Charles Dickens

This is the second in a series of five Christmas books that Dickens published in consecutive years from 1843, ‘A Christmas Carol’ being the famous first book.

The Chimes is the tale of a porter who loses his faith in Christmas, and also, due to his station in life, comes to believe (after being condescended to by those he perceives as his betters) that he and his family do not deserve happiness. He even goes as far as to withdraw his blessing from his daughter’s wedding, which he now see as pointlessly doomed to misery and poverty.

Dickens is heavily critical of Victorian Britain and satirises the middle classes and those in office that promoted policy that sought to prevent working-class people from marrying and having families. He was a great admirer of the realism novels of Elizabeth Gaskill, Benjamin Disraeli and George Elliot but Dickens wanted to support radicalism through the Christmas tradition of telling ghost stories by the fireside, as was popular at the time. As with ‘Carol’, he tells a dramatic story with an intrusive narrator (himself, since he also read these stories at public performances, that is supernatural and thrilling, but at the same time it is also a hard-hitting, and at times harrowing, portrayal of the plight of the working classes, and damning of the corrupt and inequal justice system. But this is Christmas and there is a road to redemption, and the goblins of the church bells pay the poor porter a visit.