The Christmas Books of Charles Dickens: The Chimes

1844 was a difficult year for Charles Dickens.  To begin with his finances were in a precarious state.  Dickens had lost money defending his works against plagiarism and piracy on both sides of the Atlantic.  He was struggling to complete Martin Chuzzlewit – its first parts had already been serialised but the reception from readers and critics alike had been lukewarm.  With falling sales to contend with but an increasing family, Dickens could not meet his rising expenses. 

In spite of these financial worries, Dickens organised an expensive trip abroad to Italy.  Perhaps the reason for this was to recharge his creative batteries.  It is often noted that Dickens was at a critical crossroads in his literary career at this juncture.  Martin Chuzzlewit is often cited as a transitional text between the earlier, comic, picaresque works like The Pickwick Papers and the bleaker, more intensely layered later novels such as Bleak House and Little Dorrit.  If he did seek rest, Dickens perhaps also sought clarity.  By taking a break from fiction writing, he might return to it suitably refreshed.

Charles Dickens, however was possessed by such a restless spirit, he could never keep still for long.  There was always a new scheme to occupy him, whether it was founding and editing a newspaper, performing on the stage or the later public reading tours which left him exhausted.  One lifetime was not enough to contain all his ambitions.  Dickens must have been painfully aware that there were simply not enough hours in each day.

Dickens and his family spent several months in Italy.  He continued writing, albeit in a different genre, a journalistic account of his observations of Italian life, art and culture that would be later published as Pictures from Italy.  When the Dickens family arrived for a lengthy stay in Genoa and although Charles loved the city itself, the author was initially creatively frustrated. 

Following the critical success of A Christmas Carol in 1843 (its blend of fantasy and reality, ghosts and time travel would make that tale perennially popular), Dickens had agreed to return to the seasonal theme, this time hoping to make his endeavours financially profitable but the regular chiming of church bells made it almost impossible for the author to concentrate.

One can only admire Dickens for turning these difficulties on their head then to his own advantage.  The source of irritation became the source of inspiration.  The idea for his second Christmas story came from the bells that had plagued him.  Now he had the idea it grabbed hold of him and possessed him.  By all accounts, he wrote The Chimes almost in a state of frenzy, describing in a letter how he would have a cold bath at 7a.m and then sometimes write all day.

Dickens returned to the winning Christmas formula (he would do so annually, contributing stories and essays until he decided to dissolve the Christmas edition of the magazine All The Year Round in 1868).  Though The Chimes shares a number of similarities with its predecessor, Dickens’s second festive tale is a different, altogether darker beast.  Uneven in tone, The Chimes nevertheless makes fascinating reading.  

The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In (to give the tale its full title) is set during New Year’s Eve in London.  The story commences with a lengthy, haunting description of a churchyard at night.  Dickens sets an evocative scene by stating in the opening paragraph: “...there are not, I say, many people who would care to sleep in a church.”

This reads like a warning or a disclaimer, the tone suggesting an immediate example of a sorry individual not privy to the author’s advice.  It is expected that any individual who chooses to sleep in a churchyard at night will ultimately come to grief.  After the lengthy description the author gives of the night wind, haunting its way into every nook and niche of the church in whispers and whistles, one might reasonably expect the example to immediately succeed the warning.  Dickens has sown the seeds of the idea.  He has added the germ but now chooses to back off, giving the germ time and space to fester.

The description of the church bells adds another dimension.  The bells have been there for centuries.  “But Time had mowed down their sponsors, and Henry the Eighth had melted down their mugs...” Dickens writes.  The Chimes can be seen as a meditation about Time itself being not a Great Healer but a destroyer of faith and liberty.  During the Dissolution of the monasteries, the Catholic sponsors were mowed down.  But Time is also resilient; it may erode and wither but it also endures.

This is the place where we are introduced to Toby “Trotty” Veck, the unfortunate victim of the tale.  The connection is inferred between Veck, the ticket-porter who waits outside for work and the chimes of the bells he waits under.  Both have seen better days but nonetheless withstand the elements and the ravages of Time, even though those forces almost seem to conspire deliberately against them.

“And a breezy, goose-skinned, blue-nosed, red-eyed, stony-toed, tooth-chattering place it was, to wait in, in the winter time, as Toby Veck well knew.  The wind came tearing round the corner – especially the east wind – as if it had sallied forth, express, from the confines of the earth, to have a blow at Toby.  And oftentimes it seemed to come upon him sooner than it had expected, for bouncing round the corner, and passing Toby, it would suddenly wheel round again, as if it cried, “Why, here he is!””

By depicting the wind as a malevolent being, Dickens casts Veck as a heroic figure but a figure with a comic appearance.  Dickens describes the facial and bodily characteristics and the character’s movement so vividly, exaggerating to the point where Veck becomes a caricature.  This is an accusation often levelled against Dickens. 

While many of Dickens’s characters were essentially what we would term caricatures, I think there are good reasons why Dickens did not always write rounded characterisations.  We should not forget that during the age of the illustration and the cartoon a wider readership developed in tandem with the art of exaggerated drawings.  The illustrator’s work is the author’s description fully realised. 

This is one of the reasons why Dickens was so popular.  The author captured the public imagination because he was attuned to what the public wanted.  The social message by itself would undoubtedly have been rejected by many readers.  But dressed in fine, exaggerated garb and positioned within an imaginative fictional world, readers were receptive to Dickens the moralist.  The moral was not the message but part of the complete package.

Trotty Veck is described as a stooping figure, ever-ready to run at a trot.  We may laugh but Trotty Veck the messenger is clearly not to be laughed at.  That would go against the grain of Dickens’s moral purpose.  Veck may be comical but because of his determination to triumph in the face of adversity, he is an endearing character.  Against this background Dickens the moralist goes to work.  Veck’s courage is endearing because, in spite of advancing years he has to keep going.  For the poor, there is no choice.  Keep going to barely make ends meet or give up and die of starvation.

Against all odds, in spite of his threadbare garments, in the ravishing cold; Veck keeps going.  He makes the connection between his effort and the bells above him.  At this stage of the story, the bells are an ally.

 “...but it almost goes against the grain with me to read a paper now.  It frightens me almost.  I don’t know what we poor people are coming to,” Veck declares.  Now Dickens gets into his didactic stride.  For in The Chimes the press is seen as one means of keeping the poor in their place and oppressed.  Far from being the site of freedom of expression, the press put the fear of God into poor people, instilling the belief that they deserve nothing better.  The effect of reading the newspaper on Trotty Veck is to convince him poor people are born bad and have no right to a New Year and therefore, it is implied, no right to a new beginning.

After the success of A Christmas Carol, most critical reviews had been positive.  But there were some less kind to Dickens’s warmly sentimental vision of Christmas, charity and hope.  One article in The Westminster Review criticised the tale on the basis that when the Cratchit family had been given a turkey by Scrooge, another family would have been deprived.  This mean-spirited glass-is-half-empty attitude also implied that there were not enough resources to be shared and the poor had no right to their fair share.

There is an infuriated feeling to parts of The Chimes as if the tale is less about being a sequel to A Christmas Carol and more about the author repudiating this criticism.  To begin with, Dickens does not dwell on the festive ceremonies and customs.  Apart from the bitterness of the weather, there is little (if anything) to suggest festive cheer and goodwill.

Dickens understood that defence was the best form of attack and The Chimes presents an altogether darker vision.  If the cold wind is harsh and biting, the real world is harsher still.  It is hardly Trotty Veck’s fault for believing what he reads in the newspapers (in this we might even sense Dickens’s ambition to found a radical newspaper championing the rights of the poor.)

Whereas Scrooge’s suffering is alleviated at set points by the repeated opportunity for redemption, it almost seems like there will be no light at the end of the tunnel for Trotty Veck.  Dickens’s tone becomes more scathing in its treatment of the three “gentlemen” who make fun of Trotty Veck.  After the appearance of his daughter and her fiancé’, three figures emerge from the church.

Veck is told to get off the doorstep and get out of their way.  Dependent on their commissioning him on an errand, Veck has to be deferential to them in spite of their cruelty to him.  Dickens’s satire of these figures: an alderman (who would imprison all poor people, irrespective of what they had or had not done), a political economist (who steals the remnants of Trotty’s tripe, arguing that tripe is wasted through boiling and is an uneconomical food for the poor to eat) and a gentleman harking after the good old days (and not social progress) were all based on real people.  When The Chimes was about to be published, Dickens’s publishers insisted he tone down the savagery of the satire.

They also make fun of Trotty’s daughter Meg and her fiancé Richard who have expressed their desire to marry.  Trotty, due on an errand, is compelled to be silent and not defend them.  When he does convey the message we are introduced to a pair of wealthy hypocrites, Sir Joseph Bowley (a Member of Parliament, no less) and his wife.  Their benevolence extends to only making their presence felt among the poor to lecture them on how to live their lives.  In other words, they only appear at such gatherings to enhance their own sense of esteem.

The remainder of the tale sees Trotty helping the same wandering man who is the subject of the conveyed message.  When Trotty Veck meets Will Fern, he knows Fern will receive no mercy at the hands of the alderman and will be imprisoned, in the alderman’s words “sent down”.  Veck helps the starving Will and his daughter by giving them food and a bed for the night.

But when an exhausted Veck is summoned to the church by the chimes, the music he hears in the bells is disconcerting.  Haunted by phantoms and goblins, Veck is persuaded that he fell from the tower and is now dead.  The lives of the people he cares about have deteriorated since his death.  This is a popular theme (we need only to think of It’s a Wonderful Life, a film about a depressed hero who loses the belief to do good and thus the will to live, only to be shown just how terrible life becomes without him.)

In 1844, Dickens, after claiming to be a talented mesmerist, put those talents to work by hypnotising Mrs De La Rue, a neighbour who was suffering from terrifying nightmares and sleepless nights.  Interestingly, the part where Trotty Veck is shown a series of visions, each one more horrible than the last, can be read as if Dickens is writing from a self-induced trance; guided by a sort of dream logic.  There are passages of unremitting cruelty, while other passages do not seem to make sense.

It is in Dickens’s power to reverse the course of fate.  He does not go the whole way into the heart of darkness.  In A Christmas Carol, the author showed how the world can be changed by the positive actions of one man.  The Chimes is a journey into a bleaker world, where Dickens can vent his spleen, railing at the injustices of the class system. 

If the poor expect help from above, they are likely to receive nothing but trouble.  The class system has been made that way for a reason.  The status quo will always be maintained.  The privileged few are resentful of change because it threatens their power and stranglehold on society.  Life is unfair.  These are the inherent conclusions of The Chimes.  It is almost as if Dickens abandoned the private charity that delighted the readers of A Christmas Carol as a means of improving society.  After reading The Chimes, you do not emerge from the tale with a warm glow and a feeling of the magnanimous nature of humanity. 

The only aperture of light in The Chimes is achieved by the poor becoming aware of their helplessness and through forming an alliance, seeking to change the world.  It is a bolder and more radical vision with a hint of revolution in the cold east wind.    

 Peter Ackroyd - Dickens, 1990, Sinclair-Stevenson, London

J.B.Priestley - Charles Dickens: a pictorial biography, 1963, The Reprint Society, London