Study Guide to Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645424093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, thought to be a trailblazer for other books of its time and inspired by the great novelists: Francois Rabelais, Miguel de Cervantes, Michel de Montaigne, and Robert Burton. As a nine-volume novel of the 18th century, Tristram Shandy was ahead of its time for its use of humor and satire and stories about scandalous and taboo topics. Moreover, the stories included make us consider the limitations of the logic in which we put such trust, the value of theories which remain purely theoretical, and the absurdity of our ideas of time in a world where everything is relative. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Sterne’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO LAURENCE STERNE

 

LAURENCE STERNE IN HIS TIME

Among eighteenth-century novelists, Laurence Sterne stands out as one of the most engaging, and at the same time one of the most puzzling, figures. If we were to form an estimate of him based upon the remarks of his contemporaries, we would find, not a single portrait, but a bewildering variety of them. To some of his friends Sterne was the hard-working and ambitious parish clergyman and small landowner, to others the companion of riotous nights spent in drinking and telling tall tales, to still others the brilliant and incisive political pamphleteer. A surprisingly large circle of elegant women thought of him as the soulful, sentimental and occasionally passionate suitor, while his London friends, looking at him in the light of his great work, Tristram Shandy, perceived the witty and eccentric clergyman and accomplished socialite, equally ready to make the drawing room weep with a romantic tale or set it roaring with a bawdy one. All of these pictures of Sterne are true ones; he was a man with an extraordinary diversity both of talents and of masks which he presented to the outside world. Part of the confusion which surrounds Sterne has its origin in the contrast between the (relative) conventionality of his life and the wild unconventionality of his work. To understand this fascinating man we must first look at the age that produced him, which was itself an age of contradictions.

BACKGROUND: ENGLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

England, during Sterne’s life (he lived from 1713 to 1768) was prosperous, class-conscious, beginning to realize its influence as an international power. The English had a strongly developed sense of national identity and pride, but there were threats to stability as a result of religious divisions between Presbyterians (Dissenters), Catholics, and members of the Church of England (the Established Church), and because of the political rivalry between Whigs and Tories. The Established Church, with its Episcopalian religious tenets, was supported by the government; its clergymen formed a solidly entrenched class, fiercely jealous of its rights and privileges. The decision to enter the Church was rarely a call to the religious life, but far more often simply a method of making a living without excessive effort, and often a very prosperous one. Appointments to a parish church (significantly, they were called “livings”) were often controlled by local magnates or the nobility. A clergyman with influence could frequently get himself appointed rector of a number of parishes, thus collecting the fixed income connected with each church while appointing a subordinate at a nominal wage to do the actual parish work. This custom was called “pluralism,” and although religious reformers objected to it, it was an accepted and very widespread practice.

THE CLIMATE OF LITERATURE

The eighteenth century’s golden age of literature, the Augustan Age (roughly the first quarter of the century) was over by the time Sterne was old enough to take an interest in such things. In matters of taste, however, Augustan cleverness and elegance, together with that elusive quality called wit, were still highly prized. At the same time the literate public was rapidly expanding, and the lower-class portion of it was demanding more excitement, scandal and sentiment in its reading matter. With the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740, the novel became an accepted form. As we shall see, Sterne in his own writing tried to cater to all sectors of the reading public, and he was sufficiently in tune with his era to produce almost exactly what it wanted to read. In Tristram Shandy he combined wit and sentiment in a format which is part novel, part essay, partly indescribable and wholly original.

STERNE’S EARLY YEARS

Laurence Sterne was born in the small Irish town of Clonmel on November 24, 1713. His ancestors had been people of some importance in England; a great-grandfather was Archbishop of York, but Laurence’s father was an impoverished career officer in the Army who never rose above the rank of lieutenant. The author’s boyhood seems to have been relatively uneventful, except for the fact that he fell into a mill stream and was swept under the turning mill wheel, to emerge bruised but alive on the other side. His extraordinary survival made him, temporarily, a local celebrity. Financial help from relatives enabled him to go to school in England, and despite the death of his father when Laurence was eighteen, he entered Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1733. A number of the young man’s relatives were clergymen, and the Church seemed the obvious and in fact the only sensible professional career for him. Sterne received a B.A. from Cambridge in 1737 and the M.A. in 1740. During his college years he revealed the first symptoms of the tuberculosis which would periodically make him an invalid in later life and eventually cause his death.

THE RISING YOUNG CLERGYMAN

At this crucial point in his career Sterne came under the wing of his uncle, Dr. Jaques Sterne, Precentor of York. (The Precentorship was an important ecclesiastical office connected with York Cathedral.) Dr. Sterne was a fanatical Whig, one of the many Church of England clergymen who supported the policies of the crafty Whig Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and opposed the return to the throne of the Stuart line in the person of Bonnie Prince Charles. It seems clear that Dr. Sterne intended to use his nephew’s literary talents to fight his own political battles. With the help of his uncle’s influence, Laurence was ordained to the priesthood and made vicar of the parish of Sutton-in-the-Forest, just north of the city of York, in 1738, with an annual income of forty pounds. In 1741, after a courtship marked by effusive letters which read like excerpts from Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, he married Elizabeth Lumley. Sterne’s was a typical eighteenth-century marriage. When his friends commented on the “suitability” of the union, they meant that the income from Elizabeth’s small fortune matched the young vicar’s own salary. For a number of years the future author busied himself with writing political pamphlets for this uncle, managing parish affairs and farming the lands attached to his parsonage, varying these activities by occasional visits to his college friend John Hall-Stevenson. The companions who assembled at the house of this wealthy and lively young squire, for sessions of roistering, drinking, and storytelling, called themselves the “Demoniacks.” They christened Hall-Stevenson’s estate “Crazy Castle,” but their activities seem to have been more high-spirited than vicious. Few people expressed any surprise that Sterne, a clergyman, should take part in such goings-on. Two events now conspired to turn Sterne’s thoughts toward writing for publication and profit. The first was the success of his satire on a conniving attorney, called The History of a Good Warm Watchcoat. The work is indebted to the English satirist Jonathan Swift, especially to Swift’s burlesque on religious rivalry entitled The Tale of a Tub. The other event was Laurence’s quarrel with his uncle, Dr. Jaques Sterne, which blocked any chance for the nephew’s further advancement in the Church.

THE LITERARY LION

At the age of forty-six, Sterne turned his thoughts to a full-length comic or satirical work for the London literary market. In 1760 the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy appeared, their publication subsidized in part by the author himself. In spite of initial difficulties in finding a London publisher, the book instantly caught the fancy of the public and Sterne arrived at the capital to find himself the toast of the season. Celebrities and noblemen vied for the privilege of his presence at their social functions, and the somewhat uncouth country parson blossomed out with amazing rapidity into a well-dressed, confident man-about-town. A story from this period demonstrates that advertising is not an invention of the twentieth century. Early in 1760 David Garrick, the famous Shakespearean actor, received a letter from an acquaintance named Catherine Fourmantelle, a French singer who was then at York, telling him of a two-volume comic novel named Tristram Shandy, “which have made a great noise and have had a prodigious run.” When Garrick told his friends, who included all the literary lights of London, about this fascinating new book, he had no suspicion that Miss Fourmantelle had written her letter at the dictation of - the Reverend Laurence Sterne.

TRAVELS ABROAD

From the first part of Tristram Shandy and a volume of sermons which he rushed into print to “follow up” his success, Sterne realized the large sum of 830 pounds. He was able to buy a fine coach and horses with which to return to York. But although the author’s finances were better, his health was worse. He worked furiously on a continuation of his popular fantasy and published Books III and IV in January, 1761, and the fifth and sixth volumes in November of the same year. Now his health was really failing under the combined effects of overwork and tuberculosis, and the doctors strongly recommended travel abroad. January of 1762 found the literary parson in Paris, where his conquest of London was repeated, and he made firm friends with the French author Denis Diderot. After being joined by his wife, and his daughter, Lydia, he went south to the warmer climate of Toulouse. Sterne was not a man to waste good material, and a comic description of travel in France became the subject of one of the succeeding sections of Tristram Shandy. The Sternes remained in France for over two years. When the time to return arrived a long series of quarrels between Sterne and his wife came to a head with Elizabeth’s declaration that she was going to stay on the Continent. The author’s only recorded objection to this arrangement was a financial one. Apparently Sterne felt that his numerous London flirtations, harmless as they may have been, could be carried out more comfortably if Mrs. Sterne was in France. January, 1765, saw the publication of the seventh and eighth volumes of Tristram Shandy, and two more volumes of sermons appeared in the same year. By October Sterne was in Italy, and this trip, as well as parts of the previous one, form the geographical basis for A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. The last volume of Tristram Shandy appeared in 1767, and the Sentimental Journey in 1768. The emotional background for the Sentimental Journey is provided by the last and perhaps the only truly passionate affair of Sternes life, his courtship (though his wife was still alive) of Elizabeth Draper, the wife of a government official stationed in India. The affair is also recorded in his private Journal to Eliza, maintained for a number of months in 1767 after Elizabeth’s return to her husband in the East. Sterne’s last amour and the books which resulted from it have been seen as the feverish activity of a dying man. The author’s health was failing fast; in March he caught the influenza that was raging in London and quickly succumbed. A last macabre note might have amused the writer who included so many jibes at death in his works. Sterne’s corpse was dug up by the body-snatchers (or “resurrection men”) and sold as a specimen for dissection to an Oxford surgeon. According to the story, one of Sterne’s friends recognized the body on the dissecting-table and fainted.

TRISTRAM SHANDY

INTRODUCTION

 

Without some warning about the Shandean “system,” or rather lack of system, Tristram Shandy can at first be rather baffling. Anyone who reads it expecting to find some similarity to other eighteenth-century novels will be disappointed. For Sterne’s work is almost wholly unconventional, an experiment in a new kind of writing, though aspects of Sterne’s style find their roots in earlier literature. In particular, the author admires and acknowledges his debt to the fantastic episodes, the incredible catalogs and bawdy asides of the French master humorist of the sixteenth century, Francois Rabelais, the author of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Hardly less important is the picturesque humor and romantic digressions of the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. And to complete the acknowledged debts, Sterne bows to the discursive and highly personal essays of the French author Michel de Montaigne and his English counterpart Robert Burton, the creator of the Anatomy of Melancholy. All of these writers experimented with new literary forms, and Sterne takes license from their freedom. He writes a book which deals not with actions but with opinions, which derives relationships not from humdrum laws of cause and effect but from the English philosopher John Locke’s theory of the association of ideas. In Tristram Shandy time does not depend on the clock but is wholly subjective.

ORGANIZATION OF TRISTRAM SHANDY

In spite of this seeming confusion, there is a good deal of order in Tristram Shandy. An overall pattern is present: the action of the first two volumes takes place immediately before the birth of Tristram, and much of the argument, speculation and reflection is based upon his imminent arrival. We meet the principal characters: Tristram’s father, Walter; his military Uncle Toby, and Toby’s servant, Corporal Trim; the obstetrician or accoucheur, as he prefers to be called, Dr. Slop; and Parson Yorick, who in some aspects is Sterne himself. Books III and IV begin the tale of Tristram’s misfortunes, the accident to his nose, and the erroneous christening, and also include the long digression of the German philosopher Slawkenbergius. In the fifth and sixth books Tristram meets with another accident and we are given the sentimental story of Le Fever. In Books VII and VIII Sterne turns to his travels on the Continent for material, and begins the long-promised tale of Uncle Toby’s courtship of the Widow Wadman. The final volume provides the end of the affair between the innocent Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman, but at this point death wrote finis to a work which Sterne might have carried on forever.

THE PURPOSE OF TRISTRAM SHANDY

Sterne’s first intention is to make us laugh, and we feel that if he can do that he is quite satisfied. He has no objection, however, if we think as well, and there is food for thought in much of his humor. He makes us consider the limitations of the logic in which we put such trust, the value of theories which remain purely theoretical, and the absurdity of our ideas of time in a world where everything is relative. Some of the greatest books of modern times, James oyce’s Ulysses, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, and Thomas ann’s The Magic Mountain, among others, have questioned the same far-reaching assumptions that Sterne is skeptical of, but few of them have one it with his good humor, or with his saving sense of the ridiculous.

TRISTRAM SHANDY

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

BOOK I

CHAPTERS 1-5

The narrator of the tale is Tristram Shandy himself, but the story as he tells it begins well before his birth. Tristram complains that his father and mother were momentarily distracted at the instant of his conception, and that many of the misfortunes of his life can be traced to this inattention.

Comment: Tristram tells the story, but we can assume that the author uses him to voice his own ideas a good deal of the time. While the physical description of the hero of the book does not fit Laurence Sterne very well, the personality and especially the ideas of the narrator match those of Sterne perfectly. Readers who find the apparently disjointed and wanderi...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to Laurence Sterne
• 2) Introduction
• 3) Textual Analysis
• 4) Character Analyses
• 5) Critical Commentary
• 6) Essay Questions and Answers
• 7) Glossary of Terms
• 8) Bibliography