by Steven Moore
216 Fielding assumed he was writing primarily for a male audience, as indicated by Squire Western’s blue language, some smutty double entendres (such as Jones’ obsession with Sophia’s muff), and his liberal use of Latin quotations throughout: “This Latin she took to be some affront, and answered, ‘You may be a gentleman, sir, but you don’t show yourself one to talk Latin to a woman’ ” (10.4). Nevertheless, many 18th-century demireps read and loved Tom Jones.
217 Which is, to quote the king of Brobdingnag, that the English are “the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth”—a judgment many English novelists of this period seem to confirm because 90 percent of their characters are despicable, envious, petty, selfish, back-biting, arrogant, hypocritical, greedy, ridiculous, vain, ungrateful, and/or malicious. Jones disagrees, but the 90-year-old Man of the Hill tells him he’s still young: he’ll change his tune after a few more decades on that sceptered isle.
218 At the end of the formal counterpart to this tale, Sophie misinterprets the story Mrs. Fitzpatrick tells her, assuming it’s a warning against marrying an Irishman, rather than (the narrator tells her) against marrying a fool—the moral of Defoe’s Roxana. Fielding includes further dramatizations of valid versus invalid reader responses when Jones and Partridge attend a puppet show (12.5) and when Jones takes Partridge to see Hamlet (16.5), underscoring the critifictional nature of the text.
219 Quoted in the Norton Tom Jones, 672. The other two are Oedipus Rex and Ben Jonson’s play The Alchemist.
220 A previous chapter includes a Fieldingesque digression on the usefulness of chapters in books.
221 Garn discusses the probable influence of Charlotte Summers on two novels by Mikhail Chulkov (1740–93): a sprawling cross between Decameron and Scarron’s Comic Novel entitled The Mocker, or Slavonic Tales (1766–89), and a short picaresque called The Comely Cook (1770). I haven’t included a section on the early Russian novel because not many were written in the early-modern period, and those that were mostly imitated English and continental models. (Plus hardly any of them have been translated into English.) If interested, see Gasperetti’s Rise of the Russian Novel, which pays special attention to Chulkov’s fabulous-sounding carnivalesque novel.
222 Paltock includes a 5-page glossary at the end of the book, the first novelist, I believe, to do so.
223 Youarekee’s king is named Georigetti, and the rebel leader is called Harlokin; “Harlequin” was the code name for the Stuart pretender in the early 1720s, when this portion of the novel takes place.
224 A. L. Morton (1952), quoted in James Grantham Turner’s introduction to the Oxford edition (xxxvii).
225 Pages 154–56 in the Broadview edition of Johnson’s Rasselas, where the essay occupies pp. 153–58. Johnson doesn’t name names, but he obviously had Tom Jones in mind, which he hated. (Boswell takes him to task a few times for that opinion in his Life.)
226 Page 247 in the Broadview edition of Coventry’s Pompey the Little, where it occupies pp. 231–51.
227 Quoted on p. ix of Day’s introduction to the Oxford edition of Pompey the Little. My lady goes on to say she saw herself in the hypochondriacal Mrs. Qualmsick, one of Pompey’s last owners.
228 Chapter 105 in the first edition, reprinted by Oxford and hereafter cited by chapter. In 1758, Smollett published a lightly expurgated edition with different chapter numbering, which was the only version available until the 20th century.
229 For example, Haywood is several paragraphs into a secret meeting between two characters when she interrupts to say, “I should before now have acquainted my reader that the lady was not only masked but also close muffled in her hood . . .” (2.21). Instead of rewriting the page to insert that information where it belongs, she left it there and kept scribbling. As further evidence of first-draft haste (or plain bad writing), one sympathetic critic expresses difficulty in interpreting a passage due to Haywood’s “confused grammatical subordination and technically unclear use of pronouns” (Flint, 217–18).
230 There’s another phallic image near the end when Trueworth spies Betsy in a garden and, to get a closer look at her, “thrust himself as far as he was able between the branches of which the arbour was composed” (4.21). By that point the widowed Betsy has presumably gotten over her fear of sex and they marry shortly thereafter.
231 Published in the Covent Garden Journal in February 1752, it is reprinted as an appendix to the Broadview edition of Betsy Thoughtless, 639–40.
232 Written in her copy of Amelia, as quoted by Battestin in his introduction to the Wesleyan edition, xvi.
233 Her first novel, The Life of Harriot Stuart (1750), is an assured coming-of-age story most noteworthy for being one of the first English novels to be partly set in North America, for which reason I’ll discuss it in the next chapter.
234 Covent Garden Journal, no. 24, 24 March 1752. Lennox returned the compliment in her 1758 novel Henrietta, whose protagonist prefers Joseph Andrews over the scandal novels of Manley and Haywood.
235 Unfortunately, after turning to nonfiction for a while, Lennox seems to have taken their advice for her subsequent novels, which are much more realistic and largely unread nowadays, except for her final one, Euphemia (1790), which, like her first, I’ll mention in the next chapter because of its North American setting.
236 The autobiographical introduction to Goodall’s only other book, The True Englishman’s Miscellany (1740), suggests the first part of the novel is somewhat autobiographical. It also indicates Goodall was born around 1715; his date of death is unknown.
237 This expands on the quotation from Shakespeare’s Richard II that Goodall placed on the title page: “My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,/My soul the father, and these two beget/A generation of still-breeding thoughts;/And these same thoughts people this little world/In humours like the people of this world” (5.5.6–10).
238 Probably not the metaphysical poet John Cleveland (1613–58) but Prévost’s Cleveland, which was eponymously published in England as “Written by Himself.”
239 Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier may have had this passage in mind when the protagonist of their novel The Cry (1754) rejects the paranoid “impossibility of conversing with any sort of creatures but beasts of prey, tigers, wolves, and foxes, who are ever laying in wait to destroy me” (1.1).
240 From the “Concluding Note by the Editor” at the end of Sir Charles Grandison. (The body of the text will be cited by volume/letter.) Critics agree Richardson had Tom Jones in mind here, which eclipsed Clarissa in sales and popularity.
241 It is omitted from the Oxford edition, even though Harris spends half a page discussing it in her introduction; Barchas discusses it at even greater length (200–13).
242 Quoted on p. xxi of Harris’s introduction.
243 Pages 8, 14 in Schofield’s facsimile edition (which reduces and prints 4 pages of the original per page); the body of the novel will be cited by part/scene. Jane Collier, with whom Fielding lived in the early 1750s, had already published a satirical handbook of anti-etiquette entitled An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753), available today—unlike, inexplicably, The Cry—in a modern edition (Oxford University Press, 2006).
244 By “best authors,” Fielding and Collier obviously meant Samuel Richardson, and it’s interesting to note that, according to Boswell, Dr. Johnson spoke in 1768 of Richardson in the exact same language: unlike Fielding, Richardson dissected “characters of nature, where a man must dive into the recesses of the human heart” (346).
245 Quoted by Bree (107), who devotes chap. 7 of her Twayne book to The Cry. In a related adaptation of dramatic form, Fielding’s next novel, The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757), consists of two monologues delivered, she writes in her introduction, “on the stage of the world”: “the great femme fatale and the pattern wife,” as Bree calls them (110), each delivers a monologue explaining her actions, though, as Bree goes on to say, Fielding�
�s intent was not a history lesson but “an anatomy of 18th-century, rather than Roman, femininity” (121). Fielding ignored the opportunity to vary their voices—luxurious Asiatic for Mark Antony’s serpent of old Nile, crisp Attic for his dutiful wife—resulting in a rather wooden performance.
246 I’m unaware of a book like Beasley’s Novels of the 1740s that covers the decade, but two good essays do: the subsection “Novels of the 1750s” in Keymer’s Sterne, The Moderns, and the Novel, and Lupton’s “Giving Power to the Medium: Recovering the 1750s.” And like Booth, the first to explore the frisky Fifties, I must pass over novels “which, if written in the thirties or forties, would have been landmarks in this history but which, coming when they do, are not worth individual citation” (183), such as The Adventures of Mr. Loveill by John Hill (1750), Constantia (1751), Cleora (1752), The Adventures of a Valet (1752), The Stage-Coach by Susan Smythies (1753), The Temple Beau (1754), Memoirs of the Noted Buckhorse by Christopher Anstey (1756), A Journal of Eight Days Journey from Portsmouth to Kingston upon Thames by Jonas Hanway (1756), The Juvenile Adventures of David Ranger by Edward Kimber (1756), The History of Henry Dumont, Esq., and Miss Charlotte Evelyn by Charlotte Charke (1756), The Anti-Gallican by Edward Long (1757), and The Campaign, a True Story (1759). I intended to write about a smutty fairy tale with the winning title Did You Ever See Such Damn’d Stuff? or, So Much the Better: A Story Without Head or Tail, Wit or Humor (1760), but this anonymous novella appears to be a translation of an unidentified French jeu d’esprit.
247 This is the second reference in The Card to “a method of dueling peculiar to [Archy’s] cousin Grandison” (2.9). Archy’s romantic adventures in Italy wink at those of Sir Charles.
248 One of them is named Humphry Copper, and later they meet “a certain personage named Clinker” (4.22); in what appears to be the only essay on Toldervy’s novel, Keymer suggests Two Orphans may have influenced Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (55).
249 Page 47 in Haslett’s prodigiously annotated edition of part 1; part 2 will be cited by page number from Garland’s facsimile edition of the complete novel (1766).
250 Amory’s first book of fiction was a volume of linked stories entitled Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1755), which is cited a few times in John Buncle and chronologically follows the novel.
251 Chap. 3, hereafter cited by chapter from Richard’s edition, which like other Broadview editions, is loaded with extras, including Johnson’s 1749 poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” a far superior treatment of the theme of Rasselas.
252 Johnson wrote his novella the same month Candide was published, so there’s no question of influence or competition. The Abyssinian setting was suggested by a book Johnson had translated in 1735, Jerome Lobo’s travelogue A Voyage to Abyssinia, which mentions a man named Rassela Christos.
253 Annotators of Tristram Shandy always identify the reference in 9.34 to Scarron as the author of The Comic Novel,though it’s possible Furetière is meant, for his considerably more Shandean Roman bourgeois was translated into English as Scarron’s City Romance in 1671, a misattribution not cleared up in Sterne’s lifetime.
254 Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian theorist I’m paraphrasing—from his pioneering essay on Tristram Shandy in Theory of Prose—uses the words fabula and syuzhet for story and plot, respectively (170). French (and French-influenced) theorists prefer histoire and récit.
255 Introduction to his Laurence’s Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, 11.
256 Walter is quoting/paraphrasing the 1612 English translation of Pierre’s Charron’s On Wisdom (1601), a study of Montaigne. In other words, Walter is still stuck in the Renaissance, so woefully out-of-date that he can’t be taken seriously on this or almost any other point. Like Amory’s John Buncle, like all novels of learned wit, Tristram Shandy is a tapestry woven from many other texts, most of them unacknowledged. This isn’t plagiarism but artistic appropriation, as in collage and sampling.
257 Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) was an attempt to pin down the meaning of words; Sterne shows how easily words become unpinned, and the resulting confusion—sometimes comic, sometimes tragic—when words go wild. Casuists calculate the word fiddlestick has 14,000 different meanings, depending on how it is pronounced (9.19).
258 A violin’s strings are tuned G-D-A-E; Tristram’s use of “a.e.i.o.u.” indicates he’s tuning his language at the beginning of the chapter before he performs his narrative for us.
259 Of course this could be a postmasturbatory lament for his former sexual potency. After a while it seems every line in Tristram Shandy can and should be taken two or more ways.
260 In a profoundly perceptive essay in Cash and Stedmond’s Winged Skull (258–69), R. F. Brissenden speculates that Tristram Shandy began as a Scriblerian satire like A Tale of a Tub and Martinus Scriberlus, but gradually “became a novel simply because the Shandys and the Shandy world began to live. To begin with, Shandeism, rather than the Shandys themselves, was probably the most important thing with Sterne. The characters were there primarily to illustrate a theory (or set of theories). This, of course, they do—but they also begin to live in their own right” (268).
261 Find Flint’s Family Fictions for a fine analysis of the Shandy family dynamics (271–88).
262 I choked up with tears at Corporal Trim’s first appearance in Michael Winterbottom’s innovative film version of Tristram Shandy (2006), as though I were seeing a beloved old friend for the first time in decades.
263 Like virtually every other document and story narrated in Tristram Shandy, Trim’s recitation is interrupted and commented upon as it progresses, microcosmically mirroring the macrocosmic interruptions throughout the main text.
264 In Infinite Jest, Wallace calls this method of narrative organization “anticonfluential,” which the narrator flippantly defines as “a stubborn and possibly intentionally irritating refusal of different narrative lines to merge into any kind of meaningful confluence” (996n61). In an essay comparing Infinite Jest to Tristram Shandy, Christopher Thomas doesn’t mention their shared anticonfluential structure but comments on other similarities. See also Stephen Swain’s online essay “‘Here’s a crown for your trouble’: Narrative Form in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King” (2013).
265 In 1974 and 1975, Garland Publishing brought out a 22-volume set called Sterneiana that reproduces most of these, from Carr’s 1760 knockoff to Isaac Brandon’s Fragments in the Manner of Sterne (1797). It’s fun to leaf through the volumes because the authors obviously had fun imitating Sterne, but there’s nothing substantial here, except for vol. 22, which reproduces John Ferriar’s Illustrations of Sterne (1798), the first extended study of Sterne’s work. For an overview of these imitations, see the chapter entitled “The Offspring of Tristram Shandy” in Shepperson’s Novel in Motley.
266 See Poole’s “Reading Either-Or for the Very First Time” for a persuasive argument that these two fictionalized philosophy books are “first and foremost” literary works that sometimes resemble “sections of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy” (44).
267 See Voogd and Neubauer’s Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe, which is mostly on translations of Sterne’s work but also discusses some novelists who wrote under his influence.
268 He published the first article in Japan on Tristram Shandy (1897) before writing this unconventional novel (1905–6); see Natsuo Shumata’s “Laurence Sterne and Japan” (Cash and Stedmond, 186–93).
269 Thirwell followed this with a Shandean work of literary criticism entitled (here in the States) The Divided States (née Miss Herbert), which includes an engaging sequence on Sterne.
270 But not of John Barth’s novels, surprisingly enough. In a 1984 lecture, Barth said, “But much as I honor Laurence Sterne, I have never been able quite to finish Tristram Shandy. . . . I prefer the kind of technical fireworks that speak to my heart as well as to my mind and my funny-bone” (Further Fridays, 44–45
). Yet that’s exactly what Sterne intended: “I write a careless kind of civil, nonsensical, good humoured Shandean book, which will do all your hearts good― [¶] ―And all your heads too,—provided you understand it” (6.17). Many of the novels above belong to the category castigated today as “difficult” fiction, a genre Sterne more or less invented: “A general looker on” won’t appreciate his work, “but I write not to them” (8.17).
Calvino’s often-quoted remark first appeared as a blurb on the back cover of an Italian translation of Sterne’s A Political Romance (1759, aka The History of a Good Warm Watch-Coat), a satirical pamphlet about a local church dispute that served as a warm-up for writing Tristram Shandy.
That list, you’ve probably noticed, is a total sausage fest: the daughters of Tristram Shandy might include Djuna Barnes’s Ryder, Virgina Woolf’s Orlando, Brigid Brophy’s In Transit, Julieta Campos’s Fear of Losing Eurydice, Gabrielle Burton’s Heartbreak Hotel, Jaimy Gordon’s Shamp of the City-Solo, Janice Galloway’s Trick Is to Keep Breathing (“This book resembles Tristram Shandy as rewritten by Sylvia Plath”—New York Times Book Review), Sarah Schulman’s Empathy, Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries, Helen DeWitt’s Last Samurai, Heather Woodbury’s What Ever, Cintra Wilson’s Colors Insulting to Nature, Vanessa Place’s La Medusa, Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, Emilie Autumn’s Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, Carol Hart’s History of the Novel in Ants, Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, certain novels by Kathy Acker, Christine Brooke-Rose, Rikki Ducornet, Thalia Field, Xiaolu Guo, Carole Maso, Ali Smith, and Aritha Van Herk, and some formally innovative YA novels by the likes of Susie Day, E. Lockhart, and Lauren Myracle. But Sterne’s cocktail of comic erudition, slap-and-tickle sexuality, bittersweet sentimentalism, and achronological form doesn’t seem to attract many women writers—or women readers, according to Professor Elizabeth Terries. She says in her career she’s taught Tristram Shandy to nearly 500 female students, and estimates “not more than twenty enjoyed reading Sterne’s work or will ever return to it” (111).