But as Jennifer Gribble demonstrates, the ‘whole biblical narrative that structures his novels: the book of Genesis, the prophetic Books and Psalms, are as indispensable to his reading of that narrative as the Gospels and the Book of Revelation’. This Judeo-Christian narrative, imbued with the Golden Rule that we should love our neighbours as ourselves, is supplemented with constant references to the parables of Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount. Gribble traces it through illuminating studies, thematically bound to each other. The narrative is seen, for example, in parts of Martin Chuzzlewit, where Gribble’s commentary is a good example of her approach: ‘The Chuzzlewit family are introduced as “descended in a direct line from Adam and Eve”, and the Genesis story is further ironically invoked in Pecksniff’s embodiment of the deadly sin of selfishness. In his “ancient pursuit” of gardening he positions himself as the second Adam; the naming of his daughters, “Mercy” and “Charity”, completes the self-image of one “given to benevolence”, an anti-type of Pickwick, as the near-echo of his name suggests.’ Further, in America, ‘where the newly-established settlement of Eden proves to be “a mere swamp”, it is “as if the waters of the Deluge might have left it but a week before; so choked with slime and matted growth was the hideous swamp which bore that name”’. Gribble adds: ‘The reversion of Christianity’s civilizing mission to primal slime anticipates the opening of Bleak House.’

Gribble’s purpose is not merely to detail Dickens’s biblical allusions but to show how biblical teaching informs Dickens’s analyses of the workings of society and how it moulds his reading of the human situation. In Dombey and Son, Dickens, influenced by Wordsworth, explores what ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ mean in the industrialised world, and at the same time he studies the difficult spiritual journey – ‘the first of [the] extended explorations of the theological virtue of hope as it is founded in “a loving heart”’ – of Mr Dombey, who is aided by his daughter Florence.

Gribble demonstrates that in the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, biblical allusions establish ‘the teleology of the providential grand narrative’. Where some critics have felt that Dickens’s message is weakened by contradictions between the omniscient narrator’s theological viewpoint and Esther’s, Gribble argues that they complement each other. While the omniscient narrator shows that all humankind is confined ‘in Chancery’, Esther represents what that condition might mean for individuals such as John Jarndyce and herself. Furthermore, the novel’s double narrative sets a picture of providential order against apparent randomness.

Dickens touched on this idea in a letter to John Forster at the time of writing Little Dorrit: ‘It struck me that it would be a new thing to show people coming together, in a chance way, as fellow travellers, and being in the same place ignorant of one another as happens in life, and to connect them afterwards, and to make the waiting for that connection part of the interest.’

Actually, this was not ‘a new thing’, for Dickens had guided his novels by this notion from Pickwick onwards. But in Little Dorrit it becomes thematic. The Book of Revelation is in Dickens’s mind when he writes at the end of Chapter One, ‘so deep a hush was on the sea, that it scarcely whispered of the time when it shall give up its dead’. This is picked up at the end of Chapter Two, which, as Gribble says, ‘reflects on the degree of freedom available, within the apparently determining effects of the prison of this lower world, and the providential plotting of the novel, to the dispersing travellers’: ‘And thus, ever, by day and by night … coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one another, move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life.’ Miss Wade responds to this with her own grim vision of Providence: ‘In our course through life we shall meet the people who are coming to meet us, from many strange places and by many strange roads … and what it is set to us to do to them, and what it is set to them to do to us, will all be done.’

Gribble’s study of the complexity of Amy Dorrit is especially rewarding, showing that psychologically Amy is entirely convincing, though Gribble does not quite answer the vexing question as to whether Amy is morally flawed by her Marshalsea experience.

Gribble’s final chapter, ‘Last Things: Redemption, Resurrection and the Life Everlasting’, brings the discussion on to a new plane, where ‘Dickens rests his case – in the enduring life of his own richly-imagined, comprehensively-informed, searching out of what providence meant’.

So, too, does Jennifer Gribble make her case, as she sends us back with sharper eyes and fresher spirits to our Dickens – and to Bibles.