Charles Dickens' The Chimes

We've all read, watched, or, at the very least, heard of some version of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. For most people, it's the only bit of Dickens with which they've ever engaged. The name Ebenezer Scrooge is familiar in the same way Sherlock Holmes is, even if we've never read the original story. And I get it. One of my favorite things about this time of year is getting to rewatch and reread this classic of the season. 

However, did you know that it wasn't the only Christmas story Dickens wrote? 

Charles Dickens

If you didn't, I'm not surprised. Until I wrote my piece a few years ago about the movie, The Man Who Invented Christmas, I didn't know it either. But it's true. A Christmas Carol, in fact, was the first of five Christmas books Dickens wrote in his career. Sadly, these other offerings have since been overshadowed by the story of Scrooge and his four ghostly visitors on Christmas Eve. 

A Christmas Carol first appeared in 1843. Dickens wrote it out of a need to make some money. Unfortunately, the printing costs where such that, by the time he paid the bills, his profit was meager. But the story captured the imagination of his readers and became a favorite globally. On the reading tours that he did in the last decade of his life, A Christmas Carol was a big hit with his audiences. It also kicked off a five-year tradition of Dickens writing a special little novella for the Holiday Season. 

His immediate follow-up to A Christmas Carol was the story of a little, old ticket-porter (that's what the Victorians used to call people who hand-delivered mail), named Toby "Trotty" Veck. The title of that story was The Chimes. 

Until this last week, I'd never read The Chimes before, but I became curious about his other stories enough that I decided to read this one.

Trotty Veck is, in many ways, a perfect foil to Ebenezer Scrooge. One might even call him an "anti-Scrooge." They have their commonalities, of course, as all foils do. Both are men in the twilight of their days. Both have family issues. Both have experienced the loss of love. And both come from the lower classes of Victorian British society.

However, there's a big difference in how we first meet them. Whereas Scrooge has a long-calcified streak of cynicism and misanthropy at the core of his being, Trotty isn't like that. Trotty is a good man. 

So, the question becomes this: what makes this good man interesting?

Well, even though Trotty is at his core a good man, he's also a man in doubt. Life in Victorian London is hard if you have no money and work is scarce. Both of these are conflicts in his life. Yet, Trotty desperately tries to retain his belief in the best in life, that people are basically good, and that life, no matter your circumstances, is worth living. 

And he manages this...at first.

Toby "Trotty" Veck

That is until four prime examples of the worst of humanity confront him in one day, New Year's Eve to be exact. 

Two loathsome utilitarian naysayers, who freely express to Trotty their ideas that people like him (that is to say, poor people), serve no purpose in the world, aside from taking up space. Then, as Trotty goes off to do a job, the man he delivers a message to shames him to his face for being behind on paying his debts. Finally, the tipping point that convinces Trotty that people are bad comes from an article he reads in that day's paper of something horrific: the story of a mother killing herself and her baby. 

In short, that is what makes Trotty interesting: despite believing for so long that people could be good, at his breaking point, he loses hope.

You could say that he's on the edge of becoming who Scrooge is when we first meet him. Scrooge is an unkind man, who must become kind; Trotty is a kind man, who is trying to keep from becoming unkind.

But this is a Dickens Christmas tale, so what's bound to happen? Something supernatural is going to occur to help turn things around.

And in this case, it's the goblins who inhabit the eponymous Chimes.

Throughout the story, The Chimes are Trotty's ever-present companions. He almost views them as the angels on his shoulders. He even hears them talking to him in a metaphorical way, with their ringing calling out his name. But just as he's about to plunge into despair, the spirits of the chimes take him under their wing and show him a picture of an unkind world. 

It's only when his daughter, Meg, comes close to carrying out the very action he'd just read about (murder-suicide of her baby and herself), that he finally accepts that he cannot lose hope. 

And like all early Dickens, it ends with everything resolved happily. As the New Year rings in, Trotty celebrates both his daughter's soon-to-happen marriage, his new friends, Will Fern and his niece Liliana, and the new year, for as long you're alive, as long as you have time, you always have hope and opportunity for things to get better. 

As a book, it's easy to understand why The Chimes has fallen out of favor. 

It doesn't have quite the same punch as the Carol. It takes a lot longer to get going. "Marley was dead to start," goes the beginning of  A Christmas Carol. Punchy. Into the action. Character straight away. Yet, the beginning of The Chimes meanders. We don't even meet Trotty until several paragraphs in, with Dickens taking his sweet time to talk about these fantastical bells. 

Also, as a character, Trotty is not quite as interesting as Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge's story is dynamic, whereas Trotty's is an attempt to avert a tragedy. Scrooge, by tale's end, changes; Trotty, however, is basically who he was when things began, just slightly more assured in his belief in the basic decency of humanity. 

And the tone of the book is much more didactic than the Carol. While, admittedly, both are morality tales, The Chimes suffers far more than its predecessor from Dickens' desire to hit a message home to his readers--his narrator constantly interrupts the flow of the narrative to "make points". 

Yet, there are lots of things to enjoy about The Chimes. 

At its core, it's an optimistic story. It's a story asking its reader (literally, if you read it), to not give into despair. Despair, and the oblivion that it can lead one to, is a literal dead-end. People can only change, and their circumstances can only improve, if they hold out the hope, in the words of Dicken's great character Mr. Micawber that, "Something will turn up." As long as you're alive, you still have a chance--that's the core message behind all of Dicken's Christmas books.

Concurrently, the story places on emphasis on the small things in life. A good meal. A kind gesture to a stranger. A welcoming home. Family. Weddings. Friendship. It's these things that bring Trotty hope, that keep him from becoming hardened to the world. It isn't sudden windfalls; it's the everyday things that help make life bearable and bring people joy, even when they're feeling low.

Despite its flaws, The Chimes has an endearing quality that doubtlessly make it a wonderful book for any Dickensian to read--and maybe for ordinary readers to read as well. 

(If you'd care to see a decent adaptation of this story, then please, check out the video below.)