From A Christmas Carol to Clanging Chimes
A Review of Dickens' Second Christmas Story: The Chimes: A Goblin Story
So may the New Year be a happy one to you, happy to many more whose happiness depends on you! -Dickens, The Chimes.
Dickens’ first Christmas story, A Christmas Carol, is one of the most adapted stories to the screen, having been adapted over 100 times. Adaptations of his second Christmas story, The Chimes: A Goblin Story, can, it seems, be counted on one hand:
A 1914 silent movie titled The Chimes, directed by Thomas Bentley.
A 24-minute clay-animated film created in 2000 by Xyzoo Animation.
A musical adaptation staged in 1992, and a full-cast radio drama produced in 2000 and released on CD.
When one reads this second story, a nightmare wrapped in a sympathetic story of the poor, it is obvious why there aren’t more adaptations. Both stories urge the same charity and mirth. Both were written during a trip to Italy. One year after singing the Carol of the successful conversion of anti-Christmas sentiments with the help of three benevolent Christmas spirits, Dickens felt the need to turn up the volume with a sterner story, The Chimes: A Goblin Story. The Chimes depicts the slaughter of those same anti-Christian sentiments. As G.K. Chesterton puts it, it is not a Christmas Carol but a Christmas War Song.
Perhaps we glimpse the experiences that motivated Dickens’ “goblin war” in an essay written 20 years after The Chimes. The essay entitled, A Small Star in the East,1 describes Dickens’ visit to the homes of poor families in London. Of one home, for example, Dickens writes:
“The woman…was woefully shabby…”
May I ask what your husband is?”
“He is a coal-porter, sir,” with a glance and a sigh towards the bed.
“Is he out of work?”
“Oh, yes sir! and work’s at all times very, very scanty with him; and now he’s laid up.” “It’s my legs,” said the man upon the ded. “I’ll unroll ‘em” And immediately he began.
“Have you any older children?”
“I have a daughter that does the needle-work, and I have a son that does what he can. She’s at her work now, and he’s trying for work.” “Do they live here?” “They sleep here. They can’t afford to pay more rent and so they come here at night. The rent is very hard upon us…We are a week behind; the landlord’s been shaking and rattling at that door frightfully; he says he’ll turn us out. I don’t know what will come of it.”2
After a very loving and compassionate description of a poor porter being brought a hot meal, including a costly serving of tripe, by his loving daughter, Dickens directs The Chimes to hit out at the elites who reinforce the kind of fear and hopelessness described above. The story descends toward its nightmare with the arrival of some elites of Dickens’ day; Alderman Cute, Mr. Filer, and another gentleman described as follows:
“The gentleman had a very red face, as if an undue proportion of the blood in his body were squeezed up into his head; which perhaps accounted for his having also the appearance of being rather cold about the heart.”3
These visiting elites take the porter’s plate, with its last bite of tripe, and begin to criticize him for eating such uneconomical fare, saying, “You snatch your tripe, my friend, out of the mouths of widows and orphans.”4 At the end of this scene, Dickens can’t resist having one of the men eat the man’s last piece of tripe.
The porter, in his simple respect for authority and humble opinion of himself, believes these elites and casts shame upon himself.
But the worst thing these men do is to try to take away the hope and young love of the porter’s daughter. Upon hearing that she plans to be married young, since she only sees more hardship ahead, the Alderman says,
“Married! Married!! The ignorance of the first principles of political economy on the part of these people; their improvidence; their wickedness, is, by Heaven! enough to…
Now, I’m going to give you a word of good advice my girl…It’s my place to give advice, you know, because I’m a justice!
You are going to be married, you say…Very unbecoming and indelicate in one of your sex! But never mind that. After you are married, you’ll quarrel with your husband, and come to be a distressed wife. You may think not, but you will, because I tell you so…You’ll have children - boys. Those boys will grow up bad, of course, and run wild in the streets, without shoes and stockings. Mind, my young friend! I’ll convict ‘em summarily, every one…5
These comments form the theme of the porter’s nightmare in the middle of the story. At their bidding, he climbs up to the church tower chimes, bells that had given him so much joy, even in the difficulties of life. But this time, he sees goblins of every kind, good and bad, around the chimes and sees himself, having fallen from the tower, dead on the ground below. He learns that he died nine years ago.
From his “goblin” perspective, he watches what the three men said to his daughter, and even worse things, come true in her life, and we are forced to watch with him. It is a difficult read, especially if you don’t know it is a nightmare. But in the end, we find that it was only that, and he is returned to his daughter, young and just married. Then Dickens ends his story with the following:
O listener…try to bear in mind the stern realities from which these shadows come; and in your sphere - none is too wide, and none too limited for such an end - endeavor to correct, improve, and soften them. So may the New Year be a happy one to you, happy to many more whose happiness depends on you! So may each year be happier than the last, and not the meanest of our brethren or sisterhood debarred from their rightful share, in what our Great Creator formed them to enjoy.6
It strikes me that we have fewer and fewer church bells to speak to us, even during this Christmas season. They have been replaced by so many voices on the right and on the left, like the three gentlemen, who believe that their education gives them the wisdom to know how other people should live their lives and the authority to judge them from some moral high ground. Whether we denounce colonialism or progressivism in the belief that we know what is best for others, our sin is the same. Dickens’ The Chimes" is a surrogate for the silence of our steeples, reminding us that “do unto others as we would have them do to us” is not another way of saying make other people in our own image.
Dickens was as good as his word. Three years after writing The Chimes, Dickens worked with Angela Burdett-Coutts, (to whom he dedicated his novel, Martin Chuzzlewit completed in the same year as The Chimes), one of the wealthiest women in the United Kingdom and a philanthropist known by some as the Queen to the Poor, to start Urania Cottage, a hostel for prostitutes which would, among other things, help these women avoid the prison or the workhouse.
Dickens served for about ten years as active administrator and manager of the Cottage, handling finances, writing reports and overseeing everything from daily operations, selecting women who were already prisoners (often consulting with prison governors) for their program, training in domestic skills, and arranging emigration for reformed women to the colonies for new lives.
A Small Star in the East, ends with a story of a young couple at the East London Children’s Hospital who give the essay its title:
A gentleman and a lady, a young husband and wife, have bought and fitted up this building for its present noble use, and. have quietly settled themselves as its medical officers and directors. Both have had considerable practical experience of medicine and surgery; he as house surgeon of a great London hospital; she as a very earnest student, tested by severe examination, and also a nurse of the sick poor during the prevalence of cholera.7
Noting that no one had yet written of this amazing couple’s work, he concludes:
…no romancer that I know of has had the boldness to prefigure the life and home of this young husband and young wife in the Children’s Hospital in the east of London.8
The loud clanging of Dickens’ story, The Chimes, has, at its heart, a simple request; that in this Christmas season, as we look toward a new year, we open our hearts to compassion and hospitality toward all those around us whose lives, through the use of our talents and skills, we can make better.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
The fifth essay in his book Nightwalks (London: Penguin Group), 2004, p. 59-74.
Ibid., p. 67-68
The Works of Charles Dickens, Volume II, (New York: P.F. Collier), 1870, p. 257.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 258
Ibid., p. 274
Op.Cit., p. 71
Ibid, p. 74