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 ec