The Chimes
and have wakened up with it at night. I was obliged to lock myself in when I finished it yesterday, for my face was swollen for the time to twice its proper size, and was hugely ridiculous.” Again: “Third of November, 1844. Half-past 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!’ ”
Concerning Forster’s own suggestions for the improvement of the story, while it was yet in the manuscript stage, the biographer has, as usual, told us little, though what details he does give are in this instance rather clearer and more definite than usual. “The red-faced gentleman with the blue coat” who appears in the First Quarter with Alderman Cute and Mr. Filer, we owe indirectly to Forster: he replaces a “Young England gentleman” to whom the biographer objected. It is fairly clear also that Forster softened Mr. Filer on the ground that, as Dickens had originally drawn him, he would offend the political economists, which, for that matter, he did, even as he now stands. “File away at Filer, as you please; but bear in mind that the Westminster Review considered Scrooge’s presentation of the turkey to Bob Cratchit as grossly incompatible with political economy.”
In the Preface to the First Cheap Edition of his Christmas Books, Dickens explained of all of them that “The narrow space within which it was necessary to confine these Christmas Stories when they were originally published, rendered theirxviii
