New Year's Eve brings no easy promise of renewal to Trotty, the elderly messenger at the center of Charles Dickens's The Chimes Illustrated. Newspaper accounts of crime have persuaded him that poor people may be wicked by nature. When his daughter Meg and her fiancé Richard announce plans to marry, Alderman Cute and his companions answer their hope with lectures that make poverty sound like a moral offense.
Trotty soon meets Will Fern, a country laborer threatened with arrest for vagrancy, and Will's orphaned niece Lilian. He shelters Will Fern and Lilian despite his own scant food and unpaid debts. That act of fellowship conflicts with the contempt voiced by powerful men, but Trotty has not yet recovered his faith in ordinary human dignity.
Called into a church at night, he climbs the bell tower and encounters the spirits of the chimes. They make him watch a possible future in which pressure, law, and deprivation damage Meg, Richard, Will, and Lilian. Dickens joins a supernatural vision to a sharp argument about class: despair is not proof of innate corruption when institutions help produce it. The novella asks whether Trotty can reject the judgments he has absorbed before hopelessness becomes self-fulfilling.
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