Introductory Essay by Christopher Ricks This essay was originally published in 1967 as the Introduction to the Penguin English Library edition of Tristram Shandy. It was reprinted as late as 1997, when Penguin Classics issued a new Tristram Shandy edited by Melvyn and Joan New and based on the revised text and critical notes from the highly-regarded Florida Edition of Laurence Sterne’s work published in the 1980’s. Tristram Shandy is the greatest shaggy-dog story in the language. Like all the best shaggy-dog stories, it is somewhat bawdy, preposterously comic, brazenly exasperating and very shrewd in its understanding of human responses. Laurence Sterne himself has a concluding friendly jibe at his readers by insisting that they have been spending their time on a cock-and-bull story. Since Sterne’s world is one of delightful topsyturvydom, it is hardly surprising that a good starting-point should be the novel’s closing words. We have been told how Uncle Toby’s amours have faded into unconsummated nothingness, and now we hear that the parish bull is not up to its work – you could say that the bull breeds nothing but disappointment. At which the novel ends, with one of the characters voicing just that mingled irritation and affection which Sterne has dexterously created in his readers: L –– d! said my mother, what is all this story about?—— A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick—— And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard. The shaggy-dog story and the cock-and-bull story are cousins of the ‘Irish bull’, and Sterne was brought up in Ireland. So it is not surprising that one of Sterne’s earliest commentators, John Ferriar, should have been put in mind of the ‘Irish bull’. Ferriar mentioned the famous opening paragraph of Swift’s first Drapier’s Letter: ‘Read this Paper with the utmost Attention, or get it read to you by others’; and he went on to speak of ‘the old story in the jest books, where a templar leaves a note in the key-hole, directing the finder, if he cannot read it, to carry it to the stationer at the gate, who will read it for him’. That comic illogicality, expanded and varied in a thousand ways, is – as Ferriar saw – the stuff of Tristram Shandy. From the moment of publication, Tristram Shandy had its enemies. Its fame in the 1760s might sweep England, and make the author famous and rich, fêted in London and Paris. But there were voices saying that the book was obscene, or pointless, or deficient in everything that a novel ought to provide. The fact that pointlessness was one of Sterne’s points, that he was out to flout and taunt humdrum expectations – this meant little. By 1776 the greatest critic of the age, Dr Johnson, could asseverate that ‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’ A Cambridge don in 1765 had been as massively confident about the fate of this nonsensical book: Mark my words, and remember what I say to you; however much it may be talked about at present, yet, depend upon it, in the course of twenty years, should any CHRISTOPHER RICKS, INTRODUCTION TRISTRAM SHANDY (PENGUIN EDITION) 2 one wish to refer to the book in question, he will be obliged to go to an antiquary to inquire for it. The don it was that died. Tristram Shandy goes marching on – or, in Sterne’s mockingly seedy words, it has managed to ‘swim down the gutter of Time’. Sterne inveigles us into a predicament, and so neatly that we cannot help joining in his laughter at us. Just what the predicament is can be seen from a standard work of reference, the Oxford Companion to English Literature. It sets out to summarize Tristram Shandy for us: In spite of the title, the book gives us very little of the life, and nothing of the opinions, of the nominal hero, who gets born only in vol. iv, and breeched in vol. vi, and then disappears from the story. Instead we have a group of humorous figures: Walter Shandy of Shandy Hall, Tristram’s father, peevish but frank and generous, full of paradoxical notions, which he defends with great show of learning; ‘my uncle Toby’, his brother, wounded in the groin at the siege of Namur, whose hobby is the science of attacking fortified towns, which he studies by means of miniature scarps, ravelins, and bastions on his bowling-green, a man ‘of unparalleled modesty’ and amiability; Corporal Trim, his servant, wounded in the knee at Landen, devoted to his master and sharing his enthusiasm for the military art, voluble but respectful. Behind these three major figures, the minor characters, Yorick the parson, Dr Slop, Mrs Shandy, and the widow Wadman, play a more elusive part… Sterne would have relished the fact that such a summary, useful though it is, suggests a man throwing up his hands or throwing in the sponge. That Sterne was a creative genius was not evident till he was in his forty-seventh year. It was then, in 1759, that he published the first two books of Tristram Shandy. Till then he had been merely a Yorkshire priest who dabbled in writing. A few sermons; a satirical squib called A Political Romance (later The History of a Good Warm Watch Coat ), attacking ecclesiastical chicanery in York – these are not evidence of genius, and they had not brought him fame. He was born on 24 November 1713, in Clonmel in Ireland, the son of an ensign in the army. (His memories of military life may have influenced the characterization of Uncle Toby.) His father died in 1731, and his mother stayed in Ireland. His opportunity to attend Jesus College, Cambridge, was provided by a generous cousin. Sterne did not prove a distinguished student, but he read widely – and he made a lifelong friend, John Hall (later Hall-Stevenson), rich, eccentric, dissolute, and the future patron of a revelling set which Sterne attended, ‘the Demoniacs’. Already, while still at the university, Sterne suffered a haemorrhage of the lungs; ill-health was to dog him, and to produce some of the most courageously humorous passages in Tristram Shandy. With the help of uncle Jaques, precentor and canon of York, Sterne earned his livings. He took holy orders, became a priest in 1738 and was presented to the vicarage of Sutton- on-the-Forest near York. His experiences during twenty years were to furnish or at least suggest those of Parson Yorick, a veiled self-portrait, mocking but not self-lacerating. He CHRISTOPHER RICKS, INTRODUCTION TRISTRAM SHANDY (PENGUIN EDITION) 3 progressed to a prebendal stall at York, and then to a richer one, and in 1741 he married Elizabeth Lumley, whom he had courted for two years. It was not to be the happiest of marriages. His life was unobtrusive and cultivated. An amateur painter and musician (these other arts are wittily invoked in Tristram Shandy), he was also something of a writer. But it was not until 1759 – immediately following the suppression of The Good Warm Watch-Coat, which had offended local susceptibilities – that he began The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. His marriage was crumbling, and his wife was temporarily insane. It was against this grim background that he flung himself into a work of exuberant humour. After six weeks he had reached Chapter XVIII; after six months, the first two volumes were completed. His offer to the publisher Dodsley was at first rejected. But a small edition was put out, and Sterne found himself famous. Acclaimed by men as different as David Garrick and Bishop Warburton, Sterne had hospitality and flattery lavished on him. He was commissioned to supply fresh volumes. He was invited to Windsor. His portrait was painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. ‘I wrote, not to be fed but to be famous’, he said. The Sermons of Mr. Yorick were rushed out in 1760, scandalizing many people, not by their substance, but by their title. Yet Sterne delighted in scandalizing people, and scandal is a form of fame. He did not relax; Volumes III and IV of Tristram Shandy were finished by the end of 1760, and Volumes V and VI by the end of 1761. The strain can hardly have helped his health, and he was sent to the south of France to recuperate. The recuperation included being idolized by Parisian society. Mrs Sterne and the daughter Lydia were sent for, and Sterne spent more than a year in Toulouse. (His foreign travel was adapted for Volume VII of Tristram Shandy.) The family moved about France, and in 1764 Sterne was ‘heartily tired’ of it. He returned to England, leaving his family at their request. He had been away for more than two and a half years. But Tristram Shandy had by no means been neglected in England, though increasingly deplored, vilified, and sniffed at. Volumes VII and VIII were published in 1765. Still in ill-health, Sterne took a trip of seven months in France and Italy, from which he was to create A Sentimental Journey, a traveller’s tale of great charm, which he planned after the completion of Volume IX of Tristram Shandy in 1766. Visiting London in 1766, he met Mrs Eliza Draper, then in her twenties. With her he engaged in a sentimental and flowery love-affair, broken after a few months by her return to her middle-aged husband in Bombay. (Sterne’s mawkish Journal to Eliza was not published until 1904.) The homecoming of Mrs Sterne did not improve matters, but she was persuaded to return to France.