The Chimes
story the Chimes do not intervene to save Meg from infanticide and self-destruction.
For all these changes the Ferns are directly responsible. When Toby unexpectedly takes them into his house, it immediately becomes impossible for him to spend the evening with his neighbours. Dickens seems to have stumbled across them in the dark quite as suddenly as Toby himself did, and when they entered the story, they brought tragedy along with them. The writer’s mood seems now to have changed, and from here on he becomes more and more earnest, more and more relentless. He does not abandon his plan for the conversion of Toby, but in his most serious moments he is thinking, increasingly, of others. “You comfortable ones,” one can almost hear him say, “you who regard the outcasts of the world as outcasts by choice, inferior creatures, evil to the heart’s core. I will show you a child, an innocent, lovable child who will awaken all your sympathies. Then, virtually without preparation, I will plunge her, almost simultaneously, into girlhood and vice, and you who have loved her will not dare, as you read my pages, to tell me that you would have done better in her place.” And if Lilian were to be destroyed, why not Meg also? He would employ no last-minute rescue, no jot of supernatural melodrama: he would let them go—Meg and her child—they must die. Those readers of his who had often shuddered with horror over newspaper stories of women killing their children; he would show them why women kill their children. He would show a Dickensxvi
