TROTTY’S first excess of fear was gone. But he had felt tenderly and gratefully toward the Bells, as you have seen; and when he heard himself arraigned as one who had offended them so weightily, his heart was touched with penitence and grief.
“If you knew,” said Trotty, clasping his hands earnestly — “or perhaps you do know — if you know how often you have kept me company; how often you have cheered me up when I’ve been low; how you were quite the plaything of my little daughter Meg (almost the only one she ever had) when first her mother died, and she and me were left alone; you won’t bear malice for a hasty word!”
“Who hears in us, the Chimes, one note bespeaking disregard, or stern regard, of any hope, or joy, or pain, or sorrow, of the many-sorrowed throng;* who hears us make response to any creed that gauges human passions and affections, as it gauges the amount of miserable food on which humanity may pine and wither; does us wrong.* That wrong you have done us!” said the Bell.
“I have!” said Trotty. “Oh, forgive me!”
* A dig at Sir Peter Laurie, Mayor of London in 1832, for whom Alderman Cute was a thin disguise. Laurie used to call sternly for various social ills to be ‘put down’ with the force of law. So does Alderman Cute, who lists among them distressed (i.e. impoverished) wives, boys without shoes or stockings, wandering (i.e. husbandless) mothers, sick persons and young children, and suicides. “So don’t try it on. That’s the phrase, isn't it!” Sir Peter is an easy figure to mock but there are those in our own time who would turn away or recommend ‘putting down’ (in more senses that one) those thought likely to be a burden on the public purse through sickness, alienation or lack of productivity. Dickens’s point is that even the most wretched lives benefit society in ways that morbid statisticians cannot see.
* That is, Government should not ration happiness and sympathy in the same cold and calculating way it rations charity — “the lawful charity” as Dickens put it; “not that once preached upon a Mount”. Cute’s sidekick Mr Filer, a Utilitarian committed to achieving collective happiness at the expense of the individual if necessary, produced Government figures to show Trotty that his favourite dish, tripe, was not suited to a sustainable economy and was therefore causing food shortages. As for his daughter Meg, she should work and not marry and start a family: people of her unproductive class have no right or business either to be married or even to be born. “And that we know they haven’t. We reduced that to a mathematical certainty long ago!” The bells reply that they will never chime in support of a religion or politics so arrogant and presumptuous. See also Adam Smith on Fit and Proper Persons.