“Never did any town act so many parts, since Sodom and Gomorrah”

The expression “Never did any town act so many parts, since Sodom and Gomorrah” gives comic scale to the remarkable versatility of Uncle Toby’s model town: assembled from separate houses, it could become one besieged city after another. The theatrical phrase “act so many parts” turns a practical feature of the miniature into an image of transformation, while its allusion to Sodom and Gomorrah makes the town’s multiplicity sound almost without precedent.

The Town as a Transformable Set

The town’s houses were not built as a single fixed structure. Against Corporal Trim’s proposal to run them together, Uncle Toby chose independent houses that could be hooked on or off and rearranged into the plan of whichever town the campaign required. The decision was put into the carpenter’s hands, and the narrator recalls the mutual congratulations exchanged as the work proceeded: the pleasure lay in imagining the uses that a changeable construction would make possible.

The next summer showed how fully the design answered its purpose. The town became Landen, Trerebach, Santvliet, Drusen, and Hagenau, then Ostend, Menin, Aeth, and Dendermond. The list makes its transformations concrete: this was not merely one model standing for a succession of places in talk, but a set whose separate houses could be rearranged to serve as their different plans.

The Joke and Its Allusion

The narrator’s exclamation that no town had ever “act[ed] so many parts” since Sodom and Gomorrah recasts military modelling as theatrical performance. Each configuration gives the same town another part to play; place becomes a role that the miniature can assume and relinquish. The comparison with Sodom and Gomorrah heightens the joke by invoking an extraordinary precedent for a town’s many parts, without displacing the immediate source of the comedy: the ingenuity of the interchangeable houses.

Expansion of the Military Hobby

The model does not remain only a collection of houses. In the fourth year, Uncle Toby adds a fine church with a steeple because a town seemed foolish without one. Corporal Trim wants bells; Uncle Toby instead judges that the metal would be better cast into cannon. That disagreement turns decoration into military equipment and leads, in the next campaign, to six brass field-pieces placed three on each side of Uncle Toby’s sentry-box.

The six small guns lead in turn to a train of somewhat larger pieces, an escalation the narrator presents as characteristic of hobby-horsical affairs. The passage traces the same impulse that made the town modular: one addition opens the way to another. The image of a miniature city playing many roles thus belongs to a continually developing apparatus of play, whose scale eventually reaches the family’s jack-boots converted into mortars.