which is maddening.... The noise is supposed to be
particularly obnoxious to evil spirits.

But it was these same bells, which he found so maddening,
that inspired him with the title of a well-known story. He
had chosen a subject, but was at a loss for a name. As he sat
working one morning there suddenly rose up from Genoa

the clang and clash of all its steeples, pouring into
his ears, again and again, in a tuneless, grating,
discordant jerking, hideous vibration that made his
ideas spin round and round till they lost themselves
in a whirl of vexation and giddiness, and dropped
down dead.... Only two days later came a letter in
which not a syllable was written but 'We have heard
THE CHIMES at midnight, Master Shallow,' and I knew
he had discovered what he wanted.[11]

Yet, in spite of all this, Dickens shows--through his
characters--a deep interest in bells and bell-lore. Little Paul
Dombey finds a man mending the clocks at Dr. Blimber's Academy,
and asks a multitude of questions about chimes and clocks;
as, whether people watched up in the lonely church steeples
by night to make them strike, and how the bells were rung
when people died, and whether those were different bells from
wedding-bells, or only sounded dismal in the fancies of the
living; and then the precocious small boy proceeds to give
the astonished clockmaker some useful information about King
Alfred's candles and curfew-bells.