Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous. In his _Pictures from Italy_ he wrote thus: At Genoa the bells of the church ring incessantly, not in peals, or any known form of sound, but in horrible, irregular, jerking dingle, dingle, dingle; with a sudden stop at every fifteenth dingle or so, 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. As Smike and Nicholas tramp their long journey to Portsmouth they hear the sheep-bells tinkling on the downs. To Tom Pinch journeying Londonwards 'the brass work on the harness was a complete orchestra of little bells.' What a terror the bells are to Jonas Chuzzlewit just before he starts on his evil journey! He hears the ringers practising in a neighbouring church, and the clashing of their bells was almost maddening. Curse the clamouring bells! they seemed to know that he was listening at the door, and to proclaim it in a crowd of voices to all the town! Would they never be still? They ceased at last, and then the silence was so new and terrible that it seemed the prelude to some dreadful noise. The boom of the bell is associated with many of the villains of the novels. Fagin hears it when under sentence of death. Blackpool and Carker hear the accusing bells when in the midst of planning their evil deeds.