Tristram Shandy

Life & Times

Publication and Readership

Tristram Shandy is one of a group of books that could be described as part of the infancy of the novel. It dates from 1759, 40 years after Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and 10 years after Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. All three have eponymous male heroes, as was the trend at that time.

Tristram Shandy was originally published in nine volumes under the title The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Those nine installments spanned an eight-year period, from 1759–67. The author was Laurence Sterne (1713–68), an Irish-born clergyman who was an admirer of the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais, whom he wished to emulate in his comic prose. Rabelais’ work found humour in the reality of human nature – sex, vulgarity, swearing, violence, insults, stupidity and so on. Sterne made this style his genre, but his subject matter was quite different.

Sterne was well into middle age when the first volume of Tristram Shandy was published and he died just a couple of years after the last volume. It seems that his primary motivation was to make the most of his writing ability before it was too late, as he saw himself as Rabelais’ literary successor.

In England, Sterne’s work was not considered in a serious light in literary terms, because it was bawdy and crude. The English author Samuel Johnson thought of Tristram Shandy as rather too odd to have any lasting status. When one considers that it was published in the considerable shadow of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), by fellow Irishman Jonathan Swift, it is perhaps understandable that Sterne’s work was seen as eccentric and unambitious. It was certainly not a romantic adventure story, which is what people had come to expect of the novel.

Interestingly, book publishing was already subject to piracy in the late 1700s, so Sterne addressed the matter by signing the title pages of his books in order to authenticate them. He had to do this in excess of 12,000 times in an attempt to ensure that he received his royalty earnings. Although Sterne had his detractors in high literary circles, Tristram Shandy became popular very quickly across Europe, making him famous for the few remaining years of his life.

Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

The running joke in Tristram Shandy is the verbosity of the narrator, who finds it difficult to get to the point, always digressing and embellishing the story. This comic intention had a polarizing effect on Sterne’s 19th-century readership. After all, a personality trait that is amusing to one person might very easily be extremely irritating to another.

An added complication comes when the reader does not necessarily understand that humour is the aim of the author. Bearing in mind that people would have been unfamiliar with the concept of the comic novel in general, Sterne had his work cut out, especially given that his particular genre of comedy was somewhat coarse and dark for the tastes of his era.

One of the most notable personalities in the book is that of the character Uncle Toby. He is particularly fond of regaling stories of a military nature by verbally and physically acting them out, much to the amusement of others. The narrating voice of Tristram describes these tales as his uncle’s ‘hobbyhorse’, which is a term he uses in general to describe the way different characters find their amusement in life.

The original frontispiece etching for Tristram Shandy, by William Hogarth, shows a character named Corporal Trim reading a sermon on the subject of conscience to a rather disinterested audience, preoccupied with smoking pipes and sleeping. In the foreground is a rotund figure ensconced in an armchair. He wears an 18th-century wig and attire, his tricorn hat fallen to the floor. This image is attributed as the model for the Toby Jug that Staffordshire potters began manufacturing in the 1760s. Although mistaken for Uncle Toby, the image is in fact of Dr Slop, while Uncle Toby actually sits with the narrator’s father Walter in the far corner of the room. Hogarth also illustrated Tristram’s baptism, following his birth, which doesn’t come until volume four of the book, such is the narrator’s tendency for logorrhea.

One of the most remarkable things about Sterne’s approach to writing is the way in which he used graphics to relay information to the reader. For example, there was an entirely black page following the demise of a character named Yorick, which acts as a psychological pause for thought and contemplation. He also uses entirely blank pages to encourage the reader to superimpose their own imagined visual image of the characters. There is also the use of peculiar punctuation, dashes and lines, which Sterne uses as expressive semiotic tools in his prose where he feels that words alone are insufficient. All in all, the effect is rather eccentric and disjointed. However, a century later this odd style would be exalted as the seminal avant-garde literary form.

About the Author

Sterne was the son of an English army officer and spent his early years moving wherever his father was stationed. At the age of 10, he was sent to school in Halifax, where he was introduced to Latin and Greek. In turn, he was able to read the Classics and so had a formal education in seminal literature, such as the works of Homer, which profoundly affected his sensibilities. He later studied at Cambridge for his first and second degrees.

Like many gentlemen academics of his era, Sterne was encouraged to enter the church and was ordained as a vicar at the age of 25. Life as a clergyman did not really suit Sterne’s temperament, and he also suffered from tuberculosis or consumption, which made his voice rather too weak for preaching to a congregation. Despite these drawbacks, he persisted with his ‘calling’.

He married at the age of 28 and became father to a daughter, Lydia, some six years later. A decade later, his wife, Elizabeth, suffered a breakdown when she learned that Sterne had had an affair with a maid. In addition, his health was failing and Lydia was a sickly child, so the household became rather unhappy.

It was at this time that Sterne turned to his pen, probably as much as a form as escapism as an attempt to fulfill a long-held literary ambition. He had met many colourful characters in his life and he possessed a keen intellect for satire, irony, cynicism, scepticism and rhetoric. This enabled him to populate Tristram Shandy with a cast of exaggerated personalities in a similar vein to Charles Dickens, who was born a century later.

Sterne finally succumbed to the tuberculosis infection that had dogged him his entire adult life. It is not entirely clear that he had finished Tristram Shandy, for he may well have added subsequent volumes had he lived on, and the format was certainly open-ended. Following his death, he did provide one more darkly comic installment: his body was exhumed by grave robbers and sold in Cambridge for an anatomy lecture, which was quite commonplace at the time. As he was a prominent figure, someone recognized his cadaver in the operating room and he was discreetly returned to his resting place. Sterne would surely have found this event rather amusing from his celestial vantage point, for it was just the kind of thing that he borrowed from in his work.