Sunday 29 January 2012

The Chimes - my Charles Dickens 12in12

The Chimes (1844), Charles Dickens

You've probably heard of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens; it's among his most famous works, and one of the most adapted. So even if you haven't read it, you probably know what happens. Just in case you don't, here's the basic story...in poor cartoon form.



This isn't a chance for me to write about A Christmas Carol – instead I'm going to write about Dickens' second Christmas story: the lesser-known The Chimes. Dickens wrote five short stories for the festive period, between 1843 and 1848, with A Christmas Carol being only the first. The Chimes is the second (1844), and although they aren't connected, it has some features in common with A Christmas Carol.

There are no ghosts, such a significant part of A Christmas Carol – and haven't ghosts always been an important part of Christmas? But even though it isn't the dead returning to life, The Chimes does involve some supernatural interference in the lives of mortals, and if that's not Christmas-y, I don't know what is. Rather like the earlier book, Dickens uses supernatural intervention to alter the attitudes of humans who've got the wrong idea about something. You can call it a cheap trick if you like, a failure to find sufficient psychological reason for his characters' actions, I'm saying nothing.

Our central character in The Chimes, Trotty Veck, unlike Carol's Scrooge, is poor and fairly sympathetic. He's a porter, who hangs around outside a church waiting for work carrying things – anything, really, but mostly boxes and messages. His two comforts while waiting and being bashed about by the wind are the friendly chimes of the bells and the thought that his daughter will be bringing his lunch later.

Already – nothing much has happened yet – Dickens has made his sympathies pretty clear. Here's a working-class, widower father struggling to claw together enough money for himself and his daughter, in contrast with the money-hoarding, bachelor Scrooge of Carol. What follows is hardly a hymn to the working classes, nor an outright attack on those wealthier than them, but instead something rather more subtle. More subtle and, of course, more supernatural.

The first two chapters (or Quarters, as Dickens names them) read as a satire of an upper-middle class that believes it knows both the working class and what is good for that class. The paternalistic (and, by modern standards, patronising) MP declares himself a 'Friend and Father of the Poor', while agreeing a harsh jail sentence for a poor man caught stealing bread for his infant daughter. The Alderman lists the things he is in favour of 'putting down', including the 'cant in vogue about Starvation'. He doesn't want to 'put down' starvation, of course, but the nonsense that the poor are anywhere near starving. These are powerful men, keen to show that they understand the sort of people they are dealing with, and have the power/ability to solve the problems of their lives. Alderman Cute is even at pains to appear to speak to the poor in their own language, or at least in a vernacular to which he has special access among the privileged classes. The MP (a baronet) criticises Trotty for owing a small sum at his local shop – it being bad form to owe debts into the New Year – while he goes about paying off his own rather larger debts. Both men make themselves increasingly ridiculous with their self-importance (accompanied by a failure to make a beneficial difference to any poor person's life).

In fact, 'the poor' take a bit of a battering in The Chimes, with Trotty left bewildered and confused by fast-talking rich men, and persuaded (by them) of his and his class' inferiority. He spends most of the book being told off by somebody, poor bloke. Here's something that I suspect is going to crop up fairly often in this 12in12 project; Dickens' support for the working classes and social reform, using his writing as his most powerful weapon.

Dickens' final two chapters/Quarters begin with that Christmas supernatural intervention, when the spirits of the church bells appear to Trotty and also tell him off. Trotty's failing is that he's lost faith in humanity and questioned Nature (by wondering what the point was in life, if people were so hopeless as he has been led to believe).

The lesson he has learnt – a little different to Scrooge's 'I should enjoy Christmas' – is:

'I know that our inheritance is held in store for us by Time. I know there is a sea of Time to rise one day, before which all who wrong us or oppress us will be swept away like leaves. I see it, on the flow! I know we must trust and hope, and neither doubt ourselves, nor doubt the good in one another.'


I can't help finding this message problematic. As he says this, Trotty is seeing his daughter standing by the Thames, ready to throw herself and/or her infant child into the murky waters and end their suffering. Trotty has been forced to watch this by the Spirits of the Chimes, to teach him a lesson for questioning Nature. But the lesson he's learnt seems to be much the same as the message handed down by Alderman Cute and his set: listen to us, don't question us and do as we instruct you. The Chimes are giving Trotty an injunction to keep quiet and accept the difficulties life throws at him, to acquiesce in his own oppression. That they have forced him, an old man, to his knees, weeping, to say this while seeing the suffering of his daughter and granddaughter is far more brutal than anything Alderman Cute says or does.

It's the poor taking a battering again; Trotty is as guilty of these wrongs as Alderman Cute and his set – in fact, he only fell into them because of Alderman Cute in the first place. And it's no wonder Trotty is so easily swayed, when he comes up against Baronets telling him that they will do the thinking for him. By rights, the Spirits of the Chimes should be going after the Aldermen and MPs with their warnings to stop harkening back to a supposed Golden Age.

Perhaps this serves to show us the wickedness of human actions in the story – they aren't as bad as the spirits' actions, but they could still be modified. That's what the MPs, Baronets, judges and Aldermen should be taking from Dickens' writing: modify your actions, and be more forgiving of the poor among us.

But Dickens' world was a world favouring the wealthy, the influential, over the hard-pressed, ill-educated and underfed. Can we really say that the world two hundred years later is much better?

Tuesday 24 January 2012

12in12 - My Charles Dickens Birthday Project

Charles Dickens' books have been adapted so often we don't need to read them any more. Discuss.

Next month, February 2012, is a big birthday for Charles Dickens. How big? Two hundred. Two centuries since the birth of Charles Dickens. He won't be around for it, of course; he's been dead for most of those two hundred years. So we'll have celebrate the day without him (again). It's February 7th, since you ask.



Dickens has spent nearly two hundred years as one of Britain's foremost writers, Well, one of the English-speaking world's foremost writers, certainly of those last two hundred years. That's quite an achievement, and he's left a wide-ranging legacy, second only really to Shakespeare in the English language. What makes it more impressive is that Dickens wrote in so many genres, not just the novels he's famous for: short stories, travel writing, journalism, plays, poetry and general non-fiction.

His work has been adapted and reworked over and over again, working its way into the collective consciousness of the English-speaking world, again rather like Shakespeare. Dickens' Christmas stories have come to define the Victorian Christmas for those of us too young to remember the reality, made the festive season the popular holiday it now is, and still strongly influences our modern perception of Christmas. Adaptations of A Christmas Carol abound toward the end of every year, and Scrooge has come to be a widely-recognised term for someone like Dickens' infamous character.

Even before the BBC started rummaging through the Dickensian back catalogue for their current season of work devoted to Charles (or Boz, as he sometimes preferred), he was frequently the subject of adaptations. Not only have Dickens' books been adapted, but he himself often appears for public readings (as the man himself did while still alive) – the most famous perhaps being Simon Callow's portrayal alongside Christopher Eccleston in the new Doctor Who.





In fact, Dickens seems to have been adapted so often that it seems we don't really need to read his books any more. I've certainly seen A Christmas Carol on stage enough times that I know the story and characters as well as if I'd read it. And that's the curse of the writer of 'classics', of members of the canon of 'great' writers; people don't actually read their books any more. As Mark Twain quoted a Professor Winchester: a classic is something everybody wants to have read, but nobody wants to read. Mind you, I'm always wary of Mark Twain quotes; they're prone to being greatly exaggerated.

I thought I'd celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of Dickens' birth by actually reading some of these books that made his name and legacy. My birthday present to him will be to read twelve of Dickens' books in a year (I'm aiming for one in each month, of course). That's roughly eleven more Dickens books than I've managed to read in my life to date (1988-2011). For someone with an English Literature degree, I consider that a pretty poor effort.



To kick off my Dickensian effort (see what I mean? Dickens is sufficiently well-established that we have an adjective for him and his work which immediately conjours up a certain type of character and location, usually something Victorian and in London), I'll be starting with a Christmas short story: The Chimes.

So, welcome to my Dickensian sort-of extravaganza (can an extravaganza take place over twelve months? is that over doing it?). I call it 12in12, and I hope you stick around until the (bitter?) end.

So far I've covered:
January - The Chimes
February - Hard Times: For These Hard Times
March - Bleak House
April - The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
May - American Notes for General Circulation(coming soon...)

Thanks to Will Clayton for the birthday cake image.
The other images depict Dickens at a reading of his own, and Fringe Festival stalwart Pip Utton playing Dickens.
Then we've got the cover of the Complete Dickens Kindle edition, 99p from Amazon.