Laurence Sterne's comic novel whose narrator takes three volumes to be born
Tristram Shandy sets out to tell his life story and doesn't manage to get himself born until volume three. Laurence Sterne's nine-volume comedy, issued between 1759 and 1767, turned a struggling Yorkshire clergyman into a celebrity and filled its pages with black sheets, marbled paper and plot diagrams.
Sterne was a hard-up Anglican priest in York when his first fiction, a satire on church politics published in January 1759, so embarrassed the Archbishop of York that it was burned. Convinced he had found his gift for comedy, he started a new book at once. When the publisher Robert Dodsley offered £20 instead of the £50 he asked for the first volume, Sterne borrowed money and printed the opening two volumes himself in York, a run of perhaps 200 copies. They appeared in late December 1759 and were an instant hit. By March 1760 Dodsley was paying £250 for the copyright, and a new London edition carried an illustration by William Hogarth.
The joke at its heart is that Tristram cannot explain anything without detours. He blames four early accidents for his gloomy fate: his conception is disturbed when his mother asks whether the clock has been wound; the doctor's forceps flatten his nose, a disaster by his father's theory that big noses bring success; a maid garbles the lucky name Trismegistus so he is christened Tristram, a name suggesting sorrow; and a falling window sash causes a mishap as a toddler. Around these swirl quarrels between his irritable, theory-mad father Walter and his gentle Uncle Toby, and essays on everything from obstetrics to siege warfare.
Sterne described his method as writing a first sentence and trusting God for the second. Fake sequels became so common that he signed every copy of volume five. Tuberculosis sent him to France in January 1762, and he wrote volume eight before volume seven, then printed them in reverse order. The final volume came out in January 1767; he died in March 1768, leaving scholars to argue whether the novel is finished.
Innuendo drives much of the humour, often through sentences that break off with a dash. Victorian readers found it obscene, but twentieth-century modernists embraced it, and the 2006 film A Cock and Bull Story shows Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon failing to film it.
Source: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
