The Chimes

Toby "Trotty" Veck runs errands for whoever will pay him, waits in the cold beneath a church tower, and has started to believe what the newspapers and the gentlemen tell him: that people like him are born bad, and that poverty is a fault rather than a condition.

On New Year's Eve the bells call him up into the tower, and what they show him is the rest of the story. His daughter Meg and her fiancé Richard, ground down year by year. Will Fern, punished for being poor in the wrong parish. Every life around him following the logic Trotty has just accepted about himself.

He wakes on New Year's morning with the question still open, and a chance to answer it differently.

The second of Charles Dickens's five Christmas books, published in 1844, a year after A Christmas Carol, and written with considerably more anger than that one.