Chapter 5 - Footnotes and Catchwords

Summary

By mid-century, novel readers began to expect a printed framework for reading prose narrative consisting of cues such as page numbers, catchwords, chapter divisions and notes. This chapter tells the backstory of this navigational framework of the eighteenth-century novel that Sterne disrupts, before analysing his experimentation with mise en page. This study of Sterne’s manipulation of seemingly untouchable conventions of the printed page, such as pagination and catchwords, complements an approach to his more widely recognised interference with footnotes and chapters, and reveals the full extent of Sterne’s pioneering disruption of the format of the eighteenth-century book. I argue that Sterne’s innovations with footnotes, catchwords, chapters and pagination combine aspects of Scriblerian satire with more recent but perhaps lesser-known interventions in the codex by Thomas Amory in John Buncle (1756). Unlike Swift and Pope, however, and like Amory, Sterne deploys footnotes in the first edition of Tristram Shandy, encouraging the reader to approach at once all sections of the page in search of meaning and raising questions about literary authority from the outset.