The other day some one presented me with a paper called the _Eatanswill
Gazette_. I need hardly say that I could not have been more startled if
I had seen a coach coming down the road with old Mr. Tony Weller on the
box. But, indeed, the case is much more extraordinary than that would
be. Old Mr. Weller was a good man, a specially and seriously good man,
a proud father, a very patient husband, a sane moralist, and a reliable
ally. One could not be so very much surprised if somebody pretended to
be Tony Weller. But the _Eatanswill Gazette_ is definitely depicted in
“Pickwick” as a dirty and unscrupulous rag, soaked with slander and
nonsense. It was really interesting to find a modern paper proud to
take its name. The case cannot be compared to anything so simple as a
resurrection of one of the “Pickwick” characters; yet a very good
parallel could easily be found. It is almost exactly as if a firm of
solicitors were to open their offices to-morrow under the name of
Dodson and Fogg.
It was at once apparent, of course, that the thing was a joke. But what
was not apparent, what only grew upon the mind with gradual wonder and
terror, was the fact that it had its serious side. The paper is
published in the well-known town of Sudbury, in Suffolk. And it seems
that there is a standing quarrel between Sudbury and the county town of
Ipswich as to which was the town described by Dickens in his celebrated
sketch of an election. Each town proclaims with passion that it was
Eatanswill. If each town proclaimed with passion that it was not
Eatanswill, I might be able to understand it. Eatanswill, according to
Dickens, was a town alive with loathsome corruption, hypocritical in
all its public utterances, and venal in all its votes. Yet, two highly
respectable towns compete for the honour of having been this particular
cesspool, just as ten cities fought to be the birthplace of Homer. They
claim to be its original as keenly as if they were claiming to be the
original of More’s “Utopia” or Morris’s “Earthly Paradise.” They grow
seriously heated over the matter. The men of Ipswich say warmly, “It
must have been our town; for Dickens says it was corrupt, and a more
corrupt town than our town you couldn’t have met in a month.” The men
of Sudbury reply with rising passion, “Permit us to tell you,
gentlemen, that our town was quite as corrupt as your town any day of
the week. Our town was a common nuisance; and we defy our enemies to
question it.” “Perhaps you will tell us,” sneer the citizens of
Ipswich, “that your politics were ever as thoroughly filthy as----” “As
filthy as anything,” answer the Sudbury men, undauntedly. “Nothing in
politics could be filthier. Dickens must have noticed how disgusting we
were.” “And could he have failed to notice,” the others reason
indignantly, “how disgusting we were? You could smell us a mile off.
You Sudbury fellows may think yourselves very fine, but let me tell you
that, compared to our city, Sudbury was an honest place.” And so the
controversy goes on. It seems to me to be a new and odd kind of
controversy.
Naturally, an outsider feels inclined to ask why Eatanswill should be
either one or the other. As a matter of fact, I fear Eatanswill was
every town in the country. It is surely clear that when Dickens
described the Eatanswill election he did not mean it as a satire on
Sudbury or a satire on Ipswich; he meant it as a satire on England. The
Eatanswill election is not a joke against Eatanswill; it is a joke
against elections. If the satire is merely local, it practically loses
its point; just as the “Circumlocution Office” would lose its point if
it were not supposed to be a true sketch of all Government offices;
just as the Lord Chancellor in “Bleak House” would lose his point if he
were not supposed to be symbolic and representative of all Lord
Chancellors. The whole moral meaning would vanish if we supposed that
Oliver Twist had got by accident into an exceptionally bad workhouse,
or that Mr. Dorrit was in the only debtors’ prison that was not well
managed. Dickens was making game, not of places, but of methods. He
poured all his powerful genius into trying to make the people ashamed
of the methods. But he seems only to have succeeded in making people
proud of the places. In any case, the controversy is conducted in a
truly extraordinary way. No one seems to allow for the fact that, after
all, Dickens was writing a novel, and a highly fantastic novel at that.
Facts in support of Sudbury or Ipswich are quoted not only from the
story itself, which is wild and wandering enough, but even from the yet
wilder narratives which incidentally occur in the story, such as Sam
Weller’s description of how his father, on the way to Eatanswill,
tipped all the voters into the canal. This may quite easily be (to
begin with) an entertaining tarradiddle of Sam’s own invention, told,
like many other even more improbable stories, solely to amuse Mr.
Pickwick. Yet the champions of these two towns positively ask each
other to produce a canal, or to fail for ever in their attempt to prove
themselves the most corrupt town in England. As far as I remember,
Sam’s story of the canal ends with Mr. Pickwick eagerly asking whether
everybody was rescued, and Sam solemnly replying that one old
gentleman’s hat was found, but that he was not sure whether his head
was in it. If the canal is to be taken as realistic, why not the hat
and the head? If these critics ever find the canal I recommend them to
drag it for the body of the old gentleman.
Both sides refuse to allow for the fact that the characters in the
story are comic characters. For instance, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, the
eminent student of Dickens, writes to the _Eatanswill Gazette_ to say
that Sudbury, a small town, could not have been Eatanswill, because one
of the candidates speaks of its great manufactures. But obviously one
of the candidates would have spoken of its great manufactures if it had
had nothing but a row of apple-stalls. One of the candidates might have
said that the commerce of Eatanswill eclipsed Carthage, and covered
every sea; it would have been quite in the style of Dickens. But when
the champion of Sudbury answers him, he does not point out this plain
mistake. He answers by making another mistake exactly of the same kind.
He says that Eatanswill was not a busy, important place. And his odd
reason is that Mrs. Pott said she was dull there. But obviously Mrs.
Pott would have said she was dull anywhere. She was setting her cap at
Mr. Winkle. Moreover, it was the whole point of her character in any
case. Mrs. Pott was that kind of woman. If she had been in Ipswich she
would have said that she ought to be in London. If she was in London
she would have said that she ought to be in Paris. The first disputant
proves Eatanswill grand because a servile candidate calls it grand. The
second proves it dull because a discontented woman calls it dull.
The great part of the controversy seems to be conducted in the spirit
of highly irrelevant realism. Sudbury cannot be Eatanswill, because
there was a fancy-dress shop at Eatanswill, and there is no record of a
fancy-dress shop at Sudbury. Sudbury must be Eatanswill because there
were heavy roads outside Eatanswill, and there are heavy roads outside
Sudbury. Ipswich cannot be Eatanswill, because Mrs. Leo Hunter’s
country seat would not be near a big town. Ipswich must be Eatanswill
because Mrs. Leo Hunter’s country seat would be near a large town.
Really, Dickens might have been allowed to take liberties with such
things as these, even if he had been mentioning the place by name. If I
were writing a story about the town of Limerick, I should take the
liberty of introducing a bun-shop without taking a journey to Limerick
to see whether there was a bun-shop there. If I wrote a romance about
Torquay, I should hold myself free to introduce a house with a green
door without having studied a list of all the coloured doors in the
town. But if, in order to make it particularly obvious that I had not
meant the town for a photograph either of Torquay or Limerick, I had
gone out of my way to give the place a wild, fictitious name of my own,
I think that in that case I should be justified in tearing my hair with
rage if the people of Limerick or Torquay began to argue about
bun-shops and green doors. No reasonable man would expect Dickens to be
so literal as all that even about Bath or Bury St. Edmunds, which do
exist; far less need he be literal about Eatanswill, which didn’t
exist.
I must confess, however, that I incline to the Sudbury side of the
argument. This does not only arise from the sympathy which all healthy
people have for small places as against big ones; it arises from some
really good qualities in this particular Sudbury publication. First of
all, the champions of Sudbury seem to be more open to the sensible and
humorous view of the book than the champions of Ipswich—at least, those
that appear in this discussion. Even the Sudbury champion, bent on
finding realistic clothes, rebels (to his eternal honour) when Mr.
Percy Fitzgerald tries to show that Bob Sawyer’s famous statement that
he was neither Buff nor Blue, “but a sort of plaid,” must have been
copied from some silly man at Ipswich who said that his politics were
“half and half.” Anybody might have made either of the two jokes. But
it was the whole glory and meaning of Dickens that he confined himself
to making jokes that anybody might have made a little better than
anybody would have made them.