The Chimes - Dickens' forgotten Christmas Book

[Jackson Richardson]

And forgotten for very good reasons. Dickens made a great success with A Christmas Carol - rightly so. He then wrote a Christmas Book/long short story for each Christmas for the following four years. Only The Haunted Man is specifically set at Christmas.

I greatly admire A Christmas Carol so I thought I'd try the others and I've recently re-read The Chimes. The work it reminded me most of was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, oddly enough, with virtuous working class being endlessly put down by stupid and complacent bourgeoisie.

Dickens was clearly trying to follow but not reproduce A Christmas Carol, so The Chimes is set at New Year, not Christmas. There is a supernatural visitation to a character who learns from it, but the character - Trotty Veck - is good hearted unlike Scrooge, so it seems he doesn't need to learn anything significant. (He read in a newspaper how a young desititute mother killed herself and thinks it very wrong. The chimes in the nearby church tower show how in time his own daughter could do the same.) The happy ending - so it was all a dream - is unconvincing.

Not Dickens at his best.

[kev67]

I read the Penguin clothbound edition of A Christmas Carol, which came with several other short Christmas stories. Most of the other stories were not very good. My favourite was one of a Christmas dinner spent with a number of down-and-out people. I suspected this was a Christmas dinner attended and paid for by Dickens himself. It was particularly good because one of the guests was a down-and-out woman.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Yes, there's some nice descriptive parts to it at the start though. There's a particular part describing the wind around the church for example that I remember and enjoyed.

[Phillise]

And forgotten for very good reasons. Dickens made a great success with A Christmas Carol - rightly so. He then wrote a Christmas Book/long short story for each Christmas for the following four years. Only The Haunted Man is specifically set at Christmas.

I greatly admire A Christmas Carol so I thought I'd try the others and I've recently re-read The Chimes. The work it reminded me most of was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, oddly enough, with virtuous working class being endlessly put down by stupid and complacent bourgeoisie.

Dickens was clearly trying to follow but not reproduce A Christmas Carol, so The Chimes is set at New Year, not Christmas. There is a supernatural visitation to a character who learns from it, but the character - Trotty Veck - is good hearted unlike Scrooge, so it seems he doesn't need to learn anything significant. (He read in a newspaper how a young desititute mother killed herself and thinks it very wrong. The chimes in the nearby church tower show how in time his own daughter could do the same.) The happy ending - so it was all a dream - is unconvincing.

Not Dickens at his best.

I didn't know this was all a dream. Is that definitely so?

I wonder why all of Dickens' other Christmas stories are all virtually unknown, while it's almost impossible NOT to know the story of Scrooge. Somehow, A Christmas carol must have resonated very deeply with the human psyche, while the other stories just did not. If you mention the name Scrooge, it would hard to find somehow with whom it was not unfamiliar. But mention the name Redlaw? Nobody would know.