The Chimes
says: It is too late. The die is cast. Richard must perish.
But there is still another aspect of the story which we have not yet considered, and the thought of which may bring us closer than anything we have done thus far to the secret of Dickens’s art. It must be remembered that all the terrible things of which I have spoken take place in a dream. When Toby wakes up, it is to learn that Meg is going ahead with her marriage in spite of Alderman Cute, and the story ends in general festivity and merrymaking. The enemy of Dickens points triumphantly to this as an example of Dickens’s shallowness and cowardice. When he did touch the realities of life, it was only a dream! Dreams are realities and realities become dreams. The happy ending remains with us. We close in a stifling atmosphere of bourgeois respectability. But let us see.
In the first place, it must be remembered that out-and-out realism was not the fashion in Dickens’s day, and great writers, as well as small ones, are bound by the literary fashions of their time. This is nowhere more evident than among the very people who object to Dickens’s alleged optimism: they are simply following the pessimistic, naturalistic trend of their day. If they would really be independent and original, let them turn to romance. It would be far more audacious, in this year of grace, to write like Dickens (if they could!) than to write like Gorky. In the second place, a dream within a dream can hardly be considered, in any appreciable degree, more unreal than the dream itself. The whole story of The Chimes in the imagination:xxviii
