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INTRODUCTION. |
xvii |
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For the Chimes was emphatically a story "with a purpose." In previous books Charles Dickens had already attacked the abuses, the cant, the hypocrisies, and the cruelties of our social systems, and was to do so many times in the future, but always—except, perhaps, in the case of Hard Times—incidentally as it were, and rather dealing with them as side issues than as being absolutely necessary to the working out of the story. But the social problems which are dealt with in the Chimes; the anger which the carrying out to their logical extremes of the cold-blooded doctrines of the most heartless form of political economy by the Bowleys and Filers and Cutes l aroused in their creator ; the strenuous endeavour to strike a swashing blow for the inarticulate, toiling, suffering, almost hopeless masses ; all these themselves make up the story in this case and dominate the whole book.
"In my mind's eye, Horatio," Charles Dickens wrote, " I like more and more my notion of making in this little book a great blow for the poor. Something powerful, I think I can do, but I want to be tender too, and cheerful ; as like the Carol in that respect as may be, and as unlike it as such a thing can be." And again : " I am in regular ferocious excitement with the Chimes . . . and blaze away, wrathful and red-hot. ... I am fierce to finish it in a spirit bearing some affinity to those of truth and mercy, and to shame the cruel and the canting." To Douglas Jerrold he wrote from Cremona, under date the 16th of October (which is probably a mistake for November) 1844 : "I have tried to strike a blow upon that part of the brass countenance of wicked Cant, where such a compliment is sorely needed at this time, and I trust that the result of my training is at least the exhibition of a strong desire to make it a staggerer. If you should think at the end of the four rounds (there are no more) that the said Cant, in the language of BelVs Life, ' comes up piping,' I shall be very much the better for it." A letter to Macready of the 28th of November conveyed the same
1 Alderman Cute was a portrait of Sir Peter Laurie, a well-known Alderman of the City of London, who had been making himself very conspicuous at about that time by his expressed determination to "put down' all manner of things, suicide included ; and there would not have been much difficulty in finding prototypes of Sir Joseph Rowley and Mr. Filer. |
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