jack-boot mortars

The jack-boot mortars are two miniature siege weapons that Corporal Trim makes from an old pair of jack-boots and brings into the parlour for Uncle Toby to admire. Their arrival transforms family footwear into military material: the boots’ hereditary value and the mortars’ usefulness for a future siege collide in one conspicuous object. Through that collision, the mortars expose both the imaginative force of Uncle Toby’s military hobby and its cost, which Walter fears will consume his brother’s fortune.

Making and Intended Use

The mortars originate in a pair of jack-boots that Obadiah tells Trim Walter has stopped wearing. Trim cuts down the boots and fashions them into two mortar-pieces, intending them for the siege of Messina the following summer. The narrator first places the work among the household’s scattered activities: while Dr. Slop is occupied upstairs with the midwife and Mrs. Shandy, Trim is boring the mortars’ touch-holes with a hot poker. The improvised weapons thus emerge not from a formal workshop but from the domestic space and its discarded objects.

Once the mortars are ready, Trim is delighted with his handiwork. Knowing how much his master will enjoy seeing them, he cannot resist carrying them directly into the parlour. Their passage into the room makes them more than private handiwork: they interrupt the household’s ordinary arrangements and bring Uncle Toby’s military interests into direct contact with Walter’s family concerns.

The Parlour Dispute

The parlour door’s troublesome hinge announces Trim’s arrival. Woken by its creaking, Walter complains that the hinge needs attention, then objects to the possibility of noise indoors. Trim explains that he is carrying two mortar-pieces for a future siege and that he has made them from the jack-boots Obadiah said Walter no longer wore. What Trim presents as a thoughtful gift to his master immediately becomes, for Walter, the destruction of a valued possession.

Walter insists that the boots were hereditary and that he prized them above his other appointments. They had been in the family since the civil wars, and Sir Roger Shandy had worn them at the battle of Marston-Moor. Walter declares that he would not have taken ten pounds for them. The mortars therefore carry a family history that their new military function cannot erase: in Trim’s hands, the boots have been converted into siege equipment, but in Walter’s eyes they remain an heirloom with a particular lineage and worth.

Toby’s Enthusiasm and Walter’s Warning

Uncle Toby responds to the mortars with pleasure rather than alarm. Seeing their military promise, he offers to pay Walter ten pounds for the boots at once. Walter’s reply turns the dispute from a question of payment into a broader concern about Toby’s spending. He points to the ten pounds for the boots alongside twelve guineas for pontoons, half as much for a Dutch draw-bridge, and a train of little brass artillery ordered the previous week, as well as the other preparations for the siege of Messina.

Walter takes Toby kindly by the hand as he warns that these military operations exceed his brother’s strength and draw him into expenses larger than he first realizes. He predicts that the spending will eventually ruin Toby’s fortune and leave him a beggar. Toby answers that the national good is worth the cost. The mortars crystallize this difference in judgment: what Walter sees as a new entry in a mounting series of expenditures, Toby welcomes as a contribution to a siege.

Misplaced Expectations and Comic Function

The mortars’ arrival also helps set the household’s expectations awry. After the dispute, Walter believes the house is quiet and asks who is in the kitchen. Trim reports that Dr. Slop is there making a bridge. Uncle Toby, whose thoughts have been stirred by the affair of the jack-boots, takes the bridge to be a model of the Marquis d’Hôpital’s bridge and sends Dr. Slop his thanks. The mortars have put military ideas so firmly into Toby’s mind that an otherwise ambiguous household activity is immediately interpreted as siege preparation.

The object’s significance lies in this double conversion. Trim turns worn boots into weapons; Walter sees an inherited possession turned into a costly loss; Toby sees useful matériel and an occasion for military delight. The mortars are at once a practical product of Trim’s ingenuity and a comic emblem of how thoroughly Toby’s siege-making imagination reshapes the household around it.