Perhaps because his father was not religious, Beckett seems to have felt no anguish in turning away from the Anglican beliefs of his youth; his mother, on the other hand, was deeply religious in a rather narrow evangelical way. Loss of faith, however, clearly has not prevented him from exploiting his Protestant heritage, any more than it prevented James Joyce from exploiting his Catholic one….

A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man has made millions of readers aware of the thoroughness of Joyce's Catholic education under the Jesuits. It is not generally known, however, that Beckett's Anglican training was almost as thorough. The religious education he received at his mother's knee is vividly dramatized by the famous photograph of him kneeling to pray there at an early age. His years from four to nearly fourteen doubtless saw little slackening in that training, and the ensuing three-and-a-half...