STREETS 185Church, and the Bells are making such an intolerable uproar that I can’t hear
myself think” (7.397; 7.549). Highly melodramatic Bells tug at the guilty
memory of the criminal Rudge, who returns to haunt the neighborhood
twenty-two years after his double murder and his own faked death at the
Warren. His first victim, Reuben Haredale, had been ringing an alarm bell
when he was cut down by Rudge; the murderer is undone when he hears the
same bell chiming as the Gordon rioters set fire to the Warren: “It was the
Bell. If the ghastliest shape the human mind had ever pictured in its wild-
est dreams had risen up before him, he could not have staggered backward
from its touch, as he did from the first sound of that loud iron voice” (BR
55). More powerful than any vision, the bell’s voice penetrates Rudge’s heart
and causes him to stagger around in circles, losing sight of his plan to hide
himself among the rioters.
Bells awaken sadder memories in the third chapter of Little Dorrit, when
Arthur Clennam returns to London on a Sunday evening: “Maddening
church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear,
fast and slow, made the brick and mortar echoes hideous.... In every thor-
oughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful
bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the
dead-carts were going round.” Bells curse the streets that echo and extend
their sound until the city becomes a prison for the eye, the ear, and the lungs:
“Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets,
streets, streets.” Moving from the streets into the mind, these depressive sensa-
tions bring on an unstoppable flow of unwelcome memories. As Clennam
sits brooding on the bells, the “sound had revived a long train of miserable
Sundays, and the procession would not stop with the bells, but continued to
march on.” Bells toll for death, of course; but also for the many little deaths
of the heart and soul that are revived by waves of recurring sound. The
association of bells with painful childhood memories may also suggest a pos-
sible link between Dickens’s antipathy to bells and the warning bell that rang
before the Marshalsea gates were locked for the night, to signal the separation
of young Dickens from his family.
When Dickens was living in Genoa, he seems to have suffered a sort of
bell-trauma that he transformed into the machinery of his 1844 Christmas
book The Chimes. Forster quotes from a letter of that October in which
Dickens describes himself as staggering, undone by transplantation to foreign
soil: “Never did I stagger so upon a threshold [of a story] before.” Forster’s
language (in italics) substitutes for something he must have found unquotable
in the original letter as he describes Dickens paralyzed at his writing desk by
the chiming of all the bells in Genoa: “in one fell sound the clang and clash of