Novel
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Laurence Sterne · 1759
Opening lines
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me […]
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
Tristram Shandy sets out to tell the story of his life and starts it from his conception, disturbed by his mother asking his father whether he has wound the clock. He is not born until the third volume: before that come his father's theories on first names, the wound Uncle Toby received at the siege of Namur and the fortifications he reconstructs with Corporal Trim on the bowling green of the garden. The birth goes badly: Dr Slop's forceps crush the child's nose. The book breaks off, starts again, skips chapters and addresses the reader directly.
Context
Nine volumes appeared in five instalments between 1759 and 1767, four pairs and a last volume on its own, and its author died the following year. The book treats print as a material: a page entirely black for a mourning, a blank page for the reader to draw a woman on, lines that trace the curve of the digressions, and a page marbled by hand in each copy, and therefore different from one to the next. A London bookseller had refused to give fifty pounds for the first two volumes; their author had them printed at his own expense in York in December 1759 and sent a few copies to London. A few months later, the same house gave him two hundred and fifty, and three hundred and eighty for the next two.
Who it is for
More than six hundred pages in eighteenth-century English, translated into French, where the digressions take up more room than the story.
Prizes and reception
An immediate success, and so widely imitated that its author signed with his own hand the first-edition copies of volumes five, seven and nine in order to distinguish his own.
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