In this passage, Stephen Blackpool is spending his last moments on earth with Rachel; being a victim of the "Old Hell Shaft" adds him to the list of dark stories concerning the area. In the last monologue before his death, he mentions how the poor "die an no need, one way an another - in a muddle - every day" (263). Throughout all of Stephen's life, he has had a steady stream of bad luck, however, he has maintained a pure and moral personality in spite of it; his is the "Starlight" in the chapter title whose spirit burns bright and brilliant.
Stephen's adherence to ethics is Dickens' contrasting of the poor vs. the rich; many of the wealthy characters in the story like Tom and Harthouse imagine themselves as superior to the poor, yet display acts of immorality with impudence. The religious allusions at the end of the passage reiterates Stephen's sanctity, as his story parallels St. Stephen, widely considered the first Christian martyr. As such, Stephen's death can be examined to have Christ-like properties; Stephen's final moments before death finds him the "God of the poor" (265) who, through "humility", "sorrow", and "forgiveness" (265), leads him to the "Redeemer's rest" (265). These religious allusions respectively can be compared to Jesus's journey with God, his spiritual values, and the fact that in Christian theology, Jesus is often referred to as a Redeemer with "rest" (265) representing Stephen's salvation. Much like how Jesus died for humanity's sins in Christianity, the affluent aristocrats are the ones whose irreligious and hypocritical lives of sin - much of which is spent "sowing", "reaping", and "garnering" money from the poor - condemn Stephen, a man of divine virtue, to a dark end.
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