The Chimes
Christmas Books has already been cited. In The Chimes, Toby alone is anything more than the suggestion of a character. While there is no character-development even in the case of Toby, there is a progressive revelation of character. This extends through the first half of the tale. Here it is dropped, and our attention is centred upon the vision. Toby is individualized through description, soliloquy, and conversation or dramatic scene. The crowning revelation of his character comes in the Second Quarter, where he offers shelter to Lilian and Will Fern.
The other serious characters can hardly be said to be characterized at all. Lilian must have been real in Dickens’s imagination, or he could not have been so moved as he was by her fall, but it can hardly he claimed that he succeeded in communicating a sense of reality to the reader. For this reason, the scene at the close of the Third Quarter seems to me artistically ineffective, though its social implications are suggestive indeed. Alderman Cute, Mr. Filer, and Sir Joseph Bowley—though we catch hardly more than a glimpse of each—are, for that matter, much more vivid, much more real than Lilian, Meg or Richard. Next to Toby himself, Sir Joseph is certainly the most effective character in the story. His passion for entering the New Year with all the obligations of the old behind him is a convenient “tag” of the kind Dickens used so skilfully, but better than that is his highly characteristic speech—his curious hesitancy, his hovering on the edge of pious generalities only to lapse immediately again into the mundane.
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