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On the last day of the year, Toby 'Trotty' Veck, a poor, kind old ticket-porter who carries messages in the London streets, hears gentlemen and politicians…
On the last day of the year, Toby 'Trotty' Veck, a poor, kind old ticket-porter who carries messages in the London streets, hears gentlemen and politicians declare that the poor have no right to exist and that his daughter Meg should not marry. Disheartened, he climbs the church tower, where the goblins of the bells show him a terrible vision of the future that awaits his daughter and her friends if he loses faith, before the New Year's chimes ring out.
Context and significance
Charles Dickens wrote this second Christmas book in Genoa in 1844, the year after A Christmas Carol, as an angry attack on the economists and magistrates who blamed the poor for their own poverty. See his life.
About the author
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) worked in a boot-blacking factory as a boy while his father was in a debtors' prison, and poverty and wronged childhood run through his novels, from Oliver Twist to the largely autobiographical David Copperfield.