The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In by Charles Dickens

“Who turns his back upon the fallen and disfigured of his kind; abandons them as vile; and does not trace and track with pitying eyes the unfenced precipice by which they fell from good—grasping in their fall some tufts and shreds of that lost soil, and clinging to them still when bruised and dying in the gulf below; does wrong to Heaven and man, to time and to eternity. And you have done that wrong!”

This short novel, first published in 1844, was written just a year after the author’s famous and better-remembered A Christmas Carol. The events in the story take place on New Year’s eve.

The central character in the book is Toby “Trotty” Veck, a casual messenger who waits for possible jobs while standing a church doorway. Trotty begins to imagine that the church bells—the chimes—call to him.

Dickens uses the story’s characters to show the suffering of the working classes and the indifference of rich people to the lives and fate of the poor.

The book features all thirteen of the illustrations from the original publication.