Introduction
It is New Year’s Eve, but old Toby ‘Trotty’ Veck, a hard-up widower, is not celebrating. Alderman Cute has got him so worked up about a sustainable economy, food injustice and industrialisation that Trotty despairs for future generations if things carry on as they are. Even the church bells seem to toll the death knell of Victorian England. But that night, the spirits of the bells rise up to demand an apology.
“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; Man’s earthly business is to seek continual improvement, through industry and innovation. (60 / 60 words)
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; Man’s earthly business is to seek continual improvement, through industry and innovation.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: because, just, may, ought, unless, whereas, whether, who.
Word Games
Jigsaws Based on this passage
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
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