Walter Shandy’s Courtship Instructions

Walter Shandy’s Courtship Instructions is a letter Walter writes for his brother Toby during Toby’s courtship of Widow Wadman. It offers a deliberately comprehensive guide to approaching a woman, combining religious counsel, rules of dress and speech, tactics of suspense, and prescriptions for controlling appetite. The advice is affectionate in address but comic in its conviction that courtship can be managed by a catalogue of maxims and remedies.

Occasion and purpose

After the company breaks up for the night, Walter has half an hour before bed and writes to Toby, who is making preparations of his own for the next day. Walter presents the letter as a token of brotherly love and acknowledges that Toby needs instruction in women and courtship. He writes while Mrs. Shandy is beside him preparing for bed, and admits that his hints have come to him without order. The casual circumstances make the letter feel less like a settled treatise than a stream of counsel, though Walter’s tone repeatedly turns each passing thought into a rule.

Walter begins with religion. He advises Toby, throughout the courtship, to commend himself to God’s protection before setting out on the undertaking, whether in the morning or afternoon. The counsel is framed as a reminder of an obligation Toby generally observes, so it both affirms Toby’s piety and places courtship within a moral and devotional order. Walter’s advice then moves quickly from spiritual protection to practical management of appearance.

Appearance and performance

Walter instructs Toby to shave the top of his head every four or five days, or more often when convenient. Before removing his wig in front of Widow Wadman, Toby should avoid revealing how much baldness comes from time and how much from the attentions of Corporal Trim. Walter’s concern is not simply neatness: he wants to keep the idea of baldness out of her imagination. Courtship, in this account, depends partly on managing what another person is allowed to notice.

Clothing receives the same attention to measured effect. Toby’s breeches should neither fit too tightly nor hang loosely like the old-fashioned trunk-hose. Walter claims that a middle course prevents conclusions, extending his preference for moderation from dress to interpretation itself. The letter thus treats even the cut of a garment as part of the delicate work of presenting oneself without inviting an unwanted judgment.

Walter also recommends a low, soft voice and warns Toby against making sudden noise with the fire tongs and poker. Silence, or something close to it, can encourage a sense of midnight secrecy, he argues. The advice joins a particular household object to a broader tactic: the atmosphere of a conversation can be shaped by controlling its volume and interruptions.

Conversation and courtship tactics

Walter tells Toby to avoid pleasantry and facetiousness, and even to keep Widow Wadman from books that might encourage laughter. Devotional tracts are acceptable; Rabelais, Scarron, and Don Quixote are not, because Walter classifies them as books that excite laughter. His reasoning is pointedly paradoxical: he insists that lust is the most serious passion while prescribing a courtship stripped of humor. The counsel exposes the gap between Walter’s solemn theory of desire and the comic detail of his prescriptions.

Physical proximity, too, is to be handled through restraint. Walter tells Toby to put a pin in the bosom of his shirt before entering Widow Wadman’s parlour. If she permits him to sit beside her on the sofa and gives him an occasion to place his hand on hers, he should refrain. Walter’s explanation is that she would feel the temper of Toby’s hand; instead, Toby should leave that possibility, and as many others as he can, undetermined. In Walter’s account, withholding a gesture keeps curiosity on Toby’s side. The strategy makes uncertainty an instrument of courtship rather than something to be resolved at once.

Appetite, regimen, and the letter’s ending

The prescriptions become more elaborate if Toby’s desire remains difficult to govern. Walter proposes bloodletting below the ears, citing an ancient Scythian practice, and then turns to Avicenna’s advice about hellebore and purges. He also gives dietary restrictions: Toby should eat little or none of goat, red deer, or foal, and should abstain as far as possible from several birds, including peacocks, cranes, coots, didappers, and water-hens. For drink, Walter recommends infusions of vervain and hanea; if Toby tires of them, he can substitute cucumbers, melons, purslane, water-lilies, woodbine, and lettuce.

This catalogue of treatments extends Walter’s habit of converting a human difficulty into a system of rules. Religious devotion, clothing, conversation, gesture, medical regimen, and diet all become elements in a single program of courtship. Yet the letter does not resolve Toby’s pursuit or report the effect of any particular instruction. Walter closes by saying that nothing further occurs to him unless a new war breaks out, then signs himself Toby’s affectionate brother. That military aside, set against advice about love, preserves the Shandy brothers’ characteristic overlap between romantic concerns and the prospect of war, while the affectionate signature keeps the extravagant instruction grounded in their familial bond.

Narrative significance

The letter gives Walter a chance to impose his orderly, prescriptive intelligence on a subject resistant to certainty. Its rules repeatedly aim to regulate appearances and reactions, but the courtship they address cannot be guaranteed by a rulebook. The progression from prayer to wigs, breeches, household noise, books, touch, ancient remedies, and food makes the advice comic through accumulation: Walter treats the smallest circumstance as potentially decisive. At the same time, his address to Toby is explicitly affectionate, so the letter’s elaborate absurdity is also an expression of care, however imperfectly fitted to its recipient’s situation.