“Set on fire like a candle, at either end”

“Set on fire like a candle, at either end” is a comic expression for desire and its bodily consequences, built around the possibility of being lit at either end—or both at once. The image first appears as an elaborate reflection on how a candle burns, but its pointed return in the account of Widow Wadman’s approaches to Uncle Toby converts abstract conceit into sexual innuendo. The phrase’s force lies in that turn: a mock lesson in anatomy and combustion becomes a way to describe courtship as an attempt to kindle him from every direction.

The Candle as a Bodily Model

The narrator reasons that a man can be set alight like a candle at either end, provided enough wick projects. Lighting it at the bottom, however, makes the flame put itself out; the joke treats the candle’s behavior as a practical theory of desire, complete with conditions and qualifications. The mock precision keeps the image suspended between physical explanation and sexual suggestion.

The speaker then imagines choosing how he himself would be burned. Rather than being consumed like a beast, he would have a housewife light him at the top, so that the flame descended decently from head to heart, liver, and bowels, and onward through the mesenteric veins and arteries and the turns of the intestines. The long anatomical itinerary gives the metaphor a deliberately learned surface while carrying its erotic implications through the body.

Uncle Toby Interrupts the Anatomy

The anatomical sequence belongs to a conversation on the night Mrs. Shandy is brought to bed with Tristram. When the speaker reaches the blind gut, Uncle Toby interrupts to ask Dr. Slop where it lies, admitting that despite his age he still does not know. The exchange breaks the speaker’s bodily map with Toby’s literal-minded question, turning an intimate metaphor into a comic discussion of anatomy among the men gathered around a birth.

That interruption also sets up the expression’s later application. The talk begins with a generalized account of where a flame might travel through a body; the narrative then brings the language back to Uncle Toby himself, whose vulnerability to being kindled is part of Widow Wadman’s design.

Widow Wadman’s Double-Ended Strategy

Widow Wadman decides to light Uncle Toby neither at one end nor the other, but, if possible, at both ends at once. The extravagant candle image makes her courtship sound like a deliberate experiment: she intends to discover which approach will work by trying to engage him from both directions simultaneously.

The narrator extends the conceit through military equipment. No blind or mantelet in the stores of military furniture—from the arsenal of Venice to the Tower of London—could have served Widow Wadman’s purpose as well as the arrangement already prepared by the needs of Uncle Toby’s affairs. The military vocabulary carries the expression into the novel’s broader language of siege and assault, while the passage’s double meanings make courtship and bodily exposure difficult to separate.

Figurative Meaning and Narrative Use

The expression does not remain a detachable proverb about exhaustion. Here, being lit at either end becomes an explicitly erotic possibility, and being lit at both ends defines the particular pressure Widow Wadman brings to bear on Uncle Toby. The candle’s wick, flame, and direction of burning furnish a mock-mechanical vocabulary for an emotional and sexual contest.

Its recurrence also demonstrates how the novel turns a digression into an instrument of plot. A comically extended account of combustion and intestinal anatomy appears to wander from the story, but its imagery returns with sharper purpose in Widow Wadman’s campaign. The shift from learned bodily description to military courtship preserves the joke while revealing the expression’s central ambiguity: it can sound like a theory of physical process even as it describes the hazards of desire.