The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767)
Nine volumes of digression in which the narrator's birth arrives only in Volume III
Literature · Novelists
Laurence Sterne
1713–1768 · Irish-born English
Experimental and sentimental fiction
Laurence Sterne was a Yorkshire clergyman who became a sudden celebrity with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), a digressive, typographically playful novel in which the narrator barely manages to get himself born. Its games with time, association and the printed page make it a forerunner of modernist and postmodern fiction.
How to spot them
- ▸Tristram Shandy, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Walter Shandy and Dr Slop
- ▸A black page mourning Parson Yorick, a marbled page and a blank page for the reader to draw on
- ▸A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, narrated by Yorick
- ▸Vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest; lived at Shandy Hall, Coxwold
Key works
A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768)
Parson Yorick's episodic, emotional travels; published weeks before Sterne's death
The Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1760–1769)
His sermons, published under the name of his fictional parson
A Political Romance (1759)
Satire on a York ecclesiastical quarrel, suppressed on publication
Journal to Eliza (1767 (published 1904))
Sentimental journal addressed to Eliza Draper
Key ideas
- Plot subordinated to the free association of ideas, echoing John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding
- Hobby-horses: each character's ruling obsession, such as Uncle Toby's model fortifications
- Sentimentalism: the celebration of feeling and sensibility (A Sentimental Journey popularised 'sentimental')
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland, the son of an army officer
- •Tristram's nose is crushed by Dr Slop's forceps, and he is christened Tristram instead of Trismegistus by mistake
- •The novel's action is set off when his mother asks, at a crucial moment, whether his father has wound up the clock
- •Uncle Toby, wounded in the groin at the siege of Namur, re-enacts sieges on a bowling green with Corporal Trim
- •Samuel Johnson remarked: 'Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.'
- •After his burial in London his body was reportedly taken by body-snatchers and recognised at a Cambridge dissection
- •His remains were reburied at Coxwold in 1969; Shandy Hall is now a museum
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Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Laurence Sterne
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Tristram Shandy