The Chimes: A Goblin Story by Charles Dickens

Author:Charles Dickens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: One New Year's Eve, Trotty, a ticket-porter or casual messenger, is filled with gloom at the reports of crime and immorality in the newspapers, and wonders whether the working classes are simply wicked by nature. His daughter Meg and her long-time fiancé Richard arrive and announce their decision to marry next day.Charles Dickens, one of the best known and most read of English writers of Victorian period. He was born into a large comfortable middle class family of Navy clerk in Portsmouth., His father John Dickens later found work in Chatham and Charles, the second of seven children went to the local school there. After moving to Camden Town in London, John Dickens was arrested and sent to debtor's prison and young Charles aged twelve was forced to work at a factory for six shillings a week. He returned to school later after his father's release from prison and became interested in the subject of social reform. He started making contributions to radical newspapers of the time. In 1833 Charles's first short stories were published in the Monthly Magazine under his pen name Boz, followed by more contributions to Morning Chronicle and the London Evening Chronicle., These stories had become very popular and were later published as a book entitled Sketches by Boz., After publication of Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby Dickens had become the most popular writer in Britain and continued to write until his death in 1870. Dickens' most famous works inlude: Great Expectations (ISBN: 9781907832536), A Tales of Two Cities (ISBN: 9781909175914), Oliver Twist (ISBN: 9781909676015), Our Mutual Friend (ISBN: 9781909438491 ).
Publisher: Sovereign
Published: 2013-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER III—Third Quarter

Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead. Monsters uncouth and wild, arise in premature, imperfect resurrection; the several parts and shapes of different things are joined and mixed by chance; and when, and how, and by what wonderful degrees, each separates from each, and every sense and object of the mind resumes its usual form and lives again, no man—though every man is every day the casket of this type of the Great Mystery—can tell.

So, when and how the darkness of the night-black steeple changed to shining light; when and how the solitary tower was peopled with a myriad figures; when and how the whispered ‘Haunt and hunt him,’ breathing monotonously through his sleep or swoon, became a voice exclaiming in the waking ears of Trotty, ‘Break his slumbers;’ when and how he ceased to have a sluggish and confused idea that such things were, companioning a host of others that were not; there are no dates or means to tell. But, awake and standing on his feet upon the boards where he had lately lain, he saw this Goblin Sight.

He saw the tower, whither his charmed footsteps had brought him, swarming with dwarf phantoms, spirits, elfin creatures of the Bells. He saw them leaping, flying, dropping, pouring from the Bells without a pause. He saw them, round him on the ground; above him, in the air; clambering from him, by the ropes below; looking down upon him, from the massive iron-girded beams; peeping in upon him, through the chinks and loopholes in the walls; spreading away and away from him in enlarging circles, as the water ripples give way to a huge stone that suddenly comes plashing in among them. He saw them, of all aspects and all shapes. He saw them ugly, handsome, crippled, exquisitely formed. He saw them young, he saw them old, he saw them kind, he saw them cruel, he saw them merry, he saw them grim; he saw them dance, and heard them sing; he saw them tear their hair, and heard them howl. He saw the air thick with them. He saw them come and go, incessantly. He saw them riding downward, soaring upward, sailing off afar, perching near at hand, all restless and all violently active. Stone, and brick, and slate, and tile, became transparent to him as to them. He saw them in the houses, busy at the sleepers’ beds. He saw them soothing people in their dreams; he saw them beating them with knotted whips; he saw them yelling in their ears; he saw them playing softest music on their pillows; he saw them cheering some with the songs of birds and the perfume of flowers; he saw them flashing awful faces on the troubled rest of others, from enchanted mirrors which they carried in their hands.

He saw these creatures, not only among sleeping men but waking also, active in pursuits irreconcilable with one another, and possessing or assuming natures the most opposite.

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