Tristram Shandy (Routledge Revivals)

Max Byrd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138777699
• eBook ISBN: 9781317678557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Max Byrd's lucidly written and compelling volume aims to provide a scholarly introduction to one of the most puzzling pieces of eighteenth-century literature, and a stimulus to critical thought and discussion. Laurence Sterne – an eccentric and largely unsuccessful clergyman - was forty-six when he sat down in January of 1759 to being his literary masterpiece. Aside from his sermons, only two of which had ever been published, Sterne had little more to do with the literary life than any other respectable provincial clergyman. His explosion into the history of English literature occurred not only without preparation, but also without apparent aptitude.

Tristram Shandy, first published in 1985, sketches Sterne's life and literary antecedents, closely analysing key passages of his great satire and concluding with the critical history and bibliography. It will thus be of use to all students of eighteenth-century English literature.

CHAPTER 1

‘A Picture of Myself’

Like other great eighteenth-century novelists, Laurence Sterne came to fiction late in life: he was 46 years old when he sat down in January of 1759 to begin Tristram Shandy, an eccentric, moderately unsuccessful clergyman lost to sight in the obscurity of a Yorkshire winter. But unlike Daniel Defoe, who was 59 and notorious when he began Robinson Crusoe, or Samuel Richardson, 51 at the publication of Pamela, Sterne had virtually no experience as a writer. Defoe, in fact, had filled one long shelf already with volumes of journalism, political tracts and even poetry; and Richardson, a prosperous printer licensed to the House of Commons, had all his life been engaged in some kind of literary production and had even written a book himself of specimen letters on various subjects – polite fictions – for his readers to emulate. In retrospect their steps from journalism and letter-books to the novel seem natural and short. But apart from his sermons, only two of which had ever been published, and a trickle of polemical newspaper articles for the York Gazetteer, Sterne had had little more to do with the literary life than any other decently educated provincial minister – one could point to a hundred candidates, younger, with better claims to literary distinction or literary promise. And yet after hastily scribbling in the early days of January 1759 two separate versions of a satirical pamphlet against a local cleric (A Political Romance), and starting and abandoning two chapters of an untitled imitation of Rabelais, Sterne exploded into the history of English literature. By the end of May he was offering the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy to the eminent London publisher Robert Dodsley, and by March of the next year he was at Dodsley’s side in London, overseeing a second edition and signing a contract for two more volumes of Shandy at the enormous sum of £630. In another two years he would boast, not without reason, that a letter addressed simply Tristram Shandy, Europe’ would reach him without delay.¹

It is familiar enough by now that a book can confer instant celebrity – in the eighteenth century Richardson, Goethe, Rousseau all enjoyed vogues similar to Sterne’s. It is plausible as well that a vision and even a style can mature in long, obscure silence, as Proust’s did. But it deepens the puzzle of Sterne’s genius that these things happened not only without preparation, but also without apparent aptitude. In this chapter, accordingly, I want first to supplement briefly the biographical and bibliographical information usually found in editions of Tristram Shandy, then to discuss at somewhat greater length the vexed but central question of Sterne’s personality.

(i) BIOGRAPHICAL

His father Roger Sterne was the younger son of a wealthy Yorkshire landowner, descendant of an old and distinguished family whose most notable member, Richard Sterne, had been both Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, and Archbishop of York. Fired perhaps by Marlborough’s great victories on the Continent, or possibly angered by a family quarrel, Roger left home in 1710 at the early age of 16 or 17 and enlisted in the 34th Regiment of Foot. Almost a year later he was promoted in the field to ensign, the lowest rank of commissioned officer; and there he remained until a second field promotion to lieutenant four months before his death, although his elder brother Richard could have afforded at any time to purchase him a higher rank. If a quarrel did exist between the two brothers, it can only have been exacerbated by Roger Sterne’s rash and ill-advised marriage in 1711 to Agnes Herbert, a woman of low birth, widow of a captain and daughter of an army ‘sutler’ (camp provisioner). Two years later, the homunculus having been safely escorted by the animal spirits, Laurence was born on 24 November 1713 at Clonmel, Ireland, where his father’s regiment had been stationed.

Of his father, Sterne has left us a deft and affectionate sketch in his Memoirs:

My father was a little smart man—active to the last degree, in all exercises—most patient of fatigue and disappointments, of which it pleased God to give him full measure—he was in his temper somewhat rapid, and hasty—but of a kindly, sweet disposition, void of all design; and so innocent in his own intentions, that he suspected no one; so that you might have cheated him ten times in a day, if nine had not been sufficient for your purpose … (Letters, p. 3)

Of his mother, however, no such affectionate account has survived. Instead, Yorkshire gossip and Sterne’s own letters have established a genuine estrangement between mother and son, dating evidently from Sterne’s marriage and rising prosperity, when Agnes came forward to demand money, but undoubtedly having its roots in the long separation that began with the boy’s removal from Ireland to the protection of his Yorkshire relatives in 1723 or 1724. In the preceding summer two of the Sterne infants had died, a boy and a girl (only three of the children were to survive infancy), and Roger Sterne, fearful perhaps for his eldest son, ‘got leave of his colonel to fix me at school’ in England (Letters, p. 3). Thereafter Laurence was never to return to Ireland and to the rough, dangerous barrack life his mother and sisters continued to endure – camping and decamping in haste, scrambling after his father’s regiment from crowded post to crowded post. Tended by his uncle Richard Sterne and surrounded by his well-connected cousins, he studied Latin and Greek at the Hipperholme Grammar School in a pleasant village near Halifax and the family seat. (At the time of his ordination the school was to present him with a bill for nine years’ tuition and supplies.) Meanwhile Roger Sterne, who like Uncle Toby had seen action in earlier sieges, was posted in 1727 to take part in the siege of Gibraltar; there he fought an unlucky duel with a fellow-officer (about a goose, according to the Memoirs) that saw him pierced by his opponent’s rapier and pinned to the wall. Four years later, constitution still impaired by the injury, Sterne relates, ‘he was sent to Jamaica, where he soon fell by the country fever, which took away his senses first, and made a child of him, and then, in a month or two, walking about continually without complaining, till the moment he sat down in an arm chair, and breathed his last’ (Letters, p. 3). In 1733, supported now by an allowance from a cousin also named Richard, at the relatively advanced age of 20, Sterne entered Jesus College, Cambridge, to which other members of his family had belonged.

From that point on his career was fixed on the church. Whether or not he felt a genuine calling – and his clerical sincerity, like Swift’s, has often been questioned – family tradition alone, beginning with the great weight of Archbishop Sterne’s example, would have exerted sufficient pressure; and it is entirely possible that his cousin Richard had also insisted on his taking orders as a condition of the allowance. In any case, however, no other realistic possibilities existed. Sterne had been an indifferent student – bored perhaps by the fossilized curriculum at Cambridge, developing already a Shandyesque eye for the ridiculousness of learned lumber – he would have been unlikely to turn in the direction of seeking a place in government or a private house, the only real alternatives for an impoverished university gentleman in the eighteenth century. And a military career like his father’s, if he ever considered it, would also have been out of the question: out of the question for a reason that was profoundly to affect the very texture of Sterne’s life and of his masterpiece Tristram Shandy. His sister Anne – ‘this pretty blossom’, Sterne wrote in the Memoirs – had died at the age of 3 in the Dublin barracks: ‘she was, as I well remember, of a fine delicate frame, not made to last long, as were most of my father’s babes’ (Letters, p. 2). ‘Lorry Slim’, to use his own nickname, had inherited the family delicacy. Six feet tall, with spider legs and a ‘thin, dry … rarified’ figure, at some point during his Cambridge years he suffered the first of a series of terrifying, lifelong consumptive episodes: a vessel burst in his lungs while he slept and filled his bed with blood (‘in two hours, thou lost as many quarts of blood’, Tristram reports nonchalantly of himself; ‘and hadst thou lost as much more, did not the faculty tell thee——it would have amounted to a gallon?’).² For pulmonary tuberculosis such as that there was no cure. ‘That death-looking, long-striding scoundrel of a scare-sinner … is posting after me,’ Tristram would say with a constant backward glance (VII, vii). Thereafter Sterne’s whole adult life was to see periods of good health alternating precipitously with disabling fits of weakness, exhaustion, nervous apprehension. Having little choice, and with a foretaste of his own mortality that must have for a time turned every ambition to ashes, Sterne left Cambridge in the spring of 1737 and submitted quietly to the mysterious dispensations of Anglican preferment.

For the next twenty years he served as a cleric at Sutton, near York, at first under the protection of his influential uncle Jaques Sterne, over politics, however, Jaques withdrew his patronage and Sterne quarrel with Jaques on a dispute about a mistress.) It is not the least of found all further advancement blocked. While resident at Sutton and still on good terms with his uncle, he took the further step of marrying, not rashly and below himself as his father had done, but not well. Elizabeth Lumley was a spinster of 26 when Sterne, after a courtship of nearly two years, married her in York Minster on 30 March 1741. Like Sterne she was consumptive, in delicate health, and like him, too, she had influential relatives in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of York. She brought with her not only a small income derived from her parents’ estate, but also a stubborn, intransigent temper that was to sit badly with the increasingly odd, not to say flighty, temper of her husband. By no account is the marriage reported to have been a happy one – ‘wife.—— ’Tis a shrill, penetrating sound of itself,’ says Tristram (V, v). ‘Sterne and his Wife,’ wrote their friend and neighbour John Croft, ‘tho’ they did not gee well together, for she used to say herself, that the largest House in England cou’d not contain them both, on account of their Turmoils and Disputes, they were every day writing and addressing Love Letters to one another …’ (Croft, p. 234). The chief cause of unhappiness – in the beginning, at least – was not incompatibility of temper, but what Croft bluntly called Sterne’s ‘infidelity to the Marriage Bed’ (Croft, p. 226). A family servant, Richard Greenwood, was much later to recall that ‘He used to accompany his master whenever Sterne came to York, & when there he rarely spent a night without a girl or two which Richard used to procure for him. He promised Richard to reward him for keeping these private amours of his secret, particularly from Mrs Sterne.’³ (York gossip blamed Laurence’s quarrel with Jacques on a dispute about a mistress.) It is not the least of the paradoxes of his character that Sterne, undoubted and indefatigable philanderer though he was, could centre his great novel around the theme of sexual impotency.

For the next decade he preached occasional sermons in York Minster, visited his eccentric college friend John Hall-Stevenson at his ‘Crazy Castle’ in the north of Yorkshire, where a motley group of literary pranksters and Rabelaisian poseurs called themselves the ‘Demoniacs’, and tended with uneven success his farm and parishes. Richard Greenwood remembers him writing sermons: ‘In person tall and thin—when [composing] would often pull down his wig over one eye & remove it from side to side’.⁴ Other York residents, spurred by Jaques Sterne, remembered his refusal to give money to his mother when she came to York from Chester, where she had been living with Sterne’s sister Catherine, a refusal that led apparently to Mrs Sterne’s brief imprisonment for a debt in 1751. The scandal, widely circulated in York, was to canker Sterne’s reputation in his own time and afterwards to heighten the disgust Victorian critics instinctively felt for a clergyman who wrote indecent novels. (‘Ah, I am as bad as that dog Sterne’, Byron wrote in his journal, ‘who preferred whining over “a dead ass to relieving a living mother”.’)⁵ Recent biographers have tended to exonerate Sterne, however, portraying his mother as unduly grasping and as the victim of Jacques Sterne’s machinations against his nephew.

If the quarrels with his mother and uncle did nothing to temper the strains in Sterne’s inherently unstable character, the nearer daily skirmishes with Elizabeth Sterne must have intensified them almost beyond measure. Along both of the two great fault-lines that threaten most marriages – sex and money – there were constant rumblings and slippages. ‘It was agreed betwixt them,’ Croft writes, ‘to have a Strong Box with a Nick in the Top and so they were to putt in what each saved out of their private expenses towards raising a Fortune for their Daughter Lidia when unhappily M^rs Sterne fell ill, and she espied Laurie breaking open the Strong Box. She fainted, and unluckily a Quarrel ensued’ (Croft, pp. 234–5). And the Letters give all too plain evidence of a quite public liaison in 1759 with a visiting actress, Catherine Fourmantel (‘What is Honey to the sweetness of thee, who art sweeter than all the flowers it comes from.—I love you to distraction Kitty’: Letters, p. 83). There is also the story John Croft set down in his ‘Anecdotes of Sterne’: ‘As an instance of his infidelity, his wife once caught him with the maid, when she pulled him out of bed on the Floor and soon after went out of her senses, when she fancied herself the Queen of Bohemia’ (Croft, p. 226). In a later collection of Yorkshire stories and jokes he enlarged the episode:

Mrs Shandy, fancied herself the Queen of Bohemia. Tristram, her husband, to amuse and induce her to take the air, proposed coursing, in the way practised in Bohemia; for that purpose he procured bladders, and filled them with beans, and tied them to the wheels of a single horse chair. When he drove madam into a stubble field, with the motion of the carriage and the bladders, rattle bladder, rattle; it alarmed the hares, and the greyhounds were ready to take them.⁶

Whether or not Croft exaggerates (Bohemia was the name of fields south of Sutton), it may well have been this sad collapse that Sterne had in mind when he explained to a friend that ‘every sentence’ of Tristram Shandy ‘had been conceived and written under the greatest Heaviness of Heart’.⁷

(ii) BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

In a letter of 23 May 1759, Sterne offered Volume 1 of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy to Robert Dodsley for £50, and promised a second volume by November if Dodsley liked it. Dodsley, however, returned the manuscript within a month, explaining that the ‘risk’ was too great and the satire too local. Undeterred, Sterne rewrote throughout the summer (‘All locality is taken out of the book—the satire general,’ he told Dodsley), finished a second volume, and returned to Dodsley in October with a new proposition. He would print a ‘lean edition, in two small volumes, of the size of Rasselas, and on the same paper and type, at my own expense’, and sell them from John Hinxman’s bookshop in York. If the book met with the success he expected, he would then ship Dodsley a portion of the first printing to be sold by him in London, and he would bargain with him for future editions and advances.⁸

The book appeared in Hinxman’s window during the last days of December 1759 and almost at once sold two hundred copies. Catheri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 ‘A Picture of Myself’
• 2 The Line of Wit: Literary Backgrounds
• 3 An Age of Sensibility
• 4 Style
• 5 The Discovery of a Key: Volumes I and II
• 6 The Indecent and the Sentimental Sublime: Volumes III–VI
• 7 ‘Joy of the Worm’: Volumes VII–IX
• 8 Critical History
• Selected Bibliography
• Index