s,
And always know our proper stations.

The reference to the 'new system' is not quite obvious. Dickens
may have been thinking of the 'Wilhem' method of teaching
singing which his friend Hullah introduced into England, or it
may be a reference to the Tonic Sol-fa system, which had already
begun to make progress when _The Chimes_ was written in 1844.[7]

There are some well-known lines which owners of books were
fond of writing on the fly-leaf in order that there might be
no mistake as to the name of the possessor. The general form
was something like this:

John Wigglesworth is my name,
And England is my nation;
London is my dwelling-place,
And Christ is my salvation.

(See _Choir_, Jan., 1912, p. 5.) Dickens gives us at least
two variants of this. In _Edwin Drood_, Durdles says of the
Mayor of Cloisterham:

Mister Sapsea is his name,
England is his nation,
Cloisterham's his dwelling-place,
Aukshneer's his occupation.

And Captain Cuttle thus describes himself, ascribing the
authorship of the words to Job--but then literary accuracy
was not the Captain's strong point:

Cap'en Cuttle is my name,
And England is my nation,
This here is my dwelling-place,
And blessed be creation.

It is said that there appeared in the _London Singer's Magazine_
for 1839 'The Teetotal Excursion, an original Comic Song by
Boz, sung at the London Concerts,' but it is not in my copy
of this song-book, nor have I ever seen it.

Dickens was always very careful in his choice of names and
titles, and the evolution of some of the latter is very
interesting. One of the many he conceived for the magazine
which was to succeed _Household Words_ was _Household Harmony_,
while another was _Home Music_. Considering his dislike of
bells in general, it is rather surprising that two other
suggestions were _English Bells_ and _Weekly Bells_, but the
final choice was _All the Year Round_. Only once does he make
use of a musician's name in his novels, and that is in _Great
Expectations_. Philip, otherwise known as Pip, the hero, becomes
friendly with Herbert Pocket. The latter objects to the name
Philip, 'it sounds like a moral boy out of a spelling-book,'
and as Pip had been a blacksmith and the two youngsters were
'harmonious,' Pocket asks him:

'Would you mind Handel for a familiar name? There's
a charming piece of music, by Handel, called the
"Harmonious Blacksm