Toby Veck, also known as Trotty, is a ticket-porter, that is, a licensed London messenger, available for hire, and he waits for any work that may come his way, just outside the church door.
“And a breezy, goose-skinned, blue-nosed, red-eyed, stony-toed, tooth-chattering place it was, to wait in, in the wintertime,” writes Toby’s creator, Charles Dickens, in his 1844 Christmas story, The Chimes.
“The wind came tearing round the corner – especially the east wind – as if it had sallied forth, express, from the confines of the earth, to have a blow at Toby.”
Not that rough handling by the wind bothered Toby. A hard frost, too, or a fall of snow, was an Event; and it seemed to do him good, somehow or other.
“Wet weather was the worst, the cold, damp clammy wet, that wrapped him up like a moist great-coat – the only kind of great-coat Toby owned, or could have added to his comfort by dispensing with. Wet days, when the rain came slowly, thickly, obstinately down, when the street’s throat, like his own, was choked with mist; when smoking umbrellas passed and repassed, spinning round and round like so many teetotums, as they knocked against each other on the crowded footway, throwing off a little whirlpool of uncomfortable sprinklings; when gutters brawled and waterspouts were full and noisy; when the wet from the projecting stones and ledges of the church fell drip, drip, drip on Toby, making the wisp of straw on which he stood mere mud in no time, those were the days that tried him.”
