by Dickens
‘I am still in stout heart with the tale. I think it well-timed and a good thought … Weather worse than any November English weather I have ever beheld, or any weather I have had experience of anywhere. So horrible to-day that all power has been rained and gloomed out of me. Yesterday, in pure determination to get the better of it, I walked twelve miles in mountain rain. You never saw it rain. Scotland and America are nothing to it.’
Just as he had done with A Christmas Carol, Dickens worked on The Chimes in a fever of energy, allowing the story to absorb and exhaust him. The Chimes is another supernatural Christmas story, but this one is not of ghosts, but of goblins; an echo of the Christmas story in The Pickwick Papers. The book’s full title is The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang An Old Year Out and a New Year In. The main character, Toby Veck, better known by his nickname of Trotty Veck, is a poorly paid ‘ticket porter’, or deliverer of messages, who waits for employment at the foot of a bell tower. He is a widower with one child, Margaret, known as Meg.
Trotty Veck has been depressed by his experience of life and by the way he has been conditioned by society to believe that working-class people – including himself – are worth less than the wealthy and well-connected. On a cold and blustery New Year’s Eve, Meg, who has been waiting a long time to marry her fiancé, Richard, comes to find her father at his waiting post, bringing with her a welcome hot meal. She tells him she and Richard have decided to marry the following morning, explaining:
‘“Richard says … another year is nearly gone, and where is the use of waiting on from year to year, when it is so unlikely we shall ever be better off than we are now? He says we are poor now, father, and we shall be poor then, but we are young now, and years will make us old before we know it. He says that if we wait: people in our condition: until we see our way quite clearly, the way will be a narrow one indeed – the common way – the Grave, father … So Richard says, father; as his work was yesterday made certain for some time to come, and as I love him, and have loved him full three years – ah! longer than that, if he knew it! – will I marry him on New Year’s Day; the best and happiest day, he says, in the whole year, and one that is almost sure to bring good fortune with it.”’
This news should make Trotty Veck happy, but he has become so conditioned to think of people like himself as being unwise to marry, or have children, or to do anything except live a miserable existence, that he finds himself believing it. Like Scrooge, Trotty Veck needs to stop seeing the worst in everything.
Throughout The Chimes, Dickens introduces pompous characters, including Alderman Cute and the politician Sir Joseph Bowley, who are convinced of the superiority of their own class. There are marked similarities between the way in which these characters behave and talk and the way in which Ebenezer Scrooge dismisses the poor as those who should die ‘and decrease the surplus population’. The Chimes was an overt message to the middle and upper classes that they need to change the way they treat those poorer than themselves.
Charles Dickens also uses the book to express his fury at what he sees as the media sensationalising, and making its money from, human misery. The reasons behind Trotty Veck’s perceived misanthropy are stories he reads in newspapers and the attitudes of the wealthy people he delivers messages for. Both the newspapers and the moneyed classes engender in Trotty Veck a belief that his people, the working class, are inherently bad, that they are born bad and are unable to be changed. Trotty has been made world weary and disillusioned by newspaper stories, such as that of a woman who killed her baby because she could not afford to feed it. He no longer wants Meg to marry and give birth to a new generation, as he believes that next generation is doomed to keep making the same mistakes as their parents and grandparents. The news stories that fill Trotty Veck with disgust for his fellow humans, were based on stories that had shocked and angered Dickens himself.
Late that night, on New Year’s Eve, Trotty Veck feels himself being called by the bells of the church whose belltower he stands beside every day. He climbs to the very top, where he encounters the spirits of the bells, attended by goblins. The goblin leader scolds him for losing his faith in humanity and leads Trotty to believe that he has died in a fall from the belltower and that he is now a spirit. The goblins show him a vision of Meg, Richard and their friends, a difficult and heartbreaking life that Trotty Veck, now he is dead, is unable to change. His cynicism and misanthropy have been passed onto his daughter. Meg’s personality has changed and, with it, her happy future. As Trotty watches the people he cares for living miserable lives of alcoholism, prostitution, destitution and despair, Trotty begs the goblins, and the Chimes themselves, to allow him to save his daughter.
The story ends with Trotty waking up in his own home. It is New Year’s Day and Meg and Richard are excited about their wedding. As with A Christmas Carol, the ending is one of redemption and happiness – and the readers are left to consider their own lives and actions, and whether they bear any comparison to Alderman Cute, Sir Joseph Bowley, Mr Filer or the misanthropic version of Trotty Veck.
On 3 November, Dickens wrote triumphantly to Forster:
‘Halfpast two, afternoon. Thank God! I have finished the Chimes. This moment. I take up my pen again to-day, to say only that much; and to add that I have had what women call “a real good cry!”’
To Thomas Mitton, he confided:
‘I have worn myself to Death, in the Month I have been at work. None of my usual reliefs have been at hand; I have not been able to divest myself of the story – have suffered very much in my sleep, in consequence – and am so shaken by such work in this trying climate that I am as nervous as a man who is dying of Drink: and as haggard as a Murderer. I believe I have written a tremendous Book; and knocked the Carol out of the field.’
Baby Frank, who was just a few months old when his father finished The Chimes, was given the nickname of ‘the Chickenstalker’, after the character of Mrs Chickenstalker in the new story.
For his family, the completion of The Chimes was a happy event, as Dickens was back in a happy mood and his exhilaration was always catching. Filled with a renewed energy, he planned a business trip back to London, to talk to his publishers and promote The Chimes. He travelled back England at the end of November 1844, guided by Louis Roche. He wrote to Catherine en route:
‘I arrived here at halfpast five tonight, after 50 hours of it, in a French coach. I was so beastly dirty when I got to this house, that I had quite lost all sense of my identity, and if anybody had said “Are you Charles Dickens?” I should unblushingly have answered “No, I never heard of him”. A good wash, and a good dress, and a good dinner have revived me, however.’
In London, he lodged at the Piazza Coffee House in Covent Garden, from where he wrote constant letters and enlisted several artist friends to illustrate the new book; these included John Leech, who had illustrated A Christmas Carol (and whose illustration of Trotty Veck seemingly in the act of the trotting motion that led to his nickname became emblematic of the book), Daniel Maclise, Clarkson Stanfield and Richard Doyle. The Chimes was a joint venture between Dickens’s old and new publishers: Bradbury and Evans printed the book and Chapman and Hall published it. The publication date was set for 16 December. John Forster arranged select parties so Dickens could read The Chimes aloud. On 2 December, Dickens wrote triumphantly to Catherine:
‘The little book is now, so far as I am concerned, all ready … Anybody who has heard it, has been moved in the most extraordinary manner. Forster read it (for dramatic purposes) to A Beckett – not a man of very quiet feeling. He cried so much, and so painfully, that Forster didn’t quite know whether to go on or stop; and he called next day to say that any expression of his feeling was beyond his power…. As the reading comes off tomorrow night, I had better not despatch my letter to you until Wednesday’s post …
‘P.S. If you had seen Macready last night – undisguisedly sobbing, and crying on the sofa, as I read – you would have felt (as I did) what a t
hing it is to have Power.’
On 3 December, there was another reading for which Forster held a ‘tea party’; as he explained in his invitations, ‘D. objecting to anything more jovial’. Dickens did not want his friends’ listening skills to be impaired by alcohol, he wanted to ensure all attention was on him and The Chimes. The reading took place at John Forster’s home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Amongst those present were the historian Thomas Carlyle, the playwright Douglas Jerrold, the artists Daniel Maclise and Clarkson Stanfield, the novelist and journalist Samuel Laman Blanchard, the Unitarian minister and social campaigner Rev. William Johnson Fox, and the Scottish writer Alexander Dyce. The party was immortalised in a pencil sketch by Daniel Maclise, who sent it to Catherine Dickens with a letter, ‘… there was not a dry eye in the house … We should borrow the high language of the minor theatre and even then not do justice – shrieks of laughter – there were indeed –and floods of tears as a relief to them – I do not think that there ever was such a triumphant hour for Charles…’ Dickens wrote to his sister Fanny that he had been told even the printers ‘laughed and cried’ as they read the story while printing it.
Forewarned by what had happened with A Christmas Carol, Dickens also made use of his time in London, to sort out an agreement with his friends Gilbert A Beckett and Mark Lemon – a close friend and the first editor of Punch – that they could have the rights to dramatize The Chimes – officially – for the Adelphi Theatre. He also spent his time in London trying to get help for the widow and children of a man who had died some months earlier. John Overs, a cabinet maker and aspiring writer, had sent several manuscripts to Dickens, who had attempted to help him get the works published. When that had failed, Dickens started sending Overs money to try and help him out in his illness. Being ill in Victorian Britain could cause financial devastation; not only did it mean that the ill person was no longer earning a wage, but they were also incurring medical expenses. It needed only one fairly minor illness to push a working family into the abyss of poverty. Dickens spent much of his week in London trying to find solutions for the family – in which he was successful, managing to secure a pension for Mrs Overs and work for her daughters.
The Chimes was published while Dickens was travelling back to Italy. Most of the reviews were praiseworthy, although some were brave enough to suggest The Chimes was not as good as its predecessor. Dickens must have been amused by the review in a right-wing magazine John Bull which accused Dickens of fanning the flames of ‘low Radical doctrines of the day’. The Chimes was frequently compared unfavourably with A Christmas Carol. In Ireland, the Cork Examiner complained:
‘The “Carol” was a generous book … it showed its handywork by brightening the page of its story as it went on, and finally achieved its great purpose, by leaving all parties, actors, and readers, better and happier than they sat down. This is high praise; but Mr Dickens in his “Carol”, deserves it … The success which attended this little incipient ‘annual was very great – much greater we opine, proportionately, that that which has attended any other of this popular author’s productions; and it was not unreasonable to suppose that he would endeavour to follow up … this festive season … Accordingly his second ‘carol’, for so we may call the ‘Chimes’, has been produced, and is already before us and some thousands of readers.
‘How do those thousands of readers like its tone? For ourselves we confess it pleases us not. It is not a fair “second” to the melody of the first … Mr Dickens, having become popular, has fallen into the popular error of substituting exaggeration and extravagance for the truth and force to which he owes his popularity … As a story, nothing can be more unartistic or more commonplace than this production.’
As had happened with Pickwick Papers and A Christmas Carol, plagiarism of The Chimes was rife. By the end of December 1844, less than a fortnight after the book itself had been published, theatres were advertising performances of ‘Dickens’s Christmas Chimes’ – although Dickens himself didn’t receive any royalties or copyright payments. Hastily created plays based on his Christmas books now rivalled pantomimes for Christmas audiences.
By 20 December, Dickens was back in Albaro with his family. He had travelled via Paris and was pleased at having been recognised, on the ship from Marseilles to Genoa, by an American tourist. Just two days after his return, the family was thrilled to receive from Angela Burdett-Coutts a ‘Twelfth Cake weighing ninety pounds, magnificently decorated’ for her godson, Charley. In a letter to Forster, Dickens wrote how perturbed the ‘Jesuitical surveillance’ of the customs officers had been by seeing a cake decorated with Twelfth Night characters. The family celebrated Christmas in style in their wing of the Palazzo Peschiere and they celebrated New Year’s Eve at a party with the palazzo’s other residents, which included a Spanish duke and his family, about whom Dickens loved to tell his friends scandalous stories.
The public loved Dickens’s second Christmas book, and the first print run of 20,000 copies sold rapidly. On 8 January 1845, the Inverness Courier began its ‘Miscellaneous’ column with the sentence, ‘Above 30,000 copies of Mr Dickens’s Christmas story, the Chimes, have been sold within a fortnight.’ A Christmas Carol was still the people’s favourite, though and, despite the fact that The Chimes had been inspired by Genoa, when Dickens was invited to perform a reading at the house of the British Consul before leaving Italy, it was A Christmas Carol that the Consul was eager to hear. The reading took place, very unseasonally, in June 1845, just before the author and his family returned to London.
Stealing a Christmas Dinner
Early on the morning of Christmas-day, some daring thief contrived to obtain entrance to the house of Mr M. Bishop, in Old-street-road, and watching his opportunity succeeded in abstracting from the kitchen a fine large turkey, which was intended for the Christmas dinner, as also a quantity of raisins and currants and other et ceteras.
Morning Chronicle, 27 December 1845
CHAPTER TEN
‘The Luckiest Thing in All the World’
‘It may have entertained the Cricket too, for anything I know; but, certainly, it now began to chirp again, vehemently.
“Heyday!” said John, in his slow way. “It’s merrier than ever, tonight, I think.”
“And it’s sure to bring us good fortune, John! It always has done so. To have a Cricket on the Hearth, is the luckiest thing in all the world!”
‘John looked at her as if he had very nearly got the thought into his head, that she was his Cricket in chief, and he quite agreed with her … “The first time I heard its cheerful little note, John, was on that night when you brought me home – when you brought me to my new home here; its little mistress. Nearly a year ago … Its chirp was such a welcome to me! It seemed so full of promise and encouragement. It seemed to say, you would be kind and gentle with me … all the Cricket tribe are potent Spirits, even though the people who hold converse with them do not know it (which is frequently the case); and there are not in the unseen world, voices more gentle and more true, that may be so implicitly relied on, or that are so certain to give none but tenderest counsel, as the Voices in which the Spirits of the Fireside and the Hearth address themselves to human kind.”’
Charles Dickens, The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)
The Dickens family returned to London in the summer of 1845. On 21 August, Dickens wrote gloomily to his friend Arthur Cunynghame, ‘London is as flat as can be. There is nothing to talk about but Railroad shares. And as I am not a Capitalist, I don’t find anything very interesting in that.’ It may have been August, but Dickens’s mind was already looking ahead to Christmas and he continued the letter, ‘The Gin Punch shall be yours in the snowy time (I hope) of Christmas; and it shall be preceded by a glass of rather better wine than one can get in the City of Palaces.’
That Autumn, as Catherine was preparing to give birth to their sixth child, a son with the splendid name of Alfred D’Orsay Tennyson Dickens, her husband was working on his third Christmas
book, The Cricket on the Hearth. The story, which is divided into three sections known as ‘Chirps’, is the story of the Peerybingle family and their friends the Plummers. John and Dot Peerybingle have a baby son and a humorously inept young nanny. The presence of a cricket singing from its home on their hearth conjures up an image of a cosy room warmed by a glowing fire.
The Peerybingles’ friend, Caleb Plummer, is living in impoverished circumstances, caring for his blind daughter, Bertha, and trying to reconcile himself to the fact that his long-lost son, Edward, is believed dead. When he left England, Edward was engaged to his sweetheart, May Fielding. Believing Edward has died, May has rsigned herself to making a loveless, but sensible marriage. Edward returns in secret, having heard May is to be married and not wanting to ruin her happiness. He disguises himself, so family and friends won’t know he has returned. Pretending to be an elderly stranger, Edward becomes a lodger in the Peerybingles’ household – although Dot soon realises his true identity. She knows that her friend May, only agreed to marry because she was worn down by her overbearing mother. May’s fiancé is Caleb Plummer’s miserly employer, Mr Tackleton:
‘Tackleton the Toy-merchant, pretty generally known as Gruff and Tackleton – for that was the firm, though Gruff had been bought out long ago; only leaving his name, and as some said his nature, according to its Dictionary meaning, in the business – Tackleton theToy-merchant, was a man whose vocation had been quite misunderstood by his Parents and Guardians … cramped and chafing in the peaceable pursuit of toymaking, he was a domestic Ogre, who had been living on children all his life, and was their implacable enemy. He despised all toys … In appalling masks; hideous, hairy, red-eyed Jacks in Boxes; Vampire Kites; demoniacal Tumblers who wouldn’t lie down, and were perpetually flying forward, to stare infants out of countenance; his soul perfectly revelled. They were his only relief, and safety-valve. He was great in such inventions … safe to destroy the peace of mind of any young gentleman between the ages of six and eleven, for the whole Christmas or Midsummer Vacation … Still, Tackleton, the toy-merchant, was going to be married. In spite of all this, he was going to be married. And to a young wife too, a beautiful young wife.’