“Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader! read…”
Sterne’s great comic novel is the fictional autobiography of Tristram Shandy, a hero who fails even to get born in the first two volumes. It contains some of the best-known and best-loved characters in English literature, including Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Parson Yorick, Dr Slop and the Widow Wadman.
Beginning with Tristram’s conception, the novel recounts his progress in “this scurvy and disasterous world of ours”, including his misnaming during baptism and his accidental circumcision by a falling sash-window at the age of five; unsurprisingly, Tristram declares that he has been “the continual sport of what the world calls Fortune”.
Tristram Shandy also offers the narrator’s “opinions”, at once facetious and highly serious, on books and learning in an age of rapidly expanding print culture, and on the changing understanding of the roles of writers and readers alike.
This revised edition retains the first edition text incorporating Sterne’s later changes, and adds two original Hogarth illustrations and a wealth of contextualizing information.
This audio guide to the book is presented by the editor, Ian Campbell Ross, of Trinity College, Dublin.
The novel before Tristram Shandy
1. Ian Campbell Ross begins this audio guide by explaining what eighteenth-century readers would have understood by the term “novel” before the publication of Tristram Shandy. To listen, click here [3:29].
2. Did the new genre of novels also mean that a new kind of readership was coming into being? Click here to find out [3:16].
Laurence Sterne and the appearance of a masterpiece
3. Ian Campbell Ross sketches out Sterne’s “life in two parts”. Click here [4:30].
4. Did the novel come out of the blue, or are there clues to its gestation in Sterne’s earlier life and work? Click here [1:59].
5. In this extract, Ian Campbell Ross describes the circumstances of the book’s first publication. Click here [3:03].
A puzzling book
6. Why does Tristram Shandy strike most readers as a puzzling work on first acquaintance? Click here [3:32].
7. The novel has a rich hinterland of quotations, allusions and references to other literature. Ian Campbell Ross discusses Sterne’s use of other books here [5:07].
8. To his contemporaries, Sterne was viewed more as a sentimentalist than a satirist. Explore what this distinction meant in the eighteenth century by clicking here [6:26].
Influences, and approaching Tristram Shandy
9. The influence of Tristram Shandy on later writers has been immense. To hear how the book expanded the possibilities of the novel, click here [5:20].
10. Does the newcomer to the book have to make special preparations before tackling it, or simply plunge in? Click here to hear Ian Campbell Ross’s view [2:48].