6 - Laurence Sterne (1713–1768): The fiction of sentiment

Summary

Laurence Sterne was an eighteenth-century publishing sensation, who has continued to exercise a tangible yet elusive impact on novelists in Europe and beyond. As their full titles may suggest, his two important fictions, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent (TS, 1759–67) and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (SJ, 1768), are classed as novels largely by default. Hence, as well as becoming iconic of a belief in the natural goodness of the heart, he has been an especially fruitful resource whenever the novel form has reflected upon its own limits or status, as was the case in the high theory of German romanticism, in European modernism and in late twentieth-century postmodernism.

In 1759, sparked partly by his satire on eccesiastical politics in York, A Political Romance, Sterne published the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy. In the light of their success he then produced seven further volumes at intervals. The book defies summary as the eponymous narrator, whose name means something like a ‘sad and confused mixture’, weaves together anecdotes concerning his eccentric family, consisting principally of his father, mother, Uncle Toby and Toby's manservant Corporal Trim, along with various servants and neighbours including Parson Yorick and the Papist Dr Slop. Although the narration is in the present of its publication dates, most of the action is set in the early decades of the century and extends to before Tristram's birth. The comedy of the anecdotes is inseparable from that of their narration as Tristram is carried into multiple digressions ‘progressing’ as much sideways or backwards as forwards.