“This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me”

“This world is surely wide enough to hold both thee and me” is Uncle Toby’s parting rebuke to a harmless fly—and the narrator’s model for answering reviewers who have attacked his book. The expression turns a small act of mercy into a principle of coexistence: criticism may sting, but it need not be met with hatred or retaliation.

The phrase in its scene

The narrator recalls that the fly buzzed around Uncle Toby’s nose throughout dinner. Rather than harm it, Uncle Toby tells it to go, calling it a poor devil and asking why he should hurt it. His final words grant the creature room to exist alongside him. The line’s force comes from its scale: a broad claim about the world emerges from an ordinary encounter at the dinner table.

An answer to the reviewers

The narrator addresses the Monthly Reviewers, who, he says, had cut and slashed his work. He likens the book to a jerkin whose outer surface has been vigorously attacked while its lining remains undamaged. The fly episode supplies the temper in which he means to endure the reviews: he recommends the critics and their affairs to divine protection, wishes them well, and resolves not to return a worse word or wish than Uncle Toby offered the fly.

That resolve is not a denial of the injury. The narrator vividly registers the reviewers’ assault and remembers a particularly angry response from the previous May, when the weather was hot. Yet he distinguishes damage to the work’s exterior from harm to its inner lining, and chooses patience over reprisal. Uncle Toby’s words make that choice legible as generous restraint rather than submission.

Meaning and narrative use

The phrase gives a domestic gesture ethical reach without removing its comic modesty. A fly at dinner becomes the measure of how much room one person should allow another, even when the other has been irritating or unkind. The narrator applies that measure to literary controversy: author and critic can occupy the same world without one needing to destroy the other.

Its appeal also rests on the contrast between the reviewers’ cutting and Uncle Toby’s refusal to hurt. The narrator does not answer attack with an equal attack; instead, he makes the critics’ hostility the occasion for restating a generous rule. The expression therefore works both as an aphorism about coexistence and as a compact declaration of the book’s chosen response to criticism.