Bells in the loft of the parish church of St Peter and St Paul in Bardwell, Suffolk. The Chimes, a New Year’s tale published a year after A Christmas Carol, was an attack on the pseudo-scientific dogma that an industrialised economy was unsustainable without close State regulation and population control. Advocates of the dogma held various different positions but what united them was the belief that the State must regulate every aspect of life (including what we eat, how we live and whether we are born) in what they claimed were the wider interests of society. Dickens, by contrast, believed strongly in individual choice, the right to life and the promise of ever-rising living standards for all through industrial innovation.
Part 1 of 2
“THE voice of Time,” said the Phantom, “cries to man, Advance! Time is for his advancement and improvement;* for his greater worth, his greater happiness, his better life; his progress onward to that goal within its knowledge and its view, and set there, in the period when Time and he began. Ages of darkness, wickedness, and violence, have come and gone — millions uncountable, have suffered, lived, and died — to point the way before him. Who seeks to turn him back, or stay him on his course, arrests a mighty engine which will strike the meddler dead; and be the fiercer and the wilder, ever, for its momentary check!”*
“I never did so to my knowledge, sir,” said Trotty. “It was quite by accident if I did. I wouldn’t go to do it, I’m sure.”
“Who puts into the mouth of Time, or of its servants,” said the Goblin of the Bell, “a cry of lamentation for days which have had their trial and their failure, and have left deep traces of it which the blind may see — a cry that only serves the present time, by showing men how much it needs their help when any ears can listen to regrets for such a past — who does this, does a wrong. And you have done that wrong to us, the Chimes.”
* The bells begin with Dickens’s own views. As his regular magazine Household Words so often proclaimed, free markets, deregulation, mass production, railways and an industrial revolution powered by coal and steam were now raising living standards and driving social mobility as never before. He did not want this thrown away simply because a few theorists — his chief targets are Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarians promising ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’, the nostalgic Young England group led by Benjamin Disraeli, and the disciples of overpopulation alarmist Thomas Malthus — brandished questionable statistics casting doubt on the sustainability of Victorian industrial progress.
* Dickens here takes issue with the Young England group led by Benjamin Disraeli, who would serve as Prime Minister in 1868 and 1874-80. The group’s members, which included landowners, intellectuals and critics of industrialisation, urged the country to turn back the clock to a frankly imaginary past of kindly squires, beaming parsons and apple-cheeked peasantry, while promising that the governing elite, once restored to their proper role, would take their social responsibilities more seriously in future. See Roses and Poor-Rates, in which Dickens’s contemporary Lord Macaulay (1800-1859) castigated poet Robert Southey (1774-1843) for taking that same view.
Précis
In ‘The Chimes’, Charles Dickens imagined what the church bells might say to Trotty Veck, racked with guilt over Victorian England’s supposedly consumerist society. The bells roundly scold him for wanting — and for thinking they might want — to turn back the clock to days of ignorance and oppression, when Man’s earthly business is seek continual improvement through industry and innovation. (62 / 60 words)
Part Two
St Helen and St Cross in Sheriff Hutton, North Yorkshire. Among those lecturing Trotty on his social responsibilities, the Church was represented (to the bells’ disgust) by a gentleman who wanted to call a halt to Victorian industrialisation and get back to a society where the Great and the Good ran everything, promising a better social conscience this time. Alderman Cute was a ‘workers not shirkers’ politician who assumed the worst about people, and wanted the courts and the welfare state to whip the unemployed into productive members of society. Mr Filer, an apostle of sustainability, scolded Trotty for eating ecologically wasteful tripe, and told Meg not to marry because people of her class just had babies and did not contribute to the economy.
TROTTY’S first excess of fear was gone. But he had felt tenderly and gratefully toward the Bells, as you have seen; and when he heard himself arraigned as one who had offended them so weightily, his heart was touched with penitence and grief.
“If you knew,” said Trotty, clasping his hands earnestly — “or perhaps you do know — if you know how often you have kept me company; how often you have cheered me up when I’ve been low; how you were quite the plaything of my little daughter Meg (almost the only one she ever had) when first her mother died, and she and me were left alone; you won’t bear malice for a hasty word!”
“Who hears in us, the Chimes, one note bespeaking disregard, or stern regard, of any hope, or joy, or pain, or sorrow, of the many-sorrowed throng;* who hears us make response to any creed that gauges human passions and affections, as it gauges the amount of miserable food on which humanity may pine and wither; does us wrong.* That wrong you have done us!” said the Bell.
“I have!” said Trotty. “Oh, forgive me!”
* A dig at Sir Peter Laurie, Mayor of London in 1832, for whom Alderman Cute was a thin disguise. Laurie used to call sternly for various social ills to be ‘put down’ with the force of law. So does Alderman Cute, who lists among them distressed (i.e. impoverished) wives, boys without shoes or stockings, wandering (i.e. husbandless) mothers, sick persons and young children, and suicides. “So don’t try it on. That’s the phrase, isn't it!” Sir Peter is an easy figure to mock but there are those in our own time who would turn away or recommend ‘putting down’ (in more senses that one) those thought likely to be a burden on the public purse through sickness, alienation or lack of productivity. Dickens’s point is that even the most wretched lives benefit society in ways that morbid statisticians cannot see.
* That is, Government should not ration happiness and sympathy in the same cold and calculating way it rations charity — “the lawful charity” as Dickens put it; “not that once preached upon a Mount”. Cute’s sidekick Mr Filer, a Utilitarian committed to achieving collective happiness at the expense of the individual if necessary, produced Government figures to show Trotty that his favourite dish, tripe, was not suited to a sustainable economy and was therefore causing food shortages. As for his daughter Meg, she should work and not marry and start a family: people of her unproductive class have no right or business either to be married or even to be born. “And that we know they haven’t. We reduced that to a mathematical certainty long ago!” The bells reply that they will never chime in support of a religion or politics so arrogant and presumptuous. See also Adam Smith on Fit and Proper Persons.
Précis
Trotty protests that he meant no harm, but the bells are not done with him. They are hurt that he thought for even one moment that they would chime in support of a politics that tries to regulate happiness as cynically as it dispenses charity. The bells demand an apology, and Trotty eagerly gives it. (55 / 60 words)
