{"id":9309,"date":"2020-08-28T23:59:41","date_gmt":"2020-08-28T23:59:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/?p=9309"},"modified":"2026-08-27T04:07:52","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T04:07:52","slug":"tristram-shandy-and-the-consolations-of-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/2020\/08\/28\/tristram-shandy-and-the-consolations-of-comedy\/","title":{"rendered":"Tristram Shandy and the consolations of comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

C<\/span>lifford Street, Mayfair, 18 March 1768. John Macdonald, the 27-year-old Scottish servant of John Crauford, Esq, of Errol, is sent into the next street to ask after the health of a famous man lodging there. Macdonald later remembered in his memoir:<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street. He was sometimes called \u201cTristram Shandy\u201d, and sometimes \u201cYorick\u201d\u2014a very great favourite of the gentlemen\u2019s. One day my master had company to dinner who were speaking about him; the Duke of Roxburgh, the Earl of March, the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr Garrick, Mr Hume, and a Mr James. \u201cJohn,\u201d said my master, \u201cgo and inquire how Mr Sterne is today.\u201d I went, returned, and said: \u201cI went to Mr Sterne\u2019s lodging; the mistress opened the door; I inquired how he did. She told me to go up to the nurse. I went into the room, and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in five he said: \u2018Now it is come<\/i>.\u2019 He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute.\u201d The gentlemen were all very sorry, and lamented him very much.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Reverend Laurence Sterne (born 1713) had lived in \u201cquiet obscurity\u201d in Yorkshire until December 1759 when the first two small volumes of his masterpiece,\u00a0The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman<\/i>, appeared. Within weeks he was a celebrity in London and, soon enough, abroad. Seven more small volumes of Tristram were to follow at intervals during the next few years.<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u00a0was<\/i>\u00a0this \u201cbook of books\u201d? Who was Shandy? A contemporary reviewer wondered: \u201cOh rare Tristram Shandy!\u2014Thou very sensible\u2014humorous\u2014pathetick\u2014humane\u2014unaccountable!\u2014what shall we call thee?\u2014Rabelais, Cervantes, What?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Some readers condemned the fiction\u2019s bawdiness (Sterne was, after all, a clergyman). Many more loved its eccentric originality, its comic thrust, its disaster-prone narrator and his irresistible cast of characters: My Father, Walter Shandy, retired \u201cTurkey<\/i>\u00a0merchant\u201d and educational theorist; My Uncle Toby, a wounded veteran perplexed by his inconclusive amours with the Widow Wadman; Bridget, the Widow\u2019s maid; Corporal Trim, Toby\u2019s prop and Bridget\u2019s suitor; Dr Slop, inept man-midwife; and gentle Parson Yorick, who provided one of the many identities adopted by Sterne himself\u2014and noted by canny John Macdonald.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tristram Shandy<\/i>\u00a0is a \u201cbook of books\u201d. Sterne\u2019s imagination shapes all manner of sources into an idiosyncratic encyclopaedia dealing, among other things, with time, chance, hot chestnuts, misguided learning, midwifery, names, wounds, fortification, love, the importance of putting your breeches on efficiently, procrastination, loyalty, impotence, door hinges\u2014and noses: \u201cby the word\u00a0Nose<\/i>\u00a0. . . I mean a Nose, and nothing more, or less\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

The book is a remarkable material phenomenon. It has a black page (of mourning), a marble leaf (\u201cmotly emblem of my work!\u201d), a blank page, missing pages, diagrammatic plot lines, asterisks, two illustrations by Hogarth, and a squiggle: the Flourish of Liberty made in the air by Trim with his stick.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tristram refuses to confine himself \u201cto any man\u2019s rules that ever lived\u201d. To make us laugh he talks to us: \u201cWriting . . . is but a different name for conversation\u201d. His narrative is naturally progressive\u00a0and<\/i>\u00a0digressive: \u201cDigressions, incontestably, are the sun-shine;\u2014they are the life, the soul of reading;\u2014take them out of this book for instance,\u2014you might as well take the book along with them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

We go where Tristram takes us. He makes Uncle Toby start a sentence in one chapter, puts him on pause and lets him finish that sentence many chapters later. At one point he leaves Walter and Toby talking on the stairs while he gives us his \u201cchapter upon chapters\u201d. Sterne is as tonally flexible as Mozart: laughter becomes tears as we respond to the poignant story of \u201cLe Fever\u201d; we are amused\u00a0and<\/i>\u00a0touched by Uncle Toby\u2019s problems in love.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tristram\u2019s own problems in \u201cthis scurvy and disasterous world of ours\u201d begin early. His conception, birth and christening are all comico-catastrophical. In his early boyhood, a de-weighted window sash accidentally descends upon his most delicate part. Assailed by illness, he laments: \u201cTime wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of it . . . are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more . . .\u201d. Tristram knows that Death is pursuing him, but (like the agonisingly tubercular Sterne himself) he breaks free for a time and heads for France: \u201cNow, I . . . think . . . that so much of motion, is so much of life, and so much of joy\u2014and that to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

These nine small volumes celebrate the very liberties that help us live: \u201cTrue\u00a0Shandeism<\/i>, think what you will against it, opens the heart and lungs, and . . . forces the blood and other vital fluids of the body to run freely thro\u2019 its channels, and makes the wheel of life run long and chearfully round\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

Constriction or oppression of any creature, human or otherwise, moved Sterne\u2019s soul and Tristram\u2019s pen:<\/span><\/p>\n

. . . my uncle\u00a0Toby<\/i>\u00a0had scarce a heart to retalliate upon a fly.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Go,\u2014says he, one day at dinner, to an over-grown one which had buzz\u2019d about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time,\u2014and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him;\u2014I\u2019ll not hurt thee, says my uncle\u00a0Toby<\/i>, rising from his chair, and going a-cross the room, with the fly in his hand,\u2014I\u2019ll not hurt a hair of thy head:\u2014Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;\u2014-go poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?\u2014This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

No wonder the gentlemen who, all aware that Death was about to come for their friend, had gathered that day in Clifford Street \u201cwere all very sorry, and lamented him very much\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

The author chairs the Laurence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall, North Yorkshire, Sterne\u2019s home in the 1760s. The Trust is a registered charity\u00a0<\/i><\/span>(No. 1181127). The fee for this article will be given to the Trust. For further information see\u00a0<\/i><\/span>www.laurencesternetrust.org.uk<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The story of \u201cA COCK and a BULL . . . And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard\u201d:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9482,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[653],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-counterpoints"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9309"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9371,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9309\/revisions\/9371"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}