The Chimes Story

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In a faraway country where few people have ever traveled, there was once a wonderful church. It stood on a high hill in a great city. Every Sunday and on holidays like Christmas, thousands of people climbed the hill to the church. The main room of the church was so long that if you stood at one end, you almost could not see the other end. In the farthest corner was an organ.

This organ could play music very loud. Sometimes when the organ is played, people from miles around would close their windows and prepare for a thunderstorm. No such church as this was ever seen before. It was especially wonderful when it was lighted with burning candles for a holiday and filled with young and old people. But the most wonderful and most unusual thing about the huge church was the sound of its bells.

Connected to the church was a huge stone tower. Everyone who built the church had been dead for hundreds of years. No one could remember how high the tower reached. It rose so far into the sky that no one could see the top, except when the weather was very clear. Even then a person could not be sure that the top was in sight. All the people knew that at the top of the tower was a group of bells, Christmas bells.

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They had hung there ever since the church had been built. Their sound was very special. Some thought their sound was so special, because a great musician had made them and put them in place; others said it was because of their great height. They said the air was so clear and pure high up where the bells rang.

Everyone who had heard the bells said their sound was the sweetest in the world.

Some said they sounded like the singing of God's angles; others said they sounded like wind singing through the trees. There was an old man living not far from the church who said that his mother had told him of hearing the bells when she was a little girl.

But he was the only one who knew even that much. The bells were Christmas bells. They were not meant to be played by the organist, nor were they meant to be heard on common days. It was the custom on the night before Christmas, Christmas Eve, for all the people to bring their gifts to the Baby Jesus to the church.

When the greatest and best gift was given, the music of the Christmas bells would be heard. It came from far up in the tower. Some said the wind rang the bells, others said God's angels set the bells moving. But for many long years, the bells did not ring.

Some said that people were less careful of their gifts for the Baby Jesus, others said that no gift was great enough to earn the music of the bells. Every Christmas Eve, rich people tried to give better gifts than anyone else, yet the rich people did not give anything they wanted for themselves. Each year there were many gifts, each year the religious service was good, but the bells in the stone tower did not ring.

They knew very little about the Christmas bells, but they had heard about the religious service in the church on Christmas Eve. We cannot wholly comprehend their world, except in relation to ours, the social stratum of Alderman Cute, Mr. Filer, and the Young England gentleman. Walsh contends that we never really enter Trotty's thoughts, even though we sympathize with him:.

Why The Chimes Rang

The alienated individual in this story is of a different social class from that of the author and the readers. He is seen from the outside; his thoughts, especially his exaggerated class-consciousness — submissive to the general opinion that the poor must be born bad — are mostly bestowed upon him for the purposes of satire. Chickenstalker, the groceress, and his future son-in-law, Richard, are slightly more than proletarian; like Joe Gargery in Great Expectations , they are on the lower edge of the lower middle class, unlike the revolutionary labourer Will Fern, a Hodge from Dorset. And yet Dickens so extends his sympathy to all of them, so situates the narrative, that we identify with them and against the story's more affluent members of the middle class.

The spontaneous benevolence of Toby Veck and Mrs.

Chickenstalker finds no parallel among the middle or upper classes. As far as the reader knows, Sir Joseph Bowley and Alderman Cute continue their complacent and illusionary careers as Friends of the People. For them, there are not the miraculous revelations and sudden conversions to humanitarianism which Scrooge and Tackleton [the exploitative toy-manufacturer in The Cricket on the Hearth , ] undergo. Alderman Cute's cant about "Putting Down" working-class suicide and infanticide, Mr. Filer's quibbling about the wanton expense of tripe a dish few if any North Americans today have tasted and his advising Richard on economic grounds not to marry young today all fall wide of Dickens's mark.

Filer is a direct allusion to the Utilitarian Movement and the political economy of the Reverend Thomas Malthus , whose perspective in Essay on the Principle of Population Filer espouses and whose statistical methodology and Social Darwinism he has adopted. Cute's reiterating his determination to "Put Down" working class-suicide, street-walking, and other social ills reflects similar utterances by Middlesex magistrate Sir Peter Laurie.

The Baldwin Project: Why the Chimes Rang by Raymond Macdonald Alden

Nevertheless, these authorities, as Kurata points out, are neither melodramatic villains nor "deliberate evildoers. All of them are unimaginative and stupid, but each firmly believes that his actions are dictated by the best of intentions" Dickens directs readers' sympathies by making the working-class characters three-dimensional and central to the narrative whereas the middle- and upper-class characters remsin flat or undeveloped.

His characterization is perfectly consistent with his intention to use the second Christmas Book to strike a blow for the poor.

Then, too, the little "gift" book, based on the mixed-media format and intimate style of A Christmas Carol , reflects Dickens's intention to recoup his financial losses after the disastrous piracy suit with Peter Parley's Illustrated Library over that publisher's violation of Dickens's copyright. On 8 May , Dickens officially broke with his former publishers Chapman and Hall over the less-than-stellar Carol profits, and signed with the printing firm of Bradbury and Evans.

Dickens made Italy the northern state of Piedmont as his family's destination in July because he admired Joey Grimaldi's pantomime and Conte di Camillo Benso Cavour's Liberalism, choosing, as Paul Schlicke notes, to settle in Genoa, "the birthplace of Mazzini" , founder in exile of the "Young Italy" movement in and "the most progressive and nationalistic region of a country whose most pressing concern was liberation from tyranny" The 18th Century Escape From Alcatraz! Foregoing marriage to raise her orphaned siblings, Sasha's resolve is tested by the return from abroad of dashing Matei, her childhood sweetheart.

A Tale of Two Cities. Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video. Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. This story is an interesting companion piece to Dickens Christmas Carol. The Spirit of the Chimes take another man on a,story of love and discovery.

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One person found this helpful 2 people found this helpful. Charles Dickens is undoubtedly one of the best authors of all time, and his characteristic wit is present in this, his second "Christmas" story. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite live up to its predecessor, "A Christmas Carol". Even so, it was a decent read, high drama and all. See all 3 reviews. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers.

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