MEMORY 67dark and tender memories, at least for the sake of maintaining the cheerful-
ness of lives more innocent than one’s own.
Chastising its hero for dwelling in old resentments, the story picks up
a thread begun in the earlier fantasy of The Chimes, which punishes its
working-class hero for allowing the ideas of upper-class social reformers to
haunt and depress his simple mind. This story has conventionally been read
as a sign that Dickens had moved away from portraits of individual villainy
to a systemic view of social evil. Indeed, the story pillories the rhetoric of
upper-class reformers, whether they are political economists or paternalists,
with consistent venom. They are all accused of erasing the humanity of the
poor, of imagining them as a threatening blight that has to be controlled or
cleaned up, and of creating despair in the minds of the very people they claim
to be helping. This, finally, was Dickens’s nullifying response to Lord Ashley
and the Factory Movement. But the story is stranger and more confused than
this account suggests. The villains are the reformers who make the poor feel
that they are “born bad” and can only get worse. Yet the wrong takes place
inside the head of the childlike old man Trotty Veck, when he allows himself
to absorb and believe what the reformers say. The chimes that represent his
obsessional thoughts turn from voices of cheer into echoes of the reformers’
contempt. They generate a dream vision of the future in which his family
and friends come to ruin in just the ways the upper classes predict. Then the
Bells themselves become chastising agents that accuse him of participating
in the reformers’ wrong through his unconscious internalization of their
attitudes.
The story makes the victim take the responsibility for the perpetrators’
crimes against human nature. Its message seems to be that it’s the job of the
poor not to believe the way they are portrayed, but to manufacture hope
and optimism out of themselves. Read autobiographically, the fable raises a
number of questions. Did Dickens blame himself, as the story rebukes Trotty,
for allowing the recurrent nightmare of his early poverty and shame to take
over his thoughts like bells that clanged and could not be stopped? Did
he recognize in Trotty’s alternation between sentimental cheer and anxious
despair the poles of his own psychology? Or, did he sense his collusion with
the reformers in his own fearsome images of savage, uncivilizable children?
The guilt of the fathers pervades and infects the world of The Chimes, but
it runs parallel to the guilt of the oppressed psyche that cannot get on with
ordinary “trotting” about its business. All three of the Christmas stories
seem split between the desire to tell their memories of woe and stern rebukes
to the anxieties and depressions that are produced by the woes themselves.
The interior conflict that Dickens pursued through the writing of these