Beds of Justice

Beds of Justice are Walter Shandy’s paired family debates, devised to settle difficult questions by considering them in contrasting states of mind. A private domestic custom modeled on an ancient practice of deliberation, they become both a method for reaching a compromise and a figure for the narrator’s own alternating modes of composition.

Origin and Procedure

Walter adapts the ancient Goths’ custom of debating matters of state twice: once drunk, to provide vigor, and once sober, to provide discretion. As a water-drinker, he cannot reproduce the two conditions literally. After years of unsuccessful experiments, and in the seventh year of his marriage, he establishes a household equivalent: the Saturday night immediately before the first Sunday night of each month is set aside for discussion in bed with Elizabeth. The paired sittings give a consequential family question both spirit and sobriety without requiring Walter to drink.

Walter calls the two sessions Beds of Justice because their opposing counsels generally produce a middle decision. In his account, that compromise reaches wisdom as effectively as repeated rounds of drunken and sober deliberation would. The procedure is presented as a deliberate solution to the problem of how a consistently sober man can benefit from the different energies associated with intoxication and restraint.

A Family Decision Under Deliberation

The narrator introduces the practice through Walter’s resolution to put his son into breeches. The decision may appear to have been made suddenly, in a fit of defiance, but it had already been discussed between Walter and Elizabeth in two Beds of Justice about a month earlier. The narrator promises that the reader will be allowed behind the curtain to hear how the couple debated the matter, describing their household discussions as a model for how they handled lesser questions as well.

The first exchange of that discussion shows the form at work in miniature. Walter turns partway in bed, shifts his pillow toward Elizabeth, and opens the debate by saying that they should begin thinking about putting the boy into breeches. Elizabeth agrees; Walter then says they have shamefully deferred it, and Elizabeth again concurs. The decision is not merely a pronouncement by Walter: the scene begins as a joint conversation, even though the narrator identifies the proposal as his father’s resolution.

The Marriage Settlement and Family Stakes

The practice sits within a family in which consequential household matters are already shaped by formal arrangements. In the marriage settlement, Walter covenants that if he retires from business to the country while Elizabeth is still bearing children, he will provide £120 for each pregnancy, to pay for a coach and horses to take her to London and to cover expenses for her lying-in there. The settlement also gives Elizabeth choice over where and with whom she stays in London. A further clause penalizes her if a London journey is prompted by false signs of labor. The narrator says that the extra protection was added because his uncle Toby had drawn attention to the possibility of unfair play, and complains that the consequences of the article fell on him.

This legal arrangement makes the domestic debates more than an amusing household ritual: the family’s deliberations unfold amid provisions that regulate marriage, pregnancy, travel, and expense. The settlement assigns rights and conditions in unusually formal detail, while the Beds of Justice offer Walter and Elizabeth a recurring means of discussing private decisions. The book places these different forms of family governance alongside one another without suggesting that the debates cancel or replace the settlement’s binding terms.

From Household Counsel to Literary Method

The narrator explicitly extends the Beds of Justice beyond family matters. He says that the method works in literary discussions as well as military and conjugal ones, then adapts it to the problem of writing delicate passages that might invite criticism. He writes one half while full and the other fasting, or writes the whole while full and corrects it fasting; reversing those stages, he says, amounts to the same practice.

Writing full, he describes himself as free from the world’s cares and fears, allowing his pen and imagination to proceed without anxious self-monitoring. Writing fasting, he gives the world attention and exercises discretion. Neither mode alone defines the result: their combination produces what he calls a careless, civil, nonsensical, good-humoured Shandean book, whose appeal depends on the reader understanding it. The movement from Walter’s domestic procedure to the narrator’s writing makes deliberation a principle of composition as well as a means of family decision-making.

Meaning and Limits

The custom’s governing idea is that opposing states can correct one another. Vigor needs discretion; the unguarded impulse needs a later check. Walter’s sobriety forces him to invent a schedule that supplies contrast through separate occasions rather than drink, while the narrator turns that contrast into a flexible writing practice. In both cases, the hoped-for result is not a victory for one counsel but a middle course.

Yet the account also preserves a comic gap between deliberation and apparent spontaneity. Walter’s decision about the breeches looks hasty when announced, although it has already passed through two formal household debates. Likewise, the narrator’s apparently easy, digressive manner is described as the product of alternating compositional states. Beds of Justice thus connect family government and literary form: beneath a sudden resolution or free-flowing prose lies a process of repeated consideration, with no guarantee that the resulting compromise will spare the family from its consequences.