The Chimes
many of his works; and, second, because its social and moral teaching is not only daring in the extreme but astonishingly anticipative of certain more recent attitudes.
The Chimes was written in Genoa, in 1844. This time Dickens began, not with a story or a situation, but with an idea, a character, and a purpose. Just as, in his Child’s History of England, he found it impossible to write about the past without importing all the problems and prejudices of the present into it, so now, during his Italian journey, he found it impossible, as he gazed upon foreign scenes, to withdraw his mind from a constant preoccupation with the sorrows and the problems of the London poor. “Ah!” he cried to Forster upon his return, describing the glories of Venice, “when I saw those places, how I thought that to leave one’s hand upon the time, lastingly upon the time, with one tender touch for the mass of toiling people that nothing could obliterate, would be to lift oneself above the dust of all the Doges in their graves, and stand upon a giants staircase that Sampson [sic!] couldn’t overthrow!” The purpose, then, here as in the Carol, was to strike a blow for the poor, and never was Dickens more passionately sincere, never did he give stronger evidence of his astonishing capacity for complete surrender to the emotional appeal of the creatures of his own fancy than when he was writing this book.
The method of The Chimes differs widely, however, from that which had been used in the Carol. Here the protagonist, Scrooge, was an enemy of the poor, a man himself in comfortablex
