LAURENCE STERNE (1713-1768)

Tristram Shandy

Main Characters

Tristram Shandy-The narrator and "hero" is an ill-starred nonentity who is not even born until halfway through the novel.
Walter Shandy-Tristram's father, fond of far-ranging philosophical speculations on the subtlest points, but somewhat divorced from reality.
Toby Shandy-Tristram's Uncle Toby, an old soldier and kindly gentleman who delights in recalling his past campaigns.
Corporal Trim-Uncle Tobys loyal and innocent servant. Mr. Yorick--An absurdly fanciful clergyman.
Dr. Slop-An ill-humored, inept quack doctor.
Widow Wndman-An amorous widow who lives near Shane Hall and hopes to entice Uncle Toby into marriage.

The Story

Tristram Shandy can always attribute the peculiarity of his nature and the strange events of his life to the fact that, when he was on the point of being conceived, his mother asked his father, the eccentric, henpecked Walter Shandy, whether he had not forgotten to wind the clock.

Immediately after Tristram's conception, which occurred sometime between the first Sunday and the first Monday of arch, 1718, Tristram's father journeyed from Shandy Hall, the ancestral estate, to London, a trip his sciatica had hitherto prevented him from making. Both noteworthy occurrences can be verified in Mr. Shandy's meticulously kept diary.

The reason that Tristram was born in Shandy Hall, instead of in London, and delivered by a mere midwife, instead of a real doctor, is ascribed to the peculiar marriage settlement between the elder Shandys. According to its terms, Mrs. Shandy would be allowed to bear her child in London, but if she ever falsely persuaded her husband to take her to the capital, she surrendered this right and would have to settle for a home delivery. Since she has done this once, Mr. Shandy feels justified in sparing himself the expense of taking his wife on a second trip to London, although he enjoys going there by himself.

On the night Tristram is born, his father and his Uncle Toby are comfortably debating some complicated and endless issue before a cheerful fire. When Susannah, the maid, informs them of the impending birth, they send for a midwife and for Dr. Slop, a local quack practitioner who had once written a cheap pamphlet on the history of childbirth. Dr. Slop's chief function at local births is to allow the midwife to do the delivering while he charges a handsome fee for drinking the father's best wine.

Before either doctor or midwife can arrive, Walter Shandy and his brother have some fine conversations about their past life. Uncle Toby was an honorable soldier in his day, but during the Siege of Namur in 1695 he received a wound in an embarrassing place and left the army to retire to the country. His loyal servant, Corporal Trim, joined him and suggested an ideal occupation for the retired military man. Near Shandy Hall is a patch of lawn where Trim constructed a miniature battlefield. There Uncle Toby reconstructs his campaigns by means of toy fortifications, trenches, and soldiers.

His delight in this pastime is not, however, shared by his more philosophical brother, who constantly interrupts his long-winded tales of vanished military glory with equally long-winded philosophical speculations. Walter Shandy has theories about everything, and they are often highly ingenious, but they are never even remotely applicable to the problem at hand, and usually get bogged down in oceans of arcane facts and meaningless, if charming, lore. One such philosophical divertissement, begun while the brothers await the arrival of the midwife and Dr. Slop, concerns itself with the reasons for Mrs. Shandy's preference for a female rather than a male attendant at her delivery. Uncle Toby suggests it might just be female modesty, but this idea is too simple to suit Walter Shandy who goes into a long and incomprehensible philosophical harangue about the complex nature of women.

The talk is interrupted by the arrival of Dr. Slop. While Corporal Trim diverts the Shandy brothers with the reading of a long sermon, Dr. Slop goes about his work with typical ineptitude. Mistaking the infant's hip for his head, the doctor flattens Tristram's nose with his forceps. Another portion of Tristram's anatomy will receive an insult on a later occasion when, as a boy, Tristram relieves himself out of a window only to have the window come crashing down on him. These episodes, Tristram feels, with some justice, have blighted life.

Finally, the lad is born, while Mr. Shandy reads the company his translation from a Latin treatise on npses by German scholar named Hafen Slawkenbergius. (Both author and work are Sterne's inventions.) When Mr. Shandy hears of the nearly disastrous episode with the forceps, he fears for his child's safety. Learning that the baby is unusually sickly, he sends immediately for the local parson, Mr. Yorick, to baptize the infant before any further mishaps occur.

Hastening to dress for the event, Mr. Shandy sends Susannah on ahead to tell Yorick that he wants his son baptized "Trismegistus" in honor of his favorite philosopher. But Susannah finds the odd name difficult to remember, and by the time she conveys the request to Mr. Yorick, she has transformed the name into Tristram, which also happens to be the clergyman's first name. This coincidence thrills Mr. Yorick. The child is baptized accordingly, and by the time Mr. Shanc arrives, fully clothed at last, he is too late to change matters, although he thinks Tristram is the worst name in the world and can only bring bad luck. The only hope for this disaster-hounded child now is a proper education.

Tristram's boyhood is marred by one sad event - the death at Westminster School of his older brother, Bobby. Different members of the family react differently to the untimely tragedy: Mr. Shandy philosophizes about the nature of death; in her grief, Susannah finds joy in the thought that she will inherit all her mistress' dresses when Mrs. Shandy goes into mourning; and Corporal Trim symbolically drops his hat as if he himself had died and delivers a magnificent funeral oration on the spot.

The Shandy family's next problems concern the sort of tutor, if any, to get for Tristram and the age at which the boy will be ready to wear long trousers. But these practical considerations take second place to the tale of Uncle Toby's pursuit by the Widow Wadman, a buxom lady who lives near Shandy Hall. The gentle Uncle Toby bears up well under the widow's efforts to win his heart.

One day, however, the Widow Wadman, more anxious than ever to be married, asks Uncle Toby an embarrassing ques-tion: precisely where was he wounded? He assures her he will allow her to touch the actual place where he received his famous wound; he then produces a map of Namur and puts her trembling finger on the appropriate portion of the battle-field.

Corporal Trim, less naive if just as good-hearted as Uncle Toby, has to point out to him that it is the spot on his person, not on the battlefield, that the Widow Wadman has in mind. When he is finally made to realize the awful truth, Uncle Toby beats a hasty retreat from any idea of marriage.
At the end of the novel, Tristram's mother asks, reasonably enough, "Lord, what is all this story about?"
"A Cock and a Bull," replies Yorick, "and one of the best of its kind I ever heard."

Critical Opinion

It is one of the glories of the English novel that at its very inception in the mid-eighteenth century a work should have appeared which mocked all its newborn conventions; which told its minuscule story backwards and at great length with absurd digressions; and which was, in fact, that very modern phenomenon, an anti-novel with an anti-hero, with impotence as one of its major themes.

It is no accident, then, that Tristram Shandy should have exerted a profound influence on the fiction of James Joyce, for both Sterne and Joyce are irrepressible jokers who delight in exploding the possibilities of prose fiction into something very different from the ordinary novel-perhaps best called the comic epic in prose. By means of caricature, digressions, ab-surdly inflated language to describe the most mundane things, puns, and a panoply of wildly eccentric characters, Sterne makes glorious fun in Tristram Shandy of such a sober predecessor as Samuel Richardson, and even of the more worldly Fielding.

Beneath the practical jokes played on his fellow novelists and on his readers, however, Sterne has laid a very solid substratum which gives Tristram Shandy, for all its seeming chaos, a strength of form and theme that has made it endure long after most practical jokes are forgotten. This substratum consists of the very human story, told in loving, even senti-mental detail, of the two immortal Shandy brothers-Walter and Toby-and their occasionally philosophical, occasionally ridiculous responses to the world around them. Both men are henpecked; Walter Shandy by his wife, Uncle Toby by the voracious Widow Wadman. Both men see the world con-spiring against their pleasure and ease. And both refuse to submit to the pressures of the world.

Uncle Toby's "hobbyhorse," by means of which he escapes from a drab world, is his military past, which he and Corporal Trim never tire of discussing. It is one of the infinite number of paradoxes in the book that so gentle and considerate a man as Uncle Toby should have been a menace on the battle-field.

Totally unsympathetic to the military, and riding a "hobby-horse" of his own, is Walter Shandy who escapes from the burdens of existence through a super-subtle and highly abstract philosophy that nobody else can understand. Occasionally, like lunatics in an asylum, the two brothers cooperate in each other's manias, and the resulting fun is both hilarious and heart-warming.

Underlying the extraordinary technical virtuosity of the novel are a complex and very modem philosophy of time (it takes the hero four books in which to be born) and a senti-mentality about the sacredness of life and individuality that give emotional coherence to an otherwise seemingly slapdash effort of the imagination.


The Author

Laurence Sterne's early years were spent in the military environment that he was later to describe with such affectionate amusement in the career of Uncle Toby in Tristram Shandy. He was born in 1713, son of an ensign in an infantry regiment, at Clonmel in Ireland. Until his father's death, when Sterne was eighteen, the family moved constantly from garrison to garrison, taking time out, when the boy was ten, for him to go to grammar school at Halifax.

When his father died, Sterne was left penniless. Through the good offices of a cousin he was enabled to go to Cam-bridge where he made friends with one John Hall (later Hall-Stevenson), who often played host to Sterne in his bizarre home known as Crazy Castle.

In 1736 Sterne took his BA and was ordained a clergyman. Two years later he became vicar of Sutton-in-the-Forest, where he met and married Miss Elizabeth Lumley in 1741. Sterne's philandering with other women became notorious, however. In 1758 his wife became insane. In addition to his amorous escapades in the years preceding the writing of Tristram Shandy, Sterne was also involved in the rather weird goings-on at Crazy Castle. Sterne and others formed a group calling themselves the Demoniacks, which indulged in practi-cal jokes and experiments in mock diabolism, all considered terribly shocking for a clergyman.

It is therefore not surprising that in 1759 Sterne left his vicarage and began the writing of Tristram Shandy. The first two volumes, published in 1760, made an immediate sensation in London literary society. Never had a book so eccentric and idiosyncratic as this been presented in the form of a novel, although there were obvious precursors in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Sterne went to London to capitalize on this success, and by 1761 four more volumes of Tristram Shandy had appeared. Its success was somewhat dampened by the denunciations from several pulpits of its alleged "immorality." Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith, among others, found the novel repugnant on both moral and literary grounds.

In 1760 Sterne became curate at Coxwold. Two years later he voyaged to France because of ill health. His amorous experiences there led to the writing of A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). In 1767 Sterne parted permanently from his wife. It was the year of the appearance of the ninth and final volume of Tristram Shandy and of the third and fourth volumes of Sterne's Sermons. In 1768, heart-broken at having to part also from his daughter, Sterne died of pleurisy in his London lodgings, insolvent and disillusioned.

By the Same Author

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy: Written in 1768 as Sterne was facing death, this charming travel story is a sort of epilogue to the unfinished Tristram Shandy. The narrator this time is the Reverend Mr. Yorick who is a barely disguised portrait of Sterne himself. Written partly as an answer to Smollett's highly unsentimental Travels in France and Italy (1766), Sterne's slim book recounts various adventures, usually with complaisant chambermaids and other damsels, in a series of self-contained episodes. Less eccentric and more elegant in style than Tristram Shandy, A Sentimental Journey was designed, in Sterne's words, "to teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do."
man so in love with the sea that he has outfitted his country house to look like a battleship. Commodore Trunnion's riding gallantly off to his wedding to Pickle',s Aunt Grizzle is one of the most richly comic scenes in eighteenth-century fiction.