The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, also known as Tristram Shandy, is a humorous novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published from 1759 to 1767, in nine volumes across five instalments. The novel purports to be a memoir, but the titular Tristram is an effusive and digressive narrator who begins the story with his conception and doesn't reach a description of his birth until the third volume. While attempting to explain four accidents in his early life which have doomed him to an unhappy future, Tristram describes domestic conflicts between his irritable father Walter and his gentle Uncle Toby, and inserts humorous discourses on a range of intellectual topics.
Stylistically, Sterne is influenced by the earlier satirists Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Rabelais, and Cervantes. The novel is characterised by innuendo, especially sexual double entendre and aposiopesis. Sterne burlesques serious writers and genres, particularly parodying Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy and the genre of consolatio. The novel is also remembered for surprising visual elements, such as blank, black, and marbled pages; entire paragraphs censored with asterisks; and inserted diagrams.
Tristram Shandy was Sterne's first novel, and immediately transformed his life from that of an obscure rural clergyman to that of a literary celebrity. Eighteenth century audiences expressed some reservations about its daring and bawdy humour, especially given Sterne's religious profession, but praised its originality and its moments of sentimental morality. Over time, it has been an influential novel with a mixed reputation: Victorian audiences criticised it as obscene, but modernist and postmodernist authors embraced it in the twentieth century. Adaptations include the 2006 film A Cock and Bull Story, starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as they metafictionally struggle to make the film.
Background
Sterne was an obscure and financially struggling Anglican clergyman in York when he wrote his first piece of fiction, a satire on church politics titled A Political Romance, in 1759. This pamphlet was published in January of that year, and was not received well within clerical circles: the Archbishop of York considered it embarrassing to make church conflicts so public, and the pamphlet was burned. Nonetheless, Sterne felt he had discovered his true talent for humour writing, and immediately began writing a new work. He began and abandoned a "Rabelaisian Fragment" satirising sermon-writing, then began Tristram Shandy.Synopsis
The book is ostensibly Tristram's narration of his life story. But it is one of the central jokes of the novel that he cannot explain anything simply, that he must make explanatory diversions to add context and colour to his tale, to the extent that Tristram's own birth is not reached until volume three.File:Uncle Toby and Widow Wadman by Charles Robert Leslie CCWSH1157.jpg|thumb|upright|My Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman by Charles Robert Leslie, 1831Consequently, apart from Tristram as narrator, the most familiar and important characters in the book are his father Walter, his mother, his Uncle Toby, Toby's servant Trim, and a supporting cast of minor characters: the chambermaid Susannah, Doctor Slop, Toby's love interest the Widow Wadman, and the parson Yorick, who later became Sterne's favourite nom de plume and the protagonist of Sterne's next novel.
Though Tristram is always present as narrator and commentator, the book contains little of his life, only the story of a trip through France and accounts of the four comical mishaps which he says have doomed him to an unfortunate life. Firstly, while he was still only an homunculus, Tristram's implantation within his mother's uterus was disturbed. At the moment of procreation, his mother asked his father if he had remembered to wind the clock. The distraction and annoyance led to the disruption of the proper balance of humours necessary to conceive a well-favoured child. Secondly, during his birth Tristram's nose was crushed by Dr. Slop's forceps, an ill omen according to his father's pet theory that a large and attractive nose is important to a man making his way in life. Third, a mistake caused him to be christened with an inauspicious name: another of his father's theories was that a person's name exerted enormous influence over that person's nature and fortunes, and he intended to use an especially auspicious name, Trismegistus. Susannah mangled the name in conveying it to the curate, and the child was christened Tristram. According to his father's theory, this conflation of "Trismegistus" and "Tristan", doomed him to a life of woe and cursed him with the inability to comprehend the causes of his misfortune. Fourth and finally, as a toddler, Tristram suffered an accidental circumcision when Susannah let a window sash fall as he urinated out of the window.
In between such events, Tristram as narrator finds himself discoursing at length on sexual practices, insults, the influence of one's name and noses, as well as explorations of obstetrics, siege warfare and philosophy, as he struggles to marshal his material and finish the story of his life. In addition to many real authors, he discusses the fictional writer Hafen Slawkenbergius. Most of the action is concerned with domestic upsets or misunderstandings, which find humour in the opposing temperaments of Walter—splenetic, rational, and somewhat sarcastic—and Uncle Toby, who is gentle, uncomplicated, and a lover of his fellow man.
Composition and publication
Tristram Shandy was published in nine volumes across five instalments over an eight-year period, from 1759 to 1767. The first three instalments followed each other fairly rapidly: volumes one and two in December 1759, three and four in January 1761, and five and six in December 1761. The fourth instalment, containing volumes seven and eight, was published in January 1765, and the final instalment, volume nine, in January 1767. Sterne characterised his writing process as highly spontaneous: "I begin with writing the first sentence——and trusting to Almighty God for the second".First two volumes
Sterne began writing Tristram Shandy some time early in 1759. On 23 May of that year, he offered the manuscript of the first volume to the publisher Robert Dodsley, promising a second volume before the end of the year. He asked £50 for the copyright to the text; Dodsley counter-offered £20; Sterne instead printed the first two volumes at his own expense, with Dodsley as distributor. This first print run, produced in York by Ann Ward, was small – perhaps only 200 copies, and no more than 500 – and Sterne had to borrow money for the printing costs. That he took on the financial risk himself is often seen as a sign of his confidence that the work would be a commercial success. Volumes one and two were released in late December 1759, with the year 1760 printed on the title page. The novel was an immediate success, which made Sterne's name for the rest of his life. Dodsley purchased the copyright to both volumes in March 1760 for £250, and also promised £380 for the next two volumes; he released his second edition, featuring an illustration by William Hogarth, in London on April 2, followed by several more editions as the novel continued to sell out. Sterne visited London from March to May 1760 to promote the book and enjoy his newfound literary celebrity, then returned to Yorkshire to write the next volumes.Later volumes
Two more instalments of the novel appeared in 1761. Sterne finished volume three by August 1760, three months after his return to Yorkshire, and continued to make modifications until both it and volume four were printed. He commissioned William Hogarth again to produce a frontispiece illustration. Volumes three and four were published on 28 January 1761, printed and sold by Dodsley in London and J. Hinxmann in York. By November of that year, he had completed the next two volumes. Dodsley and Sterne had ended their publishing relationship for reasons that are still unknown, and Sterne did not sell anyone the copyright to volumes five and six. In December Sterne arranged for Thomas Becket and Peter Dehondt to print and sell volumes five and six, which appeared on 22 December 1761, with 1762 on the title page. By this time, fraudulent continuations by other authors had become so prevalent that Sterne autographed every copy of volume five to assure readers that it was legitimate; he repeated the practice in future instalments, signing all copies of volumes seven and nine.File:Laurence Sternes study at Shandy Hall.jpg|thumb|Sterne's study at Shandy Hall, his home in Coxwold where he composed most of Tristram Shandy
Sterne's intensive writing efforts worsened his tuberculosis, and in January 1762 he travelled to France to benefit from the warmer climate. There, he wrote much less. From August through November 1762, he worked on material about Uncle Toby which would eventually be used in volumes eight and nine. In March 1764, Sterne returned to England, travelling via Paris and London and finally reaching Yorkshire in June. He continued to delegate his clerical duties to the curate who had performed them during his absence, and wrote. Volumes seven and eight were finally completed in November 1764. According to Sterne's biographer Arthur Cash, Sterne finished volume eight before writing volume seven but presented them in the reverse order within the novel. He travelled to London to oversee the volumes' publication, and they appeared on 23 January 1765. As with volumes five and six, Sterne served as his own publisher, with Becket and Dehondt as distributors.
Sterne departed for another journey to France, and this time Italy as well, in October 1765, and resumed writing Tristram Shandy on his return to Yorkshire in June 1766. He decided to publish only one volume, to more easily begin a new serial novel, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. In January 1767, he visited London, where he corrected the proofs for the forthcoming ninth volume. Its release was advertised for January 8, but actually occurred January 29. In March of 1768, Sterne died, very shortly after publishing the first instalment of the new serial A Sentimental Journey. It remains uncertain whether Tristram Shandy should be considered a finished novel, or one that simply stopped with his death: when he first planned A Sentimental Journey, he stated that he intended to continue Tristram Shandy alongside it, but volume nine brings most of the storylines to satisfying stopping points so there are many scholars who consider it a fundamentally complete work.