Walter Shandy's Treatise on the Art of Courtship

Walter Shandy’s courtship instructions are a letter of practical and theoretical advice to his brother, Uncle Toby, on pursuing a woman. Written after a conversation in which Uncle Toby identifies a woman as a Beguine, the letter ranges from prayer and personal appearance to speech, reading, reserve, and regulation of appetite. Its accumulation of precise rules makes courtship look almost like a campaign, yet its mixture of solemn counsel and eccentric prescriptions reveals how little any system can settle in advance.

Occasion and purpose

The letter follows a gathering that breaks up after Doctor Slop objects to Walter’s disparaging remarks about nuns and Beguines. Uncle Toby has matters to attend to concerning his breeches, while Yorick is preparing a division for the following day. Left alone before bedtime, Walter calls for pen, ink, and paper and writes to his brother. He presents the letter as a token of affection, intended to supply guidance on women and love-making that Uncle Toby has reason to need.

Walter’s advice is explicitly arranged without order, as hints come to mind. That informal claim sits against the letter’s abundance of commands and authorities: the counsel may be improvised, but it adopts the tone of a complete manual. Walter also observes that his wife is beside him preparing for bed, a domestic circumstance that places his abstract instructions within the ordinary household setting from which he writes.

Religious and personal preparation

Walter begins with religion. Despite acknowledging Uncle Toby’s discretion and religious observance, he tells him not to set out on a courtship expedition, morning or afternoon, without first commending himself to God’s protection. The language frames courtship as an undertaking exposed to danger, though the danger is spiritual and rhetorical rather than a concrete incident in the letter.

He next advises Uncle Toby to shave the top of his head every four or five days, more often if convenient. The purpose is to prevent the difference between hair lost to time and hair removed by Trim from becoming visible when Uncle Toby takes off his wig. Walter treats grooming as a way of managing what a prospective partner may notice; his brisk instruction to keep thoughts of baldness out of her imagination turns an ordinary detail of appearance into part of the courtship strategy.

Dress receives a similarly exact prescription. Uncle Toby’s breeches should neither fit too tightly nor hang too loosely, like the trunk-hose of earlier generations. Walter calls the middle course important because it prevents conclusions. The advice extends his governing preference for moderation to the body and clothing, even as the elaborate attention given to such details makes the rule itself comically overdetermined.

Speech, reading, and reserve

Walter recommends a low, soft voice, arguing that silence or its approximation encourages dreams of midnight secrecy. He even advises Uncle Toby, if possible, not to drop the tongs and poker. In this scheme, the atmosphere of courtship depends not only on what is said but on the management of volume and noise: ordinary household sounds are treated as potential interruptions to a mood of intimacy.

He also warns against pleasantry and facetious conversation, and proposes keeping Uncle Toby’s prospective partner away from books that encourage laughter. Devotional tracts are acceptable; Rabelais, Scarron, and Don Quixote are not. Walter’s stated rationale is that laughter is incompatible with the seriousness of lust. The rule makes solemnity a deliberate technique, while the choice to regulate another person’s reading exposes the controlling assumptions embedded in his advice.

A pin in the bosom of Uncle Toby’s shirt is another practical precaution. If the woman permits him to sit beside her on a sofa and gives him an opportunity to touch her hand, Walter cautions him against taking it. Even that small gesture, he says, could disclose Uncle Toby’s temper. Instead, he recommends leaving matters undetermined and letting curiosity work in his favor. His strategy therefore depends on restraint and calculated incompletion, not simply on advancing toward a declared outcome.

Appetite and the limits of the manual

Walter’s final counsel shifts from social conduct to the regulation of appetite. If curiosity fails and Uncle Toby’s “Asse” continues kicking, he proposes, first, the ancient Scythian practice of losing a few ounces of blood below the ears. He then invokes Avicenna’s recommendation of hellebore syrup, evacuations, and purges. The letter gives these medical references a place beside advice about clothing and conversation, as though desire, like appearance, could be managed by prescribed interventions.

Diet and drink complete the regimen. Walter tells Uncle Toby to avoid goat’s flesh, red deer, and foal’s flesh, and to abstain as much as possible from several kinds of birds. For drink he prescribes infusions of vervain and the herb Hanea, drawing on Aelian for their reputed effects; if the stomach tires of them, he offers cucumbers, melons, purslane, water-lilies, woodbine, and lettuce as alternatives. The inventory gives the letter a deliberately encyclopedic air, but its succession of remedies also makes the limits of Walter’s system visible: his subject is courtship, yet his final methods reach into medicine and regimen.

Walter concludes that nothing further occurs to him, except the possibility that a fresh war may break out, and wishes his brother well. The abrupt return from bodily prescriptions to war brings the letter back toward the military language surrounding Uncle Toby’s life, without resolving the courtship itself. As a piece of brotherly counsel, it is both affectionate and prescriptive; as a comic set of rules, it makes clear that an accumulation of maxims can organize conduct without determining what will happen between two people.