The Chimes

A ticket porter waiting outside a church on New Year's Eve is told by everyone who matters-the alderman, the economist, the gentleman with the statistics-that the poor are a problem and he is part of it. Then the bells wake him. Dickens wrote it in Italy in a fury, weeping over the manuscript by his own account, and read it aloud to friends in London before publishing. It is the angriest of the Christmas books. Forty-six plates of painting from 1840 to 1891, including John Atkinson Grimshaw and William Powell Frith, set beside ten restored and coloured illustrations.