1712

The year 1712 enters the narrative as the date on which Corporal Trim restarts his expedition into the story of the King of Bohemia, but it immediately becomes more than a timestamp. Uncle Toby hears the date against the background of a military disappointment in Flanders and finds it ill suited to a tale containing a giant. Their disagreement turns chronology into a comic negotiation between history and fiction: Trim begins in the present of his telling, while Toby would move the fantastic action several centuries into the past.

Date and Narrative Setting

After a sweeping comic account of the many centuries Uncle Toby might have given the Corporal to choose from, Trim settles on what the narrator calls the worst year of the whole collection: the year next to the one under discussion, 1712. He takes that year and sets out again on his expedition to Bohemia. The story is explicitly resumed under the title “The Story of the King of Bohemia and His Seven Castles, Continued,” and Trim begins by placing its action in the year of our Lord 1712.

This opening makes the date a structural device as well as a historical marker. The tale is not introduced as an ancient legend detached from the book’s present; Trim gives it a definite year, and Uncle Toby responds as a listener who measures that choice against remembered campaigns. A confidently stated date thus creates a problem rather than settling one: it brings the marvellous story into contact with recent military history and invites correction.

Uncle Toby’s Objection

Uncle Toby says another date would have pleased him much better. His first reason is the stain he associates with 1712: troops were marched off, and the siege of Quesnoi was not covered, although Fagel was carrying on the works with remarkable vigour. The date therefore carries a specific military grievance for Toby. It is not an interchangeable year in a chronicle but one already burdened by a retreat and a failure to support the siege.

His second objection concerns Trim’s tale itself. From what the Corporal has let slip, Toby suspects that the story contains giants. Trim clarifies that there is only one; Toby answers that one is as bad as twenty. The joke depends on Toby treating the giant’s presence as a serious problem of historical placement. A contemporary date exposes the tale to critics and other people, so he advises that the giant should have been carried back seven or eight hundred years, safely away from their scrutiny.

Historical Time and the Fantastic

The exchange holds two kinds of time together without resolving their difference. 1712 belongs to the recognizably historical world of campaigns, troop movements, and the siege of Quesnoi; the giant belongs to the fantastic material of the King of Bohemia story. Toby’s proposed remedy is not to remove the giant, but to relocate him. The marvel may remain if its chronology is adjusted to protect it from the demands of contemporary plausibility.

That distinction gives the year its comic force. Trim has selected a date from the immense field of possible historical periods, and Toby immediately judges it by both public events and narrative decorum. The date makes the tale answerable to history, while Toby’s suggestion of a setting seven or eight centuries earlier reveals how readily a listener might use historical distance to shelter an implausible wonder. 1712 is consequently remembered in the episode not only as a year of military disappointment, but as the conspicuously ill-chosen present of a story that contains a giant.