摘要
Dickensian prose is known for its picturesque and haunting style in setting depiction unveiling the oneiric and uncanny quality of the city of London. One of the most underrated Christmas Books, The Chimes （1844）, proves to be an excellent example of a new fairy tale portraying the pervasion of two spheres： the realm of fantasy and the truth. The narrator exposes the correlation between the disturbing vision of the animated metropolis and the protagonist＇s hallucinatory fancy caused by his inner unrest and agitation, questioning the boundary between the dream and reality and the limits of perception. Despite the technical restraints of the seasonal miniature＇s construction, Dickens succeeded in capturing the hero＇s psychology and the spirit of the city through the medium of anthropomorphising the inanimate, employing the supernatural, and implementing powerful, semantically loaded images of London corresponding well with the protagonist＇s inner dilemmas. The narrative strategy balancing on the edge of dream and reality employed in the carol does not only expose the creative skills of the novelist, but also the potential of The Chimes as an embryonic novel
