Is it cheating to try to belatedly make up for my relative inexperience with Dickens by tearing through the Christmas books? Probably, but quiet you. Rather too similar in its approach to the preceding A Christmas Carol to make its relative obscurity beside that classic a lamentable fact, The Chimes does have the benefit of some gorgeous Dickensian sad sack character work, never better espoused than in this most glorious of lines:
"There’s nothing," said Toby, "more regular in its coming round than dinner-time, and nothing less regular in its coming round than dinner."