Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey (Modern Library Series)

by Laurence Sterne

Overview

Tristram Shandy provoked a literary sensation when it first appeared in a series of installments between 1759 and 1767. The ribald, high-spirited book prompted Diderot to hail Sterne as 'the English Rabelais.' An ingeniously structured novel (about writing a novel) that fascinates like a verbal game of chess, Tristram Shandy is both a joyful celebration of the infinite possibilities of the art of fiction and a wry demonstration of its limitations. Many view this picaresque masterpiece as the precursor of the modern novel.

A Sentimental Journey, which came out in 1768, begins as a travelogue. Yet it ends as a treasury of portraits, sketches, and philosophical musings, for as Virginia Woolf observed: 'A Sentimental Journey, for all its levity and wit, is based upon something fundamentally philosophic--the philosophy of pleasure.'

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679641964
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/10/1999
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	752
Sales rank:	889,695
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Laurence Sterne was born on November 24, 1713, at Clonmel in Tipperary, Ireland. His father, Roger, was an itinerant army ensign, the black-sheep son of a prominent family of Yorkshire gentry and grandson of the archbishop of York; his mother was the daughter of an army provisioner. Sterne's early childhood was spent traveling between Ireland and England as his father's fortunes dictated; not until he was ten years old did the boy permanently settle in Yorkshire. From 1723 until his father's death in Jamaica in 1731 he was sent to school near Halifax. In 1733 he entered Jesus College, Cambridge. Less than two months after taking his B.A. degree in 1737, Sterne was ordained a deacon and, like many deserving but impoverished young men of his station, embarked on a career in the church. His first appointment was to the curacy of St. Ives, but a year later in 1738 he was invested into the priesthood and named vicar of Suton-on-the-Forest, a village some eight miles north of York.

There, in 'a bye corner of the kingdom,' as he later described it, Sterne passed the next twenty years of his life as an unobtrusive yet cultivated rural clergyman. In 1741, after a one-year courtship, he married Elizabeth Lumley, daughter of the vicar of perhaps the richest parish in Yorkshire, and through his wife's influence received additional income by becoming vicar of the neighboring parish of Stillington. The marriage was generally unhappy, although it did produce a daughter, Lydia, who was born in 1747.

During the 1740s and 1750s Sterne engaged in a brief flurry of political writing, and some of his pieces have been identified in surviving issues of the York Gazetteer, a paper representing Whig interests. In addition, he published several sermons; one, 'The Abuses of the Conscience,' is noteworthy because Sterne later included it verbatim in Tristram Shandy. Yet it was the appearance in 1759 of his witty, satiric pamphlet entitled A Political Romance--which lambasted members of the York church courts for their pettiness and venality--that proved the turning point in Sterne's fortunes.

Within the year he was able to offer Robert Dodsley, the most famous printer/publisher in London, a manuscript of the first two volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The publication in December 1759 of the initial installment of Tristram Shandy transported Sterne, at the age of forty-six, from his country pulpit to the center of London's literary world. The book was an immediate success. 'Who has not 'Tristram Shandy' read?/Is any mortal so ill-bred?' wrote James Boswell in a famous epistle. Sterne was invited to Windsor, and his portrait was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. One wealthy admirer even presented him with the living of the parish of Coxwold. Sterne settled there in a house he named Shandy Hall; the house still stands in this beautiful village fifteen miles north of York. The country parson turned bestselling author basked in his celebrity: 'I wrote, not be fed but to be famous,' he said. Between 1761 and 1767 he brought out seven more volumes of Tristram Shandy.

Despite Dr. Johnson's famous criticism of the book in 1776 ('Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last') and its censorship in Victorian times (most notably by Thackeray), Tristram Shandy endures today as an innovative masterpiece that anticipated by nearly two centuries the work of such modern writers as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. Novelist Milan Kundera calls it his favorite eighteenth-century novel, one that reaches 'heights of playfulness, of lightness, never scaled before or since.' Kundera considers why the book seems so contemporary: 'Sterne starts it by describing the night when Tristram was conceived, but he has barely begun to talk about that when another idea suddenly attracts him, and by free association that idea spurs him to some other thought, then a further anecdote, with one digression leading to another--and Tristram, the book's hero, is forgotten for a good hundred pages. This extravagant way of composing the novel might seem to suggest no more than a formal game. But in art, the form is always more than a form. Every novel, like it or not, offers some answer to the question What is human existence, and wherein does its poetry lie? . . . The answer we sense in Sterne's novel is . . . the poetry lies not in the action but in the interruption of the action.'

Even though later volumes of Tristram Shandy did not create the stir of the first few, the roar and applause that initially greeted the book never completely subsided during the remainder of his lifetime. Indeed, Sterne alternated bouts of being lionized in London with recuperative continental travels, for he suffered from tuberculosis and was continually plagued by ill-health. His sole remaining work, A Sentimental Journey, was published in February 1768; it was based on Sterne's escapades during a seven-month tour by coach through France and Italy. Partly inspired by the author's brief infatuation with a much younger woman, the book is a tale of great charm devoted to what Virginia Woolf termed 'the religion of happiness.' Assessing Sterne's remarkable literary achievement in A Sentimental Journey, Woolf noted: 'No writing seems to flow more exactly into the very folds and creases of the individual mind, to express its changing moods, to answer its lightest whim and impulse, and yet the result is perfectly precise and composed. The utmost fluidity exists with the utmost permanence. It is as if the tide raced over the beach hither and thither and left every ripple and eddy cut on the sand in marble.'

On March 18, 1768, a month following the appearance of A Sentimental Journey, Laurence Sterne died in London of pleurisy, leaving debts of ú1,100. Many conflicting rumors surrounded the details of Sterne's burial. Some said he was interred at St. George's Hanover Square cemetery in Paddington. Others maintained his body was dug up only days after the funeral and sold to a professor of anatomy at Cambridge; recognizing Sterne midway through dissection, the physician supposedly returned the stolen corpse to its grave. In 1969 skeletal remains generally acknowledged after scientific examination as Sterne's were reburied in the Coxwold churchyard.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER I


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; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;--that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;--and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:----Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,----I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world from that in which the reader is likely to see me.--Believe me, good folks, this is not so inconsiderable a thing as many of you may think it;--you have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused from father to son, &c. &c.--and a great deal to that purpose:--Well, you may take my word that nine parts in ten of a man's sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracks and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, 'tis not a halfpenny matter,--away they go cluttering like hey-go-mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it.

Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?----Good G--! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,----Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying?----Nothing.

CHAPTER II


----Then, positively, there is nothing in the question that I can see, either good or bad.----Then let me tell you, Sir, it was a very unseasonable question at least,--because it scattered and dispersed the animal spirits, whose business it was to have escorted and gone hand-in-hand with the HOMUNCULUS, and conducted him safe to the place destined for his reception.

The HOMUNCULUS, Sir, in however low and ludicrous a light he may appear, in this age of levity, to the eye of folly or prejudice;----to the eye of reason in scientific research, he stands confessed----a BEING guarded and circumscribed with rights:----The minutest philosophers, who, by the bye, have the most enlarged understandings, (their souls being inversely as their enquiries), shew us incontestably, That the HOMUNCULUS is created by the same hand,--engendered in the same course of nature,--endowed with the same locomotive powers and faculties with us:----That he consists, as we do, of skin, hair, fat, flesh, veins, arteries, ligaments, nerves, cartilages, bones, marrow, brains, glands, genitals, humours, and articulations;----is a Being of as much activity,----and, in all senses of the word, as much and as truly our fellow creature as my Lord Chancellor of England.--He may be benefited, he may be injured,--he may obtain redress;--in a word, he has all the claims and rights of humanity which Tully, Puffendorff, or the best ethic writers allow to arise out of that state and relation.

Now, dear Sir, what if any accident had befallen him in his way alone?----or that, through terror of it, natural to so young a traveller, my little gentleman had got to his journey's end miserably spent;----his muscular strength and virility worn down to a thread;--his own animal spirits ruffled beyond description,----and that in this sad disordered state of nerves, he had laid down a prey to sudden starts, or a series of melancholy dreams and fancies for nine long, long months together.----I tremble to think what a foundation had been laid for a thousand weaknesses both of body and mind, which no skill of the physician or the philosopher could ever afterwards have set thoroughly to rights.

CHAPTER III


To my uncle Mr. Toby Shandy do I stand indebted for the preceding anecdote, to whom my father, who was an excellent natural philosopher, and much given to close reasoning upon the smallest matters, had oft, and heavily complained of the injury; but once more particularly, as my uncle Toby well remembered, upon his observing a most unaccountable obliquity, (as he called it) in my manner of setting up my top, and justifying the principles upon which I had done it,--the old gentleman shook his head, and in a tone more expressive by half of sorrow than reproach,--he said his heart all along foreboded, and he saw it verified in this, and from a thousand other observations he had made upon me, That I should neither think nor act like any other man's child:----But alas! continued he, shaking his head a second time, and wiping away a tear which was trickling down his cheeks, My Tristram's misfortunes began nine months before ever he came into the world.

----My mother, who was sitting by, looked up,--but she knew no more than her backside what my father meant,--but my uncle, Mr. Toby Shandy, who had been often informed of the affair,--understood him very well.

CHAPTER IV


I know there are readers in the world, as well as many other good people in it, who are no readers at all,--who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of everything which concerns you.

It is in pure compliance with this humour of theirs, and from a backwardness in my nature to disappoint any one soul living, that I have been so very particular already. As my life and opinions are likely to make some noise in the world, and, if I conjecture right, will take in all ranks, professions, and denominations of men whatever,--be no less read than the Pilgrim's Progress itself--and, in the end, prove the very thing which Montaigne dreaded his essays should turn out, that is, a book for a parlour window;--I find it necessary to consult everyone a little in his turn; and therefore must beg pardon for going on a little further in the same way: For which cause, right glad I am that I have begun the history of myself in the way I have done; and that I am able to go on tracing everything in it, as Horace says, ab Ovo.

Horace, I know, does not recommend this fashion altogether: But that gentleman is speaking only of an epic poem or a tragedy;--(I forget which)--besides, if it was not so, I should beg Mr. Horace's pardon;--for in writing what I have set about, I shall confine myself neither to his rules, nor to any man's rules that ever lived.

To such, however, as do not choose to go so far back into these things, I can give no better advice than that they skip over the remaining part of this Chapter; for I declare beforehand, 'tis wrote only for the curious and inquisitive.

--------------------Shut the door.-------------------- I was begot in the night, betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighteen. I am positive I was.----But how I came to be so very particular in my account of a thing which happened before I was born, is owing to another small anecdote known only in our own family, but now made public for the better clearing up this point.

My father, you must know, who was originally a Turkey merchant, but had left off business for some years, in order to retire to, and die upon, his paternal estate in the county of --------, was, I believe, one of the most regular men in everything he did, whether 'twas matter of business, or matter of amusement, that ever lived. As a small specimen of this extreme exactness of his, to which he was in truth a slave,--he had made it a rule for many years of his life,--on the first Sunday night of every month throughout the whole year,--as certain as ever the Sunday night came,----to wind up a large house clock which we had standing upon the backstairs head, with his own hands:--And being somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age at the time I have been speaking of,--he had likewise gradually brought some other little family concernments to the same period, in order, as he would often say to my uncle Toby, to get them all out of the way at one time, and be no more plagued and pestered with them the rest of the month.

It was attended but with one misfortune, which, in a great measure, fell upon myself, and the effects of which I fear I shall carry with me to my grave; namely, that, from an unhappy association of ideas which have no connection in nature, it so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up,--but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popped into her head,--and vice versa:--which strange combination of ideas the sagacious Locke, who certainly understood the nature of these things better than most men, affirms to have produced more wry actions than all other sources of prejudice whatsoever.

But this by the bye.

Now it appears, by a memorandum in my father's pocketbook, which now lies upon the table, 'That on Lady Day, which was on the 25th of the same month in which I date my geniture,--my father set out upon his journey to London with my eldest brother, Bobby, to fix him at Westminster school;' and, as it appears from the same authority, 'That he did not get down to his wife and family till the second week in May following'--it brings the thing almost to a certainty. However, what follows in the beginning of the next chapter puts it beyond all possibility of doubt.

--------But pray, Sir, What was your father doing all December,--January, and February?----Why, Madam,--he was all that time afflicted with a Sciatica.

CHAPTER V


On the fifth day of November, 1718, which to the era fixed on, was as near nine calendar months as any husband could in reason have expected,--was I Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, brought forth into this scurvy and disastrous world of ours.--I wish I had been born in the Moon, or in any of the planets (except Jupiter or Saturn, because I never could bear cold weather) for it could not well have fared worse with me in any of them (though I will not answer for Venus) than it has in this vile, dirty planet of ours,--which o' my conscience, with reverence be it spoken, I take to be made up of the shreds and clippings of the rest;----not but the planet is well enough, provided a man could be born in it to a great title or to a great estate; or could anyhow contrive to be called up to public charges, and employments of dignity or power;--but that is not my case;----and therefore every man will speak of the fair as his own market has gone in it;--for which cause I affirm it over again to be one of the vilest worlds that ever was made;--for I can truly say, that from the first hour I drew my breath in it, to this, that I can now scarce draw it at all, for an asthma I got in skating against the wind in Flanders;----I have been the continual sport of what the world calls fortune; and though I will not wrong her by saying, She has ever made me feel the weight of any great or signal evil;--yet with all the good temper in the world, I affirm it of her, that in every stage of my life, and at every turn and corner where she could get fairly at me, the ungracious Duchess has pelted me with a set of as pitiful misadventures and cross accidents as ever small HERO sustained.

What People are Saying About This

Virginia Woolf

Sterne's is a world in which anything may happen. We are as close to life as we can be.