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The biggest writer in Christianity right now is… Charles Dickens?
With “King of Kings,” a Victorian novelist’s final work becomes a blockbuster kid’s movie
6 min readApr 18, 2025
An animated children’s film about Jesus is lighting up the box office. I’m looking up the backstory of “King of Kings.” A first-time Korean director making a Jesus cartoon from a barely-known work by a Victorian novelist might not have seemed so promising.
Charles Dickens is famous for A Tale of Two Cities and A Christmas Carol. But he wrote one Christian work, a curious little book called The Life of Our Lord. And Seong-Ho Jan thought it would make a great movie.
It isn’t widely known that Charles Dickens—and his work—were even Christian.
That might seem strange. One of the most famous novelists in history was a Christian and his religion didn’t wish to recognize him?
Dickens laid it all out. All his good characters, he said, “are humble, charitable, faithful and forgiving” and “disciples of the Founder of our religion’.”