Ringing out the old, reading in the new year | thearticle

In among the many essays, stories and squibs that make up Charles Dickens’ first published book _Sketches by Boz_, there is a colourful piece entitled “The New Year” which vividly describes

an “extensive” party held on the last night of 1835. Hackney-coaches and carriages deliver well-dressed guests to a house with green blinds. There they indulge in small talk with their host

on a range of topics (“the weather, and the theatres, and the old year, and the last new murder”) before going on to dine, drink, dance quadrilles and “see the old fellow out, and the new

one in, with gaiety and glee.” This event mattered to Dickens. “Next to Christmas-day,” he writes, “the most pleasant annual epoch in existence is the advent of the New Year.”  I prefer

Dickens when he is equivocal (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”). And as pleasant annual epochs go, I prefer a birthday to New Year’s Eve. Birthdays constitute genuine

cause for celebration. Birthday parties are enjoyable because they are personal and purposeful. New Year’s Eve is a more comprehensive occasion and as such less exclusive. Its revelries are

all too often generic, programmatic, and anticlimactic. We have all been there: the countdown begins, the pressure mounts to have a great time, and no amount of goodwill and jollity,

manufactured or otherwise, can smother the disappointment.  This year I didn’t need to find an excuse to avoid a New Year’s Eve shindig. Covid put paid to any best laid plans or last-minute

hopes for a festive gathering. This should be viewed as a tragedy by everyone other than the most hardened misanthrope or afflicted agoraphobe. Had there been no bans and restrictions,

lockdowns and clampdowns, New Year’s naysayers like myself would have gladly shrugged off our doubts and come out in force to make merry with the less cynical masses. We could have sharpened

our blunted social skills. We might have re-appreciated fellowship, togetherness, and the warmth of a good hug. We would have collectively rejoiced – not so much in welcoming in the new

year as bidding good riddance to the old one. New Year celebrations being either stripped back or cancelled, I wondered if instead it was possible to experience vicarious pleasure through

depictions in literature. After all, Christmas features prominently in poetry, drama and prose, and, as Dickens tells us, New Year is the next best thing.  It clearly isn’t for other

writers. New Year barely appears in fiction. When it does it serves as a contrivance, a means for a brief scene involving a party, such as the one thrown by the Vincys in _Middlemarch_.

Perhaps novelists steer clear because it comes fraught with overly obvious connotations: clean slates, new starts, second chances; or the flip-side, finality, closure, defeat. We get the

former in the comic resolutions of both Bridget Jones and Adrian Mole. We witness the latter in the opening pages of novels by Nick Hornby and Zadie Smith: in _A Long Way Down_ the book’s

four protagonists prepare to end it all by jumping from a tower block on New Year’s Eve, while in _White Teeth_ Archie Jones attempts to gas himself to death in the early hours of New Year’s

Day. We find marginally richer pickings in verse where, for the most part, New Year is a time of reflection rather than celebration. In _The Old Year_ John Clare muses on how each new year

renders the previous one null and void: “He left no footstep, mark or place / In either shade or sun: / The last year he’d a neighbour’s face, / In this he’s known by none.” _In Old and New

Year Ditties_, Christina Rossetti mourns what she has lost on “this last vigil of the year”, contemplates what lies ahead (“New Year coming on apace / What have you to give me? / Bring you

scathe, or bring you grace”) and then listens to what God has in store.   God reappears in Thomas Hardy’s _New Year Eve_ to announce that He has finished another year, “In grey, green,

white, and brown” and “let the last sun down.” The inquisitive speaker of the poem grills his Creator about the point of these endeavours, but finds that God cannot stick around: “He sank to

raptness as of yore, / And opening New Year’s Day / Wove it by rote as theretofore, / And went on working evermore / In his unweeting way.” Tennyson’s rousing “Ring out the old, ring in the

new” refrain from _In Memoriam_ ends on a religious note: “Ring in the valiant man and free, / The larger heart, the kindlier hand; / Ring out the darkness of the land, / Ring in the Christ

that is to be.” The hint of hope and possibility of salvation in the New Year and beyond are vital rays of light in this otherwise death-infused elegy.  Elsewhere we come across poems

which, despite their titles, make no mention of New Year. Sylvia Plath’s _New Year on Dartmoor_ revolves around a mother introducing her newborn child to a snowy landscape. “This is

newness,” she says, but instead of a cold yet cosy winter wonderland we have a chilly, disorientating world full of “tawdry obstacles” and treacherous surfaces: “Only you / Don’t know what

to make of the sudden slipperiness, / The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.” D.H. Lawrence’s _New Year’s Eve_ is a short, impressionistic sketch of a night of passion which could play

out anytime and anywhere. The scant details are mere dabs and flurries: two lovers bask in a “fireglow”; they take stock of “The great black night scooped out”. Then they focus on each

other. “Take off your things,” orders the man, sounding at once like Mellors to Lady Chatterley. In the firelight he admires her body – while we baulk at the rogue adjective: “Your

shoulders, your bruised throat! / Your breasts, your nakedness!” For a more tangible and more sustained account of New Year we must turn back to Dickens. He published another short piece

about it in 1859. _New Year’s Day_ comprises a sequence of snapshots of New Years spent in Genoa, Paris and various other locations. Some are remembrances of times past, others are products

of his fertile imagination. However, that imagination was fully deployed fifteen years earlier for a novella about New Year. Dickens wrote _The Chimes_, the second of his five Christmas

Books, during a year-long stay in Italy. Every day he would get up early and “blaze away, wrathful and red-hot”, desperate to have it ready in time for the festive season. He succeeded: it

was published in December 1844, one year on from _A Christmas Carol_. He also succeeded in his aim of creating “a great uproar” for fighting the corner of London’s poor and downtrodden and

shaming “the cruel and the canting.” The story opens on New Year’s Eve. “The New Year,” Dickens writes, “like an Infant Heir to the whole world, was waited for, with welcomes, presents, and

rejoicings.” But for Trotty, an elderly “ticket-porter”, or messenger, there is little to celebrate or look forward to. He has started to believe the prevailing view in the papers and

Parliament that the working classes are the scourge on society, the source of all its woes. We are “born bad”, he says; we have no business on the face of the earth and are “intruding”; and

we have “no right to a New Year.” Encounters with several pompous, self-regarding bigwigs reinforce his misgivings. Alderman Cute doubles his efforts to “Put Down” bad behaviour and bad

people by confiscating Trotty’s food and dissuading his daughter, Meg, from marrying and reproducing. Sir Joseph Bowley MP, the self-styled “Poor Man’s Friend and Father”, rebukes Trotty for

not getting his affairs in order and repaying his small debts before the end of the year – easier said than done when you are a man of means and not, as Trotty considers himself,

“behind-hand with the world.”  From here, Dickens flits between light and shade. There is relief as Trotty gives food and shelter to a man and his orphaned niece who are worse off than

himself. And there is doom and gloom as Trotty’s despair deepens into suicidal thoughts. Then as the church bells ring in the New Year, he slips into a reverie and is assaulted by a series

of disturbing visions which have the power to alter his outlook on humanity. _The Chimes_ has much in common with _A Christmas Carol_: both unfold over two festive days; both incorporate

supernatural shenanigans (in one book ghosts, in the other goblins); and both have protagonists who change their ways and see the light. Dickens called each of his Christmas Books “a

whimsical kind of masque”, but this undersells _The Chimes_ which is a fierce topical satire about the plight, and the perception, of those who are hard up and ground down. It is poignant

without being cloyingly sentimental, and forceful without any noisy tub-thumping. This being Dickens, all ends well, especially so as New Year’s Day is “the best and happiest day”. But the

savage bites and caustic swipes that lead up to this point leave their mark. We could do worse than read _The Chimes, _before this New Year gets any older. It probably won’t fill the void of

a party – for those who like that sort of thing – but it might restore our faith a little after this washout of a Christmas and write-off of a year. For, as Trotty says to those who have

lost hope: “Don’t give way. A new heart for a New Year, always!”  A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important

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