The Chimes by Charles Dickens

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A winter's tale of social commentary and moral lessons.

The chimes of the bells of the abandoned church tower ring out, timeless. One New Year's Eve, Toby, who often sets up vigil beneath the tower, is once again dutifully in place. The bells have now become a part of him; often he hears them intoning hidden messages only he appears to be able to hear.

His daughter is due to marry on New Year's Day, a union he has some misgivings about due to their financial plight. Members of the upper classes are quick to share their own thoughts on such a marriage to Toby, his daughter and her fiance, leaving them all troubled.

As the bells ring out that night, Toby ascends into the bell tower, coming across the goblins of the bells. As he experiences a vision of the future, he may come to understand the meaning of his life and of many whom surround him.

'The Chimes' is Charles Dickens' second Christmas novella, following 'A Christmas Carol'. Published the following year, in 1844, it features heavier prose and a denser narrative than its predecessor, and feels lacking in its Christmas magic. But such is the curse of creating a classic - the works that follow will be compared rather than judged on their own merits.

From the opening quarter, the bells themselves are almost their own character, haunting the plot throughout. With vivid descriptions of poverty, set against the class system, the story explores the attitudes and ingrained prejudice of society, and how poverty and suffering breed crime and injustice in ways in which the two are not the same. While life may be very different now to when the novella was written and published, the social and moral issues that thematically illustrate the story prove to be as timeless as the chimes, its core message as accessible now as ever.

Toby is a sympathetic character - something that from one perspective may make him more relatable, but on the flipside make his moral lesson more difficult to grasp (and perhaps never quite stop feeling a little unfair; he is, after all, as much a victim of society and his circumstances as the other characters in the passages used to build this world and convey its lesson). In Toby's journey, the reader bears witness to and is able to reflect on Dicken's moral message.

A fable about embracing the spirit of joy and gratitude and how showing love and being loved is being in possession of true riches, how one should find renewed faith in the goodness of humanity, take responsibility and not turn one's back on those in need; complete with goblins and spirits showing a vision of a possible future, with the bells ringing in New Year's Day to show this may not be the future that will come to pas, it nevertheless proves a somewhat bleak Christmas novella.

With 'The Chimes', Charles Dickens has delivered a subtle and restrained moral message. Goblins aside, this is a grounded, gritty view of the struggles of the 1840s and a plea that unless humanity can come together, strife cannot be overcome.



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