Introduction
So much for the art of The Chimes: what now of its spirit? First of all, there is a definite affinity with the teachings of Carlyle. After finishing the story in Genoa, Dickens made a special trip to England for the purpose of reading it to a group of his friends. “Shall I confess to you,” he writes Forster, “that I particularly want Carlyle above all to see it before the rest of the world?…” The tale has often been criticized on the ground of Dickens’s alleged ignorance of the real causes of social misery. Even the admiring E.P. Whipple wrote in this connection: “Now, we must suppose that John Stuart Mill was a good and brave man, and that he had some love as well as perception of truth, yet certainly his opinion would have substantially agreed with that of Mr. Filer, so mercilessly ridiculed for his opposition to improvident marriages among the poor.” There is no denying a somewhat naïve assumption running all through Dickens’s utterances on social questions—the assumption that nothing more than the spirit of good will is needed to solve all our menacing social problems, that if only we have that, the means will somehow take care of themselves. Yet surely if either Mill or Whipple seriously believed that marriages among the poor could be made to cease simply because they were “improvident,” then these gentlemen were themselves much more naïve, much more “romantic” and unscientific than Dickens, in his wildest fights of fancy, ever dreamed of being!
The most startling thing about The Chimes, however, is that here, in 1844, we find Dickens asserting without compromisexxv
