186 KNOWING DICKENS
all its steeples, pouring into his ears again and again, in a tuneless, grating, discordant,
jerking, hideous vibration that made his ideas spin round and round till they lost
themselves in a whirl of vexation and giddiness, and dropped down dead”
(4.199). “He had never before so suffered, nor did he again,” Forster assures
us; in fact, two days later the experience became the impetus for The Chimes
(Forster 346). Dickens takes charge; he knows “how to work the bells. Let
them clash upon me now from all the churches and convents in Genoa,
I see nothing but the old London belfry I have set them in” (4.200). The
overwhelming, nauseating effects of sound have been safely transformed, he
thinks, into a story that will strike a mighty blow on behalf of the poor.
In fact The Chimes is deeply confusing about the effect of those apparently
virtuous Anglo-Protestant bells. They are Toby Veck’s consoling friends, and
then monitory figures that act, much like the Spirits in A Christmas Carol,
to warn and educate Toby against submitting to the despair he feels after
listening to the voices of so-called social reformers. For those with ears to
hear, however, the narrator has other messages than the Bells’ injunction to
honor the heartfelt humanity of the poor. He is interested in the way sound
both echoes and acts upon the internal terrain of individual listeners. Toby
invests the Chimes, “often heard and never seen,” with “a strange and solemn
character,” making them into awesome religious-parental beings. The narra-
tor takes pains to explain that this process goes on unconsciously: like what
digestive processes “did of their own cunning, and by a great many opera-
tions of which he was entirely ignorant,” so “his mental faculties, without
his privity or concurrence, set all these wheels and springs in motion... when
they worked to bring about his liking for the Bells” (CB 85). Linking Toby’s
personification of the Bells with the operations of the unconscious, Dickens
comes clean about his association of sound with the unknowable, less acces-
sible parts of the self.
After Toby’s sense of worthiness is destroyed by the talk of the social re-
formers, the Bells change their tune. Now they echo the phrases that grate
in the old man’s head: “Born bad. No Business here!... Put ’em down! Facts
and Figures!” (CB 100). The language of disorientation appears; the sound
makes the air spin, the brain of Toby reel. Good memories and associations
turn suddenly bad. Although Dickens reclaims the Bells as stern educational
figures that insist on a return to faith and optimism, arriving at the moral of
his fable requires elaborate and clumsy machinery very different from the
spontaneous visions of A Christmas Carol. The Bells do not survive their trans-
formation from psychic projections to external social monitors. As Dickens
wrote to Forster in his preview of the story, the spirits of the Bells bear
“all sorts of missions and commissions and reminders and reproaches, and