It is a major national commemoration: Charles Dickens, England’s greatest novelist, was born just two centuries ago. England’s greatest dramatist, William Shakespeare – or so some writers are now plausibly claiming – may well have been a Catholic. It is harder to make such a claim for Dickens: G K Chesterton, however, (who certainly understood Dickens better than Dickens understood himself) did in effect claim that Dickens was at heart a Catholic: and, as I shall argue, this is a claim by no means as outlandish as it might at first seem. It is, of course, true that Dickens rarely departed from the anti-popery of the average Victorian Protestant Englishman. Travelling through Switzerland in 1845 he crossed a river, from a Catholic Canton into a Protestant one, and noted the contrast between “on the Protestant side, neatness; cheerfulness; industry; education; continual aspiration, at least, after better things” and “on the Catholic side, dirt, disease, ignorance, squalor, and misery”. He went on to say that he had “so constantly observed the like of this... that [he had] a sad misgiving that the religion of Ireland lies as deep at the root of all its sorrows... as English misgovernment and Tory villainy”. It was, however, one of Chesterton’s principal claims in his great book on Dickens that It was upon him that “the real tradition of ‘Merry England’ had descended”: