

Now, just in time for the last Christmas of the 20th century, we have something novel and surprising from Dickens: “The Life of Our Lord,” a pious but charming biography of Jesus that Dickens composed for his own children at about the same time he was writing his masterwork, “David Copperfield.” Indeed, what is most striking about the long-lost tale is how it contrasts with and yet somehow illuminates the writing that Dickens always intended for public consumption.

Dickens wrote “The Life of Our Lord” between 1846 and 1849, and he read it aloud in his home every Christmas thereafter. The book remained a strictly private tradition of the Dickens family for nearly a century. Only on the death of Dickens’ youngest son in 1933 was the manuscript released for publication, and now Simon & Schuster has issued a new edition of the most neglected title in the Dickens canon.

“My dear children, I am very anxious that you should know something about the History of Jesus Christ,” goes the opening line. “No one ever lived who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong, or were in any way ill or miserable, as He was.”

Dickens’ impulse to write a life of Jesus casts an intriguing theological light on his other work. Dickens delighted in depicting good and kindly men and women, but he always set them in a landscape overshadowed by danger and even terror. For every benefactor like Miss Havisham in “Great Expectations,” there is a predator like Fagin in “Oliver Twist.” Yet Dickens was ultimately a sentimentalist, and he favored happy endings like the one that redeems Scrooge in “A Christmas Carol.”

Thus we might understand Dickens to be describing the moral universe of his own novels when he explains to his children what lessons he wants them to learn from the example of Jesus: “Never be proud or unkind, my dears, to any poor man, woman or child,” he writes in “The Life of Our Lord.” “If they are bad, think that they would have been better if they had had kind friends, and good homes, and had been better taught. So, always try to make them better by kind persuading words.”

At certain endearing moments, we almost hear the voice of Dickens himself as he addressed his own young children. “[He] ate little but some insects called locusts,” Dickens says of John the Baptist, and then he pauses to explain: “You never saw a locust, because they belong to that country near Jerusalem, which is a great way off. So do camels, but I think you have seen a camel.”

Characteristically, Dickens neglects no moment of danger or despair in the life story of Jesus--the slaughter of the innocents, the beheading of John the Baptist and the crucifixion itself. We are reminded that Dickens lived and worked long before Christian leaders started to blunt the anti-Semitic edges of the Gospels in the spirit of ecumenicalism--Dickens unambiguously blames the Jews rather than the Romans for the death of Jesus: “And they tried to raise enemies against Him,” he writes, “and to get the crowd in the streets to murder Him.” And, significantly, Dickens did not bring his biography to a climax with the death and resurrection of Jesus--he pressed on and described the martyrdom of early Christians in harrowing detail.

“Christians were hanged, beheaded, burnt, buried alive, and devoured in theatres by wild beasts for the public amusement,” he tells his children. “So thousands upon thousands of Christians sprung up and taught the people and were cruelly killed, and were succeeded by other Christians, until the religion gradually became the great religion of the world.”

“The Life of Our Lord” can be approached as a corrective to a problem that Dickens helped to create. Jesus is nowhere to be seen in “A Christmas Carol,” of course, and he is largely absent from other modern observances of Christmas, ranging from strolling mall carolers to leaping ballerinas in “The Nutcracker.” But Dickens sought to explain to his own children that Christmas is, after all, the celebration of the birth of Jesus, and anyone who picks up the latest edition of “The Life of Our Lord” will be reminded of the original meaning of Christmas.

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Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is the author of, most recently, “Moses, a Life” (Ballantine).