The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Read online

  THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM SHANDY, GENTLEMAN

  LAURENCE STERNE was born in 1713 at Clonmel, Ireland, the son of an army ensign. From 1723 until his father’s death in 1731 he was sent to school in Halifax, Yorkshire, and in 1733 he entered as a sizar at Jesus College, Cambridge, receiving his BA in 1737. With the help of his uncle Jaques, precentor and canon at York, Sterne procured his livings. He took holy orders and in 1738 obtained the living of Sutton-on-the-Forest, near York, and a prebend in the cathedral. In 1741 he received the neighbouring benefice of Stillington and he was married, although his marriage was generally unhappy. Sterne wrote forty-five sermons, of which four volumes were published during his lifetime and three were published posthumously in 1769. His literary career began late and he wrote his first pamphlet, A Political Romance, in 1759, but it was suppressed because of its controversial satirical content. In the same year he began his masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. The first two volumes made him a celebrity and he visited London, where he was lavishly feted. Between 1761 and 1767 he brought out a further seven volumes. Sterne was dogged by ill-health for much of his life and during his later years he alternated bouts of being lionized in London with recuperative continental travels and trips back to York, where he always returned to write his next instalment. A Sentimental Journey represents Sterne’s observations and experiences of two tours of the continent and is largely based on his time spent in France. The book was published in February 1768, barely three weeks before his death in London on 18 March 1768.

  MELVYN NEW is Professor of English at the University of Florida. He has been writing about Laurence Sterne for thirty-five years and his recent work includes editions of Sterne’s sermons, which comprise volumes four and five of the Florida Edition of The Works of Laurence Sterne (1996), and (with W. G. Day) A Sentimental Journey and Bramine’s Journal, volume six of the Florida Edition, 2002. In 2001 he edited, with Robert Bernasconi and Richard A. Cohen, In Proximity: Emmanuel Levinas and the Eighteenth Century.

  JOAN NEW, who has taught at the University of Florida, is a poet as well as co-editor of volumes one and two of the Florida Edition of The Works of Laurence Sterne; Tristram Shandy: The Text (1978). In addition to numerous appearances in literary magazines, her collection The River Bend was published in 1993, and a second collection Migrations in 2000.

  CHRISTOPHER RICKS is Professor of the Humanities at Boston University, and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute there. His recent books include Essays in Appreciation (1996), Reviewery (2002) and Allusion to the Poets (2002). He is a member of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He is general editor of Penguin English Poets.

  LAURENCE STERNE

  The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

  Edited by MELVYN NEW and JOAN NEW

  with an Introductory Essay by CHRISTOPHER RICKS

  and an Introduction and Notes by MELVYN NEW

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published 1759–67

  This edition of the text first published in the Florida Edition of

  The Works of Laurence Sterne by the University Presses of Florida 1978

  Introductory essay by Christopher Ricks first published in the

  Penguin English Library edition of Tristram Shandy 1967

  This edition published in Penguin Classics 1997

  Reprinted with new Chronology 2003

  1

  Copyright © the Board of Regents of the State of Florida, 1978, 2003

  Introductory essay copyright © Christopher Ricks, 1967

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editors has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  Contents

  Chronology

  Introductory Essay by Christopher Ricks

  Editor’s Introduction by Melvyn New

  Further Reading

  A Note on the Text

  The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

  Appendix: Glossary of Terms of Fortification

  Notes

  Chronology

  1713 24 November: Laurence Sterne born, Clonmel, Ireland, the second of seven children of Roger Sterne (c. 1692–1731), an army ensign, and Agnes Nuttall (d. 1759), daughter of an army provisioner.

  1715–23 The family lived in and around military camps in the Dublin area.

  1723 Sent to live with his uncle Richard in Yorkshire and attended school in the village of Hipperholme.

  1731 Roger Sterne dies and is buried at his last posting, Port Antonio, Jamaica, 31 July.

  1733 Entered Jesus College, Cambridge, where several ancestors had preceded him; BA, 1737; MA, 1740.

  1738 Assumed vicarage of Sutton-on-the-Forest, a village eight miles north of York, his home and his vocation for the next twenty-two years.

  1741 30 March: marriage to Elizabeth Lumley (1714–73), described by her cousin, Elizabeth Montagu, as a woman of many virtues, ‘but they stand like quills upon the fretfull porcupine’.

  1747 1 December: daughter, Lydia, born. In this year Sterne published a sermon in York, ‘The Case of Elijah and the Widow of Zerephath’; earlier in the decade he had written political tracts in response to local quarrels, an activity he later said he regretted.

  1750 Published, in York, ‘The Abuses of Conscience’ sermon, later to appear, almost verbatim, in volume II of Tristram Shandy, in which Trim reads the sermon to Walter, Toby and Dr. Slop.

  1758 Sterne responded to a local church dispute with a satirical pamphlet, A Political Romance (after Sterne’s death often reprinted as The History of a Good Warm Watch-Coat ), published in January 1759. It was suppressed by the clergy, and only six copies survived.

  1759 May: Sterne offered to Robert Dodsley a manuscript of what would eventually be volumes I and II of Tristram Shandy. Dodsley rejected it.

  December: volumes I and II of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in York, at Sterne’s expense. Copies were sent to London, where it became an immediate success.

  1760 Dodsley paid Sterne handsomely for the rights to a second edition of the first two volumes (published in April, with an illustration by William Hogarth and a dedication to William Pitt), two new volumes, and two volumes of Sermons of Mr. Yorick (published in May, with a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds).

  May: returned to Yorkshire, to a new home in Coxwold, twelve miles north of York. ‘Shandy Hall’, his residence there, is a National Trust site today, and houses the larg
est collection of Sterneiana in the world.

  1761 January: volumes III and IV of Tristram Shandy published, with an illustration by Hogarth. Many imitations of Sterne were published in these years.

  1762 January: volumes V and VI of Tristram Shandy published. Sterne changed publishers from Dodsley to Becket and de Hondt, probably to enhance his financial stake; he signed each copy of the first page of text of volume V, in response to his imitators. After publication, Sterne and his family departed for the south of France, in an effort to recover his failing health (a tubercular ailment).

  February–May: visited the Paris salons, meeting Diderot, d’Holbach, Hume, Wilkes and others. Hishealth failed again, and he spent almost all of the next two years in and around Toulouse.

  1764 June: returned to England.

  1765 January: volumes VII and VIII of Tristram Shandy published.

  October: volumes III and IV of Sermons of Mr. Yorick published. Sterne again departed for France, touring Italy before reuniting with his family.

  1766 June: returned to England, without his wife and daughter.

  1767 January: volume IX of Tristram Shandy published. Sterne began an affair with Eliza Draper (1744–78), a married Anglo-Indian woman of twenty-two, the addressee of his Bramine’s Journal; she returned to India and her husband in April. The Journal, from April to the end of the summer, was recovered from an attic in the mid-nineteenth century.

  1768 February: published A Sentimental Journey in two volumes.

  18 March: Sterne died in London. David Garrick wrote his epitaph: ‘Shall Pride a heap of Sculptur’d Marble raise, / Some unmourn’d, worthless, titled Fool to praise? / And shall we not by one poor Grave-stone learn, / Where Humor, wit and Genius sleep with Sterne?’

  1769 Volumes V, VI and VII of Sermons published posthumously, under the auspices of his daughter, bringing the total number of published sermons to forty-five.

  Introductory Essay

  by Christopher Ricks

  Tristram Shandy is the greatest shaggy-dog story in the language. Like all the best shaggy-dog stories, it is somewhat bawdy, preposterously comic, brazenly exasperating and very shrewd in its understanding of human responses. Laurence Sterne himself has a concluding friendly jibe at his readers by insisting that they have been spending their time on a cock-and-bull story. Since Sterne’s world is one of delightful topsyturvydom, it is hardly surprising that a good starting-point should be the novel’s closing words. We have been told how Uncle Toby’s amours have faded into unconsummated nothingness, and now we hear that the parish bull is not up to its work – you could say that the bull breeds nothing but disappointment. At which the novel ends, with one of the characters voicing just that mingled irritation and affection which Sterne has dexterously created in his readers:

  L –– d! said my mother, what is all this story about?——

  A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick——And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.

  The shaggy-dog story and the cock-and-bull story are cousins of the ‘Irish bull’, and Sterne was brought up in Ireland. So it is not surprising that one of Sterne’s earliest commentators, John Ferriar, should have been put in mind of the ‘Irish bull’. Ferriar mentioned the famous opening paragraph of Swift’s first Drapier’s Letter: ‘Read this Paper with the utmost Attention, or get it read to you by others’; and he went on to speak of ‘the old story in the jest books, where a templar leaves a note in the key-hole, directing the finder, if he cannot read it, to carry it to the stationer at the gate, who will read it for him’. That comic illogicality, expanded and varied in a thousand ways, is – as Ferriar saw – the stuff of Tristram Shandy.

  From the moment of publication, Tristram Shandy had its enemies. Its fame in the 1760s might sweep England, and make the author famous and rich, fêted in London and Paris. But there were voices saying that the book was obscene, or pointless, or deficient in everything that a novel ought to provide. The fact that pointlessness was one of Sterne’s points, that he was out to flout and taunt humdrum expectations – this meant little. By 1776 the greatest critic of the age, Dr Johnson, could asseverate that ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’ A Cambridge don in 1765 had been as massively confident about the fate of this nonsensical book:

  Mark my words, and remember what I say to you; however much it may be talked about at present, yet, depend upon it, in the course of twenty years, should any one wish to refer to the book in question, he will be obliged to go to an antiquary to inquire for it.

  The don it was that died. Tristram Shandy goes marching on – or, in Sterne’s mockingly seedy words, it has managed to ‘swim down the gutter of Time’.

  Sterne inveigles us into a predicament, and so neatly that we cannot help joining in his laughter at us. Just what the predicament is can be seen from a standard work of reference, the Oxford Companion to English Literature. It sets out to summarize Tristram Shandy for us:

  In spite of the title, the book gives us very little of the life, and nothing of the opinions, of the nominal hero, who gets born only in vol. iv, and breeched in vol. vi, and then disappears from the story. Instead we have a group of humorous figures: Walter Shandy of Shandy Hall, Tristram’s father, peevish but frank and generous, full of paradoxical notions, which he defends with great show of learning; ‘my uncle Toby’, his brother, wounded in the groin at the siege of Namur, whose hobby is the science of attacking fortified towns, which he studies by means of miniature scarps, ravelins, and bastions on his bowling-green, a man ‘of unparalleled modesty’ and amiability; Corporal Trim, his servant, wounded in the knee at Landen, devoted to his master and sharing his enthusiasm for the military art, voluble but respectful. Behind these three major figures, the minor characters, Yorick the parson, Dr Slop, Mrs Shandy, and the widow Wadman, play a more elusive part…

  Sterne would have relished the fact that such a summary, useful though it is, suggests a man throwing up his hands or throwing in the sponge.

  That Sterne was a creative genius was not evident till he was in his forty-seventh year. It was then, in 1759, that he published the first two books of Tristram Shandy. Till then he had been merely a Yorkshire priest who dabbled in writing. A few sermons; a satirical squib called A Political Romance (later The History of a Good Warm Watch Coat ), attacking ecclesiastical chicanery in York – these are not evidence of genius, and they had not brought him fame.

  He was born on 24 November 1713, in Clonmel in Ireland, the son of an ensign in the army. (His memories of military life may have influenced the characterization of Uncle Toby.) His father died in 1731, and his mother stayed in Ireland. His opportunity to attend Jesus College, Cambridge, was provided by a generous cousin. Sterne did not prove a distinguished student, but he read widely – and he made a lifelong friend, John Hall (later Hall-Stevenson), rich, eccentric, dissolute, and the future patron of a revelling set which Sterne attended, ‘the Demoniacs’. Already, while still at the university, Sterne suffered a haemorrhage of the lungs; ill-health was to dog him, and to produce some of the most courageously humorous passages in Tristram Shandy. With the help of uncle Jaques, precentor and canon of York, Sterne earned his livings. He took holy orders, became a priest in 1738 and was presented to the vicarage of Sutton-on-the-Forest near York. His experiences during twenty years were to furnish or at least suggest those of Parson Yorick, a veiled self-portrait, mocking but not self-lacerating. He progressed to a prebendal stall at York, and then to a richer one, and in 1741 he married Elizabeth Lumley, whom he had courted for two years. It was not to be the happiest of marriages.

  His life was unobtrusive and cultivated. An amateur painter and musician (these other arts are wittily invoked in Tristram Shandy), he was also something of a writer. But it was not until 1759 – immediately following the suppression of The Good Warm Watch-Coat, which had offended local susceptibilities – that he began The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. His marriage was crumbling, and his wife was temporarily insane.
It was against this grim background that he flung himself into a work of exuberant humour. After six weeks he had reached Chapter XVIII; after six months, the first two volumes were completed. His offer to the publisher Dodsley was at first rejected. But a small edition was put out, and Sterne found himself famous. Acclaimed by men as different as David Garrick and Bishop Warburton, Sterne had hospitality and flattery lavished on him. He was commissioned to supply fresh volumes. He was invited to Windsor. His portrait was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. ‘I wrote, not to be fed but to be famous’, he said.

  The Sermons of Mr. Yorick were rushed out in 1760, scandalizing many people, not by their substance, but by their title. Yet Sterne delighted in scandalizing people, and scandal is a form of fame. He did not relax; Volumes III and IV of Tristram Shandy were finished by the end of 1760, and Volumes V and VI by the end of 1761. The strain can hardly have helped his health, and he was sent to the south of France to recuperate. The recuperation included being idolized by Parisian society. Mrs Sterne and the daughter Lydia were sent for, and Sterne spent more than a year in Toulouse. (His foreign travel was adapted for Volume VII of Tristram Shandy.) The family moved about France, and in 1764 Sterne was ‘heartily tired’ of it. He returned to England, leaving his family at their request. He had been away for more than two and a half years. But Tristram Shandy had by no means been neglected in England, though increasingly deplored, vilified, and sniffed at. Volumes VII and VIII were published in 1765. Still in ill-health, Sterne took a trip of seven months in France and Italy, from which he was to create A Sentimental Journey, a traveller’s tale of great charm, which he planned after the completion of Volume IX of Tristram Shandy in 1766.

  Visiting London in 1766, he met Mrs Eliza Draper, then in her twenties. With her he engaged in a sentimental and flowery love-affair, broken after a few months by her return to her middle-aged husband in Bombay. (Sterne’s mawkish Journal to Eliza was not published until 1904.) The homecoming of Mrs Sterne did not improve matters, but she was persuaded to return to France. A Sentimental Journey was completed, and published in February 1768. A month later, Sterne was fatally ill; influenza became pleurisy, and he died on 18 March 1768. His brief but hectic writing life was over, and he left debts of £1,100 and assets of £400. Fortunately he had also left a comic masterpiece.