Mormon Book Bits #7: Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord

Editor's note: This is the seventh in a series of posts by Dennis Horne about collectible books. The introduction is here.

The following interesting reference to Dickens’ book is from Elder Dallin H. Oaks, quoting

President Gordon B. Hinckley:

            “I read this paragraph [from President Hinckley’s book Standing for Something, page 77]: ‘I was living in London in 1934’ (It doesn’t say ‘I was on a mission in London in 1934’, but that’s the fact as we know it) ‘and vividly recall the advertisements of one of the popular newspapers that [Charles] Dickens’s The Life of Our Lord would be published serially.  Following Serialization, it was published as a book.  Years later, my wife found a copy of that book and read it to our children.  There are portions of his telling that I like very much....’  That is a significant sentence to me because I got a hold of that [book] and read it too; and there were portions of it that I didn’t like very much, but there were portions that I did and those were the portions that he is referring to.  In fact, Dickens’s The Life of Our Lord would not be used as a Sunday School manual in this Church.  It not only would not get through Correlation, it wouldn’t even be able to knock on the door.”  (Dallin H. Oaks, “Chaplain’s Seminar 04”, 5 October 2004.)