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The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, commonly referred to as The Chimes, is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in 1844,…
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The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, commonly referred to as The Chimes, is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in 1844, one year after A Christmas Carol. It is the second in his series of "Christmas books", five novellas with strong social and moral messages that he published during the 1840s.
The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, commonly referred to as The Chimes, is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in 1844, one year after A Christmas Carol. It is the second in his series of "Christmas books", five novellas with strong social and moral messages that he published during the 1840s. In addition to A Christmas Carol and The Chimes, the Christmas books include The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848).
Toby ("Trotty") Veck, an elderly "ticket-porter", plies his trade from the steps of a church, whose Chimes have for many years cheered and encouraged him as he trots around delivering letters. Today, on New Year's Eve, Trotty is filled with gloom at reports in the newspapers of working class crime and immorality, and concludes that the poor must be incorrigibly bad by nature.
Trotty's daughter Meg and her long-time fiancé Richard arrive to announce their decision to marry the very next day. Although desperately poor and with few prospects, they see no point in waiting any longer, reasoning that they will otherwise regret in later years the missed opportunity to have cheered and helped each other as husband and wife. The couple's happiness is dispelled by an encounter with Alderman Cute who sanctimoniously lectures them on how they have brought their own misfortunes on themselves, and who promises to ‘Put down’ such people. The couple feel they barely have a right to exist, let alone to marry.
Trotty carries a note from Cute to Sir Joseph Bowley MP, who dispenses charity to the poor in the manner of a paternal dictator. Bowley is ostentatiously settling his debts, and berates Trotty because he is unable to pay a small debt to Mrs Chickenstalker, a local shopkeeper. Returning home, convinced that he and his fellows are naturally ungrateful and have no place in society, Trotty encounters Will Fern, a poor countryman, and his nine-year-old orphaned niece, Lilian. Fern has been accused of vagrancy and Trotty warns that Cute plans to have him arrested. Trotty takes Fern and Lilian home, and he and Meg share their meagre food and poor lodgings. Meg is distressed, and it seems the encounter with Cute has dissuaded her from marrying Richard.
Trotty sits up late with a newspaper and is reinforced in his belief that the working classes are naturally wicked by reading of a poor woman who in desperation has killed both herself and her baby. Suddenly, the Chimes burst violently in on his thoughts, and seem to call him to the church. Climbing to the bellchamber, he discovers a swarming, leaping cloud of dwarf phantoms that vanish as the Chimes cease. Then he sees the dark foreboding goblin figures of the bells. The goblin of the Great Bell berates him for the wrong he has done the Chimes in losing faith in man's destiny to improve.
Trotty sees himself lying dead at the base of the bell tower, and is told that he had fallen and died there nine years ago. Meg's life is to be an object lesson for him: he must "learn from the creature nearest to [his] heart" what pressures there are on the poor. There follows a series of visions in which, helpless to interfere, he is shown the troubled lives of Meg, Richard, Will and Lilian over the subsequent years. Richard descends into alcoholism; Meg eventually marries him in an effort to save him, but he dies ruined, leaving her with a baby; Will is driven in and out of prison; Lilian turns to prostitution and dies of grief. At last, destitute and homeless, Meg is driven to contemplate drowning herself and her child. Trotty breaks down when he sees Meg poised to jump into the river, and cries that he has learned his lesson, that "there is no loving mother on the earth who might not come to this, if such a life had gone before". He finds himself able to catch her dress and prevent her from jumping.
The book was written in late 1844, during Dickens's year-long visit to Italy. John Forster, his first biographer, records that Dickens, hunting for a title and structure for his next contracted Christmas story, was struck one day by the clamour of the Genoese bells audible from the villa where they were staying.
All Genoa lay beneath him, and up from it, with some sudden set of the wind, came in one fell sound the clang and clash of all its steeples, pouring into his ears, again and again, in a tuneless, grating, discordant, jerking, hideous vibration that made his ideas "spin round and round till they lost themselves in a whirl of vexation and giddiness, and dropped down dead."
Two days later Forster received a letter from Dickens which read simply: "We have heard THE CHIMES at midnight, Master Shallow!", and the writing of the book began. Forster describes Dickens's intentions in writing The Chimes as striking "a blow for the poor". They had always been his clients, they had never been forgotten in any of his books, but here nothing else was to be remembered ... he had come to have as little faith for the putting down of any serious evil, as in a then notorious city alderman's gabble for the putting down of suicide. The latter had stirred his indig
Source: The Chimes (CC BY-SA)
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Trotty awakens at home as the Chimes joyfully ring in the New Year on the day of Meg and Richard's wedding. Their friends arrive to provide a surprise feast and celebration. Will and Lilian are warmly greeted by Mrs Chickenstalker, who turns out to be an old friend. The author explicitly invites the reader to decide if this awakening is a dream-within-a-dream. The reader is asked to bear in mind "the stern realities from which these shadows come", and to endeavour to correct, improve, and soften them.
