The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year out and a New Year In
1844
The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year out and a New Year In
1844
The year is dying. The bells are ringing. And an old man named Toby Veck stands in the cold, watching the world pass him by. Dickens follows his A Christmas Carol with something even more desperate, more bitter, more fiercely beating with hope: a New Year's tale of a ticket-porter so worn down by poverty that he's forgotten what mercy looks like. Toby waits outside a church as the old year tolls its final hours, hungry, cold, embittered, watching the rich hurry past while he is invisible. He has a daughter, Meg, who loves him. He has almost lost the ability to believe that matters. Then the bells speak. Goblins climb the tower and show Toby visions of the poor, the outcast, the women and children crushed beneath society's indifferent wheel. They force him to see what he refuses to see. They show him Meg's future, and it is terrible. But the bells ring on, and love endures, and Dickens writes with raw fury about the England's poor while insisting, fiercely, that they deserve better. This is ghost story as social indictment, as prayer, as refuse-to-give-up.
