Toby’s model town

Toby’s model town is an assemblage of independent, detachable houses built to give Uncle Toby’s miniature campaigns a town to capture. Conceived by Corporal Trim and enlarged by Uncle Toby, it could be rearranged to represent different places rather than remain a single fixed model. Its transformations—from a portable town to a town with a church and then a setting for artillery—display the self-expanding logic of the pair’s military hobby: every new feature creates a reason for the next.

Origins and Design

During the first year of Uncle Toby’s campaigns, the word “town” repeatedly appeared in their talk, although no town actually stood inside the polygon. That absence became conspicuous as Uncle Toby took Amberg, Bonn, Rhinberg, Huy, and Limbourg one after another. Corporal Trim pointed out the absurdity of claiming so many captured towns without having one model town to show for the victories, and proposed building one from slit deal, painting it, and placing it within the inner polygon.

Uncle Toby immediately accepted the proposal, then added two improvements of his own. The first was representational: the model should resemble the towns it was meant to stand for, with grated windows and houses whose gable ends faced the streets, like those in Ghent, Bruges, and the towns of Brabant and Flanders. It would not be an undifferentiated collection of buildings, but an attempt to give the miniature setting a recognizable architectural character.

The second improvement made the model adaptable. Instead of joining the houses permanently into one town, as Trim had first suggested, each house would remain independent and hook on or off. The pieces could therefore be assembled into the plan of whatever town the campaign required. Uncle Toby and Trim watched the carpenter at work with repeated looks of mutual congratulation: their pleasure lay both in the object taking shape and in the ingenuity they shared in designing it.

A Town That Changes Its Part

The detachable construction proved its value the following summer, when the model became what the narrator calls a perfect Proteus. It stood in turn for Landen, Trerebach, Santvliet, Drusen, and Hagenau; then for Ostend, Menin, Aeth, and Dendermond. The list gives the town’s defining action: it does not merely represent a place but changes identity as the imagined campaign moves from one siege to another.

The narrator marks the scale of this versatility with an extravagant comparison to the many parts played by Sodom and Gomorrah. The joke treats the model as an actor capable of repeated transformations, while also making its flexibility tangible through the roll call of named towns. Interchangeability is not a hidden convenience of the object; it is what allows Uncle Toby and Trim to make their mock campaigns proliferate without needing a separate model for every site.

Church, Cannon, and Expansion

In the fourth year, Uncle Toby decided that a town looked foolish without a church and added a fine one with a steeple. Trim wanted bells in it; Uncle Toby preferred that the metal be cast into cannon. Their difference turns the church into a pivot between civic completeness and military use: the feature that makes the model look more like a town also prompts a discussion about what its materials should serve.

The discussion leads to half a dozen brass field-pieces, placed three on each side of Uncle Toby’s sentry-box. Soon those pieces lead to a train of somewhat larger guns, and the narrator describes the escalation as characteristic of hobby-horse affairs: the equipment grows from pieces with a half-inch bore until it reaches the scale of the jack boots belonging to Uncle Toby’s brother, Walter Shandy. The passage therefore places the town within a larger chain of additions. Each new component invites another, and the miniature military world expands beyond the buildings that first made it possible.

Function and Significance

Toby’s model town gives physical form to the partnership between Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. Trim identifies the mismatch between their language of conquest and the empty polygon; Uncle Toby recognizes the merit of the proposal and makes the design more elaborate. Their shared pleasure in the carpenter’s work, followed by the model’s successive transformations, presents the fortifications as collaborative construction as well as military play.

The object also reveals the hobby’s capacity to generate its own requirements. A campaign needs a town to capture; a town seems incomplete without a church; the church raises the question of bells or cannon; the cannon invite further artillery. This sequence makes the model more than a backdrop for imaginary sieges. Its adaptable houses organize the play, while each perceived deficiency or new possibility supplies an occasion to enlarge it. The town’s durability as an idea rests precisely on its changeability: it can be rebuilt for the next place, and the next addition can open the next stage of the hobby.