lipsed 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 exis