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The Christmas Books, Volume 1: A Christmas Carol/The Chimes

by Charles Dickens

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Reading for the 4th time

read in December 2021

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Brian said: " Between 1843 and 1848. Charles Dickens published 5 Christmas novellas. The first two, A Christmas Carol and The Chimes are included in this volume of the Penguin anthologies, the other three, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Haun Between 1843 and 1848. Charles Dickens published 5 Christmas novellas. The first two, A Christmas Carol and The Chimes are included in this volume of the Penguin anthologies, the other three, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life and The Haunted Man are included in volume 2.

A Christmas Carol is probably the most renown Christmas story of all time, it’s the story all other Yuletide yarns are judged by. It’s the template for all the Christmas stories that followed. Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol to highlight Victorian social attitudes towards poverty, particularly child poverty. Scrooge being the symbol of self interest and the children Want and Ignorance personified the consequences of that. Dickens also included Tiny Tim to arouse the sympathies of his readers who would have been largely middle class and to highlight the need for charity.

There’s no point in reviewing it really, I doubt there are many people who aren’t familiar with it. It is timeless. I have read in countless times, I read it, if not all of it, at leasts excerpts from it every Christmas.

On the other hand the second story in this volume, The Chimes, is probably not as renown. Although when it was initially published it was highly successful. This story like A Christmas Carol was also written as a vehicle to carry Dickens’ social message.

The Chimes takes place on New Years Eve and concerns Toby "Trotty" Veck, a poor elderly messenger or "ticket-porter,” who comes to believe that he is worthless and that working-class people are wicked by nature. The working class are only fleetingly shown in A Christmas Carol which mainly concerns a wealthy protagonist in Ebenezer Scrooge. In The Chimes we look through the eyes of those working classes. The Chimes has Dickens’ usual grotesques and in the form of Alderman Cute a man who’s opinions of the poor match those of Scrooge, ‘You see, my friend,’ pursued the Alderman, ‘there’s a great deal of nonsense talked about Want —“hard up,” you know; that’s the phrase, isn’t it? ha! ha! ha! — and I intend to Put it Down. There’s a certain amount of can’t in vogue about Starvation, and I mean to Put it Down. That’s all! Lord bless you,’ said the Alderman, turning to his friends again, ‘you may Put Down anything among this sort of people, if you only know the way to set about it.’

I found The Chimes a more challenging read than A Christmas Carol, it doesn’t flow as easily as Carol, it’s heavier going, pointing the way to Dickens’ later, bigger novels such as Bleak House. It’s also a lot darker than Carol dealing with prostitution, drunkenness, suicide and infanticide. The difficulty in reading Dickens today is that satire requires a knowledge of the people and conditions satirized. This is more so with Chimes (The Chimes is fierce satire). The novel's setting is the 1840s,the ‘hungry forties’, which was a period of social and political unrest. The message Dickens is putting out in The Chimes is not a moral one as in Carol but a political one. Because of this The Chimes is a more satisfying read than A Christmas Carol although Carol is the more entertaining.

Penguin’s The Christmas Books Volume 1 is therefore a fabulous collection bringing together two of Dicken’s best Christmas stories and in A Christmas Carol, in my opinion, the best Christmas story every written. ...more "

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— Dec 21, 2022 10:34PM

Dec 19, 2024 09:50PM · see review