I had as noted last week known all about A Christmas Carol before I reread it, or perhaps read it, last year, but the other two Christmas Stories in the collection I found at Roshanara seemed entirely new. The titles however were familiar, The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth, though I had no idea what they meant.
The first of these, which has been published the year after A Christmas Carol, revolves around the ringing of bells at Christmas, though their contribution to the story is only symbolic. Its protagonist is Toby Veck, a little old man who lives through daily jobs, which scarcely help him to support his daughter. She is engaged to a young man, who is keen when the story opens to marry her, though they had put this off until they felt more secure financially.
As a counterpoint to these are an Alderman and a Member of Parliament who are sanctimonious and selfish, and are about between them to jail as a vagrant a man from the latter’s area. Toby takes him to his house to stop him being taken up and feeds him, and there is a sentimental scene when we are also introduced to a little girl whom Toby’s daughter had befriended.
But then instead of going to sleep Toby goes to the church where the bells are ringing, and climbs up the tower and is surrounded by goblins who give him a glimpse of a horrendous future. Yet this turns out to be only a dream, and the story ends very happily, with his daughter happily married, and also the stranger, to the lady who keeps the shop, who had in the dream been married to the ghastly porter of the ghastly MP.
It is a strange story, and one is not quite sure what the moral is, except with regard to the forceful if caricatured critique of those who patronize the poor. Very different is The Cricket on the Hearth, which has a very clear plotline, involving the young wife of an older man, John Peerybingle. He brings home one evening a mysterious man whom the villain of the story shows flirting with a young wife. The villain sells toys made by an old man he ill treats, and is about to marry a young lady himself.
But it turns out that the stranger is the son of the old man, come back with his fortune made to marry the young lady. She marries him instead of the curmudgeon, but he too is reprieved, though not through any supernatural invention, and contributes to the new marriage feast. And of course Peerybingle is exalted when he realizes his wife is ever faithful, something he has been assured of by the cricket who provides the magical touch to the story.
The story has delightful little touches, such as the myth the old man has created about his employer to his blind daughter, which had led her to love him herself; the mother of the young lady who talked incessantly about the Indigo Trade, the failure of which had made her poor, which had led to her encouragement of the match with a rich old man; and the whimsy of the Peerybingle dog and their nursemaid who was prone to perform ‘cowlike gambols’ round the baby in her charge.
The story is not a great one, but its range suggests the genius that was to characterize Dickens’ work, the Christmas stories coming between his early picaresque novels and the great books which commenced with Dombey and Son in 1848.
There was another book at Roshanara which contained only The Cricket on the Hearth, with the most beautiful illustrations, colour as well as black and white, seven of which appear here, the last two of the old man and his blind daughter.