The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Penguin Classics)

by Laurence Sterne

  9. maggots: Whimsical fancies, but also, possibly, an allusion to the growing scientific interest in insects and microscopic organisms, which may have appeared to Sterne – as to Pope and Swift – hobby-horsical.

  CHAPTER VIII

  1. De gustibus non est disputandum: There is no disputing about tastes.

  2. fiddler and painter: Sterne was both; he wrote in his ‘Memoirs’ for his daughter, Lydia, that ‘Books, painting, fiddling, and shooting’ were his amusements (Sterne’s Memoirs, ed. Kenneth Monkman (The Laurence Sterne Trust, 1985)). See Cash, EMY, 208–14.

  3. pads: Horses.

  CHAPTER IX

  1. daubing: Perhaps a pun on a secondary meaning of daubing: ‘The putting a false show on anything (obs.); hypocritical flattery’ (OED). The primary meaning is bad painting.

  2. painter’s scale: Sterne’s use in this paragraph of the ‘painter’s scale’, the invention of Roger de Piles, a seventeenth-century authority on painting, has been usefully discussed in R. F. Brissenden, ‘Sterne and Painting’, in Of Books and Humankind, ed. John Butt (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). De Piles awards grades (1–20) in several categories to fifty painters, including an 18 to Raphael for design; Tristram awards himself a 19, although the pun on design should be noted. An English translation, The Principles of Painting, appeared in 1743.

  3. tout ensemble: In a painting, the ‘harmony which results from the distribution of the several objects or figures, whereof it is composed’ (Chambers).

  4. Mr. Dodsley: Since Robert Dodsley (1703–64) retired from their thriving publishing firm in March 1759, his brother James (1724–97) is most likely referred to here. Robert had turned down Sterne’s manuscript in the spring of 1759, but after Sterne published the first two volumes in York at his own expense, James bought the copyright for a second edition, as well as for Volumes III and IV, and two volumes of sermons.

  5. CANDID and Miss CUNEGUND’S affairs: The hero and heroine of Voltaire’s Candide, published in January 1759 and translated into English soon thereafter.

  CHAPTER X

  1. Rosinante: Don Quixote’s horse, described in I.I.1, I.II.1, etc., always unflatteringly as a ‘jade’ of a broken-down horse.

  2. chaste deportment: Don Quixote, I.III.1; when the Yanguesian carriers bring some mares into his vicinity, Rozinante proves to be less chaste than was previously thought. Sterne used Peter Motteux’s translation, revised by John Ozell.

  3. demi-peak’d: ‘Peak of about half the height of that of the older war-saddle’ (OED).

  4. poudrè d’or: Powdered with gold.

  5. chuck-farthing and shuffle-cap: Games in which money is tossed into a hole or shaken in a hat.

  6. true point of ridicule: Cf. Sterne’s letter of 23 May 1759, describing to Dodsley the design of TS: ‘The Plan… is a most extensive one,— taking in, not only, the Weak part of the Sciences, in wch the true point of Ridicule lies—but every Thing else, which I find Laugh-at-able in my way—.’

  7. de vanitate mundi et fugâ sæculi: On the vanity of the world and the swift [frightful] passing of time. A commonplace; cf. Rabelais, I.42, where Friar John speaks of delivering a ‘fine long sermon, decontemptu mundi, & fuga seculi’ to drowning men.

  8. death’s head: A skull, a memento mori, the most famous of which is Yorick’s, recovered by the gravedigger in Hamlet, V.i.

  9. like wit and judgment: Cf. Tristram’s ‘Author’s Preface’ in III.xx: ‘for that wit and judgment in this world never go together; in as much as they are two operations differing from each other as wide as east is from west.—So, says Locke,—so are farting and hickuping, say I.’

  10. compose his cough: Tristram and Yorick share with Sterne the common characteristic of a pulmonary ailment.

  11. broken-winded: Sterne lists several diseases of horses, common knowledge in an age when horses were the primary means of transportation.

  12. communibus annis: In average or ordinary years.

  13. knight of La Mancha: I.e. Don Quixote. The identification of Yorick with Cervantes’s hero, which begins with the comparison of his horse toRozinante, ends with the ‘cervantick tone’ of his last words.

  14. a fatality… men: Sterne perhaps recalls Hamlet, V.ii.10–11: ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will…’

  CHAPTER XI

  1. YORICK: Sterne brilliantly exploits the complexities of Shakespeare’s jester– memento mori as a voice for his own work. Kenneth Monkman (‘Sterne, Hamlet, and Yorick’, in The Winged Skull: Papers from the Laurence Sterne Bicentenary Conference, ed. Arthur Cash and John M. Stedmond (Kent State University Press, 1971)) notes Sterne’s early fascination with Hamlet and also that the older pronunciation of York was Yorick. In the ‘Rabelaisian Fragment’, written just prior to TS, Sterne laments for his clerical protagonist, ‘Alass poor Homenas! ’; the sentence may have steered him to Yorick as his alter ego. He published sermons in 1760 and 1766 under the name Mr Yorick and used the name for his protagonist in ASJ.

  2. reign of Horwendillus: Allusion to Shakespeare’s source for the Hamlet story in the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1200), published in 1514; Horwendillus was Hamlet’s (Amleth’s) father. Yorick is never mentioned in the account.

  3. Noddy’s: Generic name for a fool.

  4. delectable narrative: Sterne never provides this, although he seems to have had some version of a continental tour in mind when he began TS, perhaps involving the Bishop of Gloucester, William Warburton, as Tristram’s tutor. Warburton (1698–1779), author of the monumental Divine Legation of Moses (1738–41), editor of Pope, and a leading literary figure in the middle of the century, plays an important if covert role in TS, a repository of Sterne’s hostility toward censorship and prudery.

  5. goods and chattels: Common legal phrase.

  6. crasis: Cf. Johnson, Dictionary (1755): ‘Temperature; constitution arising from the various properties of humours.’

  7. heteroclite… declensions: Warburton was perhaps the first to apply this metaphor of grammatical irregularity to Sterne himself, writing to Garrick in June 1760, ‘I must not forget to thank you for the hints I received from you… concerning our heteroclite Parson.’

  8. gaité de cœur: Gaiety of heart, mirthfulness.

  9. bubbled: A popular term in the eighteenth century for being deceived or tricked by a deception or fraudulent scheme (a ‘bubble’ being both the scheme and the victim); Sterne uses it again at p. 116 and twice on p. 182.

  10. a French wit: Sterne has in mind a maxim of François de la Rochefoucauld (1613–80), the cynical French wit; he borrowed his translation from the anonymous Moral Maxims: by the Duke de la Roche Foucault (1749), maxim 205.

  11. But, in plain truth: The character of a truth-teller persecuted by enmity and gossip is one that Sterne returns to several times in his sermons, especially 17, ‘Hezekiah and the messengers’, and 31, ‘St. Peter’s character’; one suspects he identified himself with persecuted ‘plain-dealers’.

  12. unhackneyed: Inexperienced.

  13. bon mot: Clever remark.

  14. his gibes and his jests: Cf. Hamlet, V.i.189: ‘Where be your gibes now… ?’ asks Hamlet of Yorick’s skull.

  CHAPTER XII

  1. upon all-four: Proverbial, although the usual import is that no simile or metaphor can ‘run on all four (wheels)’, i.e. can correspond.

  2. book-debts: ‘Amount debited to a person’s account in a ledger’ (OED); cf. p. 327 where Sterne, characteristically, literalizes the expression.

  3. Eugenius’s: Name traditionally applied as a compliment in the eighteenth century, connoting good nature, good counsel and good health. It is usually assumed that Sterne honoured his Cambridge and Yorkshire friend John Hall-Stevenson (1718–85) in the name, although doing so hadan element of wit attached, since Hall-Stevenson was a hypochondriac and neither prudent nor sensible. Indeed, he made use of Sterne’s success to publish some bawdy and unskilful scribblings that probably embarrassed Sterne. On
e might also consider Eugenius at this point as the adversarius in traditional verse satire (e.g. Horace’s Satire II.1, Pope’s Epistle to Arbuthnot), who tries (ironically) to discourage the poet’s satiric instincts as impediments to success.

  4. When to… with: Sterne’s probable source is Thomas Tenison, ‘Discourse by Way of Introduction’, in Baconiana, or Certain Genuine Remains of Sir Francis Bacon (1679). Sterne’s ‘enew’ is Yorkshire dialect for ‘enow’, as is ‘anew’ at p. 252. Tenison has ‘enough’.

  5. tit: Small horse.

  6. that when… him: Cf. Henry VIII, III.ii.355–8: ‘The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, / And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely / His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root, / And then he falls as I do.’ That the words are spoken by Cardinal Wolsey, an emblem of clerical vicissitudes at the highest level, provides Sterne with a rich irony in applying them to a country parson’s disappointments; first noted by Watt (23, n. 5).

  Sterne’s narrative of Yorick’s career has usually been considered an idealized autobiographical account, especially of his poor relationship with his uncle, Jaques Sterne (1695/6–1759), and his failure to advance in the church. The story of the relationship is told in Cash, EMY, 232–40 and passim.

  7. Sancho Pança: Sterne alludes to Sancho Pança’s reply to the idea of his wife’s becoming a Queen in Don Quixote, I.I.7. Sterne often referred to his frustrated ambitions in the church with variants of this passage.

  8. cervantick tone: One clue to Sterne’s meaning is provided by his phrase ‘ Cervantick gravity’ to describe Walter’s attitude when he traps Dr Slop into reading ‘Ernulphus’s Curse’ in III.x; and another, by his reference to the amours of Toby as having a ‘Cervantick’ cast in IV.xxxii. In a letter written in the summer of 1759, he defines ‘Cervantic humour’ as ‘describing silly and trifling Events, with the Circumstantial Pomp of great Ones’. Clearly, burlesque and irony (mock gravity) are a large part of Sterne’s definition of ‘ cervantick tone’.

  9. faint picture… roar: Cf. Hamlet, V.i.189–91: ‘Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?’

  10. Alas, poor YORICK: Hamlet, V.i.184. Sterne’s black page may reflect an earlier elegiac tradition in which words were printed with white letters on black paper; Florida Notes gives details of several examples.

  CHAPTER XIII

  1. rhapsodical work: OED cites this passage as its last example: ‘Of a literary work: Consisting of a medley of narratives, etc.; fragmentary or disconnected in style.’ Cf. Montaigne, ‘The Ceremony of the Interview of Princes’, which opens: ‘There is no Subject so frivolous, that does not merit a Place in this Rhapsody.’

  2. out-edge: OED records two examples, this passage and one from ASJ.

  3. compound-ratio: Sterne seems to mean ‘inverse ratio’.

  4. by way of commentary: One persistent characteristic of the putative author of Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub is his (commercial) interest in the size of his volume and in the learned commentators who will be appointed to illuminate ‘dark points’. Sterne learned much about the narrative voice of Tristram from his close reading of the Tale, a significant model for TS.

  CHAPTER XIV

  1. Jack Hickathrift or Tom Thumb: Chapbook stories of folk-tale figures. The Grub-street author of A Tale of a Tub had written a learned dissertation on Tom Thumb.

  2. from Rome… Loretto: Santa Casa, or the Holy House of Loreto, one of the most famous shrines of Italy since the fifteenth century, is on the Adriatic Sea, about 125 miles north-east of Rome.

  3. journey’s end: Sterne returns to this idea in VII.xlii–xliii, when Tristram crosses the plains of Languedoc in search of ‘adventures’ and ‘human nature’; and again in ASJ.

  4. views and prospects: The idea recurs in several sermons, most particularly in 2, ‘The house of feasting and the house of mourning’: ‘like travellers, though upon business of the last and nearest concern to us, [we] may surely be allowed to amuse ourselves with the… beauties of the country we are passing through’.

  CHAPTER XV

  1. ingress… regress: Legal formula; Sterne uses it again in IV.xxxi – with bawdy intent, as did many in his age.

  2. femme sole: Single woman.

  3. toties quoties: Repeatedly; as often as occasion requires. Sterne’s legal language is an excellent parody, perhaps copied from an actual document.

  4. swell of imagination: C. H. G. Macafee, ‘The Obstetrical Aspects of Tristram Shandy ’, Ulster Medical Journal 19 (1950), calls this passage an accurate description of pseudocyesis, a condition in which the patient falsely believes herself to be pregnant and produces the objective signs by abdominal swelling.

  CHAPTER XVI

  1. wall-fruit: Fruit trees, especially those bearing soft fruit, benefit in England from being grown espaliered against a protective wall – hence ‘wall-fruit’.

  2. From Stilton… Grantham: Two post stages on the road from London to Edinburgh; Stilton is fifty-nine miles north of London, and Grantham twenty-eight miles farther north. The Trent crossed the post road at Newark-on-Trent, ten miles north of Grantham. York is approximately 200 miles north of London, midway to Edinburgh.

  3. running divisions: The image is a musical one; OED, s.v. Division: ‘The execution of a rapid melodic passage, originally conceived as the dividing of each of a succession of long notes into several short ones… esp. as a variation on, or accompaniment to, a theme or “plain song”.’ See a similar usage in III.xi.

  4. stage: The distance between changes of horse during a journey.

  CHAPTER XVII

  1. thirteen months after: John A. Hay, ‘Rhetoric and Historiography: Tristram Shandy’s First Nine Kalendar Months’, in Studies in the Eighteenth Century II (University of Toronto Press, 1973), points out the computational error in this sentence; it is only a little more than five months later that Tristram is conceived (the first Sunday in March 1718) and thirteen months later that he is born.

  2. ’Tis known… one: Cf. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1642): ‘for obstinacy in a bad cause, is but constancy in a good’. The sentence has a proverbial aura, perhaps stretching as far back as Tacitus, Germania.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  1. Dr.Maningham: SirRichard Manningham, M.D. (1690–1759), the leading English man-midwife of Sterne’s day; since Sterne is discussing events in 1718, however, the allusion is anachronistic.

  2. scientifick operator: Sterne’s first overt allusion to John Burton, MD (1710–71), antiquary and physician of York, author of the Essay towards a Complete New System of Midwifry (1751). While Sterne certainly uses the opportunity to pillory an old adversary (see Cash, EMY, 159–78 and passim), he is also alluding, as noted above, to the eighteenth-century debate regarding male and female midwives and to a second debate concerning the use of instruments for delivery. Male midwives were usually called only in difficult cases, meaning the need to extract a dead foetus or kill a live one that was endangering the mother’s life. Cash, ‘Birth’ (see Further Reading), provides an excellent background for Sterne’s portrait of Slop.

  3. March 9, 1759: The first of four specific dates that Tristram provides for the writing of TS, coinciding with Sterne’s own time of writing; the other dates are 26 March 1759 (I.xxi); 10 August 1761 (V.xvii); and 12 August 1766 (IX.i).

  4. dear Jenny: Cash, EMY, 292, points out that the identification of Jenny with Catherine Fourmantel, the professional singer with whom Sterne was having a liaison during the autumn and winter of 1759–60, and who carried the York edition of Volumes I and II of TS to David Garrick in London, is unlikely to have been the mistress Sterne writes about in the spring of 1759, unless she was in York for the 1758–9 season as well – for which only supposition exists. More likely, he argues, Jenny is ‘not Catherine… but a vague general figure of the confidante and mistress’. Yorick’s statement in ASJ perhaps best solves the problem: ‘[I have] been in love with one princess or
another almost all my life, and I hope I shall go on so, till I die, being firmly persuaded, that if ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another…’

  5. heroine it: Recorded by OED as a nonce word.

  6. He was… cases: Cf. Pope, ‘Thoughts on Various Subjects’ (LXXXIII): ‘The people all running to the Capital city, is like a confluence of all the animal spirits to the heart; a symptom that the constitution is in danger.’ The idea was a political commonplace by the middle of the century.

  7. Squirality: The landed class, usually termed Squirearchy.

  8. country-interest: Unrecorded in OED. This is the party that opposed Robert Walpole (1676–1745) and later Henry Pelham (1696–1754), and hence was linked with the Tory label. During Sterne’s politically active period in the 1740s, he identified with the Whigs opposed to the country-interest. Possibly, however, Sterne simply means a general ‘interest in the country’s welfare’ as distinct from these political divisions.

  9. Grand Monarch: Louis XIV, the ‘Sun-King’; Sterne’s charge of a direct relation between the monarch’s absolute power and France’s poverty was often made by English observers during the century, from Spectator 180 to Edward Gibbon in Memoirs.

  10. weaker vessels: See 1 Peter 3:7: ‘giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel’.

  11. Sir Robert Filmer’s opinion: Although Walter’s remarks are in accord with the ideasofthe English conservative political writer Robert Filmer (d. 1653), as found in Patriarcha, there arenodirect borrowings. Wilfred Watson, ‘The Fifth Commandment: Some Allusions to Sir Robert Filmer’s Writings in Tristram Shandy ’, MLN 62 (1947), makes the point that Sterne could have known Filmer’s ideas primarily through Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, or simply because Filmer’s name continued well into the eighteenth century as representative of ‘antiquated and hobby-horsical political thinking’ about the divine rights of kings. See V.xxxi–xxxii for another allusion to Filmer.