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.
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