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STUDIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Volume XXII
 THE RELATION OF
TRISTRAM SHANDY
TO THE LIFE OF STERNE

by

OVERTON PHILIP J A M E S
Northeast Louisiana State College

1966
MOUTON & CO.
THE H A G U E · PARIS
 © Copyright 1966 by Mouton & Co., Publishers, The Hague,
The Netherlands.
No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form,
by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written
permission from the publishers.

Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

During the course of this study of Tristram Shandy and Laurence

Sterne, I have been graciously assisted, first of all, by Professor
John M. Aden of Vanderbilt, who made me aware of certain con-
trolling questions and afforded me constructive criticism and wise
counsel. Professor Edgar Duncan has read the manuscript and
made invaluable suggestions. And Mrs. Edith Megling has pains-
takingly typed it for me.
I am also grateful to President Cecil Humphreys of Memphis
State University and to the Chairman of the English Department,
Dr. Η. B. Evans, of the same institution, for several reasons.
My wife, Nola, has been a most important part of this work.
Without her confidence I would not have begun it, and without
her encouragement I would not have completed it. In the mean-
time our son, Joe, has waited patiently.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements 5

Preface 9

I. The Author and his Work: The Problem and the

Scholarship 11

II. The Man and the Novelist 32

III. The Minister and the Novelist 56

IV. The Transition from Minister to Novelist . . . . 79

V. The Novel: of
Misnaming From the Beginning
Tristram Shandy to the Birth and the 102

VI. The Novel: From the Beginning to the Final Comment

of Yorick 129

Conclusion 162

Bibliography 165
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 PREFACE

Tristram Shandy wrote of the way his father argued the impor-
tance of names: "Like all systematick reasoners, he would move
both heaven and earth, and twist and torture every thing in nature
to support his hypothesis. In a word, I repeat it over again; - he
was serious." Since caution must be exercised - if Walter Shan-
dy's error is to be avoided - in coming to serious conclusions
about "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman",
I have, first of all, examined the course of Sterne criticism. And I
have noticed particularly whether and for what reason Sterne's
work has been called "biography" or "fiction". Although the
question might appear to be one which would have delighted
Walter Shandy, a proper evaluation of the work depends to a
great extent on whether, or to what degree, Tristram Shandy is
biography or fiction.
In the first chapter of this study I have observed that Sterne
critics, until about thirty years ago, generally agreed that Tristram
Shandy was autobiographical, but that later ones have tended to
separate the man from his work and to treat it as a product of his
imagination. Depending in part on a hundred and fifty years of
biographical criticism and on thirty of "New Criticism", I have
argued that the following view of the matter will help to under-
stand and evaluate the man and his work: Although Tristram
Shandy was the imaginative work of Laurence Sterne, neverthe-
less it owed much to the kind of life the author lived, and what he
came to be depended on his having written it.
After examining in the second and third chapters of this paper
the life and ministry of Sterne, insofar as they could be separated,
10 PREFACE

I have concluded, despite Tristram's warning, that some of the

serious elements in Sterne's life were partly responsible for
Tristram Shandy's being other than another jest book. Although
Sterne's formal education and his reading and his years of being
a minister cannot be given credit for the unique kind of imagina-
tion and humor which the work exhibits, they were responsible
for a good part of its contents, composition, and meaning.
In the fourth chapter I have closely examined the presentation
of Yorick, which is set apart from what follows it by two black
pages. Sterne appears to have modeled the character of Yorick in
part after his own. I have found reason to believe that he present-
ed the life and death of Yorick in order to remove himself from
the novel and to leave Tristram to write in character.
The fifth chapter has been devoted to examining the first por-
tion of the novel, which ends with "MY FATHER'S LAMEN-
TATIONS" at the middle of the fourth volume. This part contains
the reciprocally creative efforts of Tristram and his father. The
father tries to bring into the world an excellent son; the son tries
to present in the novel his father, his father's disappointments,
and himself as the chief disappointment.
In the last chapter I have first examined a series of events un-
intentionally brought about by Uncle Toby that Tristram credits
with having made him the kind of person and writer that he is.
This series, or sequence, of events overlaps that of Walter and
Tristram. It begins in the first volume and ends in the sixth. I have
next called attention to other sequences of events, and I have pre-
sented a scheme of the parts that make up the whole of Tristram
Shandy. Finally, I have concluded the study of the relation of the
man and the minister to the novelist and the novel by examining
the words of Yorick, with which the book closes. The speaker,
who is a great deal like Sterne himself, makes a statement about
what kind of work has been written and how valuable it is.
 I

THE AUTHOR AND HIS WORK: THE PROBLEM

AND THE SCHOLARSHIP

For over a hundred and fifty years following its publication, The
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman was generally
regarded as the life and opinions of Laurence Sterne, Prebendary
of York. Tristram Shandy's whimsical nature with its touch, or
smear, of evil was thought to be a revelation of Sterne's. It was
likewise believed that the details of Sterne's life coincided with
what the novel revealed: His father, Roger Sterne, bequeathed
little more to his son than impulsiveness and improvidence. Lau-
rence's mother, the sutler's daughter, gave to and elicited from
her son a good share of her own grossness. It was also believed
that his education instead of correcting his whimsy confirmed it:
While he was attending a public school notorious for its laxness,
his most remarkable achievement was writing his name on the
ceiling. His four years at Cambridge were spent in dawdling, in
learning to dislike scholasticism (which might have disciplined
his thinking), and in finding a sanction for dislike of scholasticism
in John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. His
capricious friend, John Hall-Stevenson, was credited with further
abetting Sterne's talent for whimsy by making his library, stocked
with facetiae, available to him and by making him a member of
the Demoniacs of Crazy Castle. It was believed that Sterne did
not take his ministerial duties seriously enough. If on his way to
church Sterne happened to flush a covey of birds, he would leave
his congregation waiting. And his failing to secure ecclesiastical
preferment was attributed to his toying with his uncle Jacques
Sterne's mistress. His changing from minister to novelist was be-
lieved to be another example of his whimsical nature. A more
12 THE AUTHOR AND HIS WORK

resolute person would have stayed with one profession, or, at least,
would have changed earlier. Sterne, however, late in life turned
from the ministry to novel writing. He produced, as he naturally
would, a masterpiece of disorder. Finally, like Yorick, whose
name he had taken, Sterne could not stay buried, but was dug up
again by bodysnatchers for medical students to "examine too
curiously".
Only since the beginning of the second quarter of the twentieth
century has the general opinion of Sterne and his work begun to
change. Probably, the change can be attributed in part to the fact
that literary criticism about the same time began to separate the
life of an author from his literary creations.1 Since then it has
become less certain that Sterne's life was the subject of his novel.
Although recent critics have come to deny the identity of Lau-
rence Sterne and Tristram Shandy,2 the habit of biographical in-
terpretation has been hard to break, and in this case the reasons
for breaking it have not gained much attention.3
It might well be that Sterne himself was partly responsible for
the reader's identifying him with Tristram. In some of his letters
he called himself "Tristram", or "Shandy"; and once or twice
1
Meyer H. Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, Oxford
University Press, 1935), pp. 26-39, summarizes the rise of objective criti-
cism, and marks its beginning in the middle twenties with the writings of
I. A. Richards, T. S. Eliot, and John Crowe Ransom. See also William
K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History
(New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), pp. 73If. Brooks and Wimsatt attribute
the spread of objective criticism to the "relatively new kind of graduate
school study that seeks to substitute for the poem not the author . . . but
the audience".
2
Rufus D. Putney, "Apostle of Laughter", in Age of Johnson: Essays
Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker (New Haven, Yale University
Press, 1949), p. 162, credits Edwin Muir with having demonstrated in 1929
that Tristram was not Sterne. I have been unable to locate the work by
Muir.
3
Implications that Tristram and Sterne were much alike are still being
expressed. See: Wilbur L. Cross, The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne,
3d ed. rev. (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1929); James Aiken Work's
"Introduction", to The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
(New York, Odyssey Press, 1940); Lodwick Hartley, This is Lorence
(Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1943); and Peter Quen-
nell, Four Portraits (London, William Collins, 1945), in the U.S.: The
Profane Virtues (New York, Viking Press, 1945).
 THE AUTHOR AND HIS WORK 13

in the novel he identified Tristram with himself. Although few,

the instances were sufficient to cause Sterne and Tristram to be
identified for all of the novel.4 It is also probable that Sterne's
having Tristram be both narrator and hero contributed to the
confusion. Generally, readers have some difficulty in separating
an author from his chief character, and more difficulty in distin-
guishing between the author and his narrator. And whenever, as
in the case of Tristram Shandy, the main character and the narra-
tor are the same, they often are unable to distinguish between the
writer and his persona. It is possible that the early critics of Sterne
had difficulty in separating Sterne from Tristram Shandy because
Tristram performed this dual role.
It might also be said in extenuation of the earlier critics of
Tristram Shandy that a complete separation of Sterne from his
work would have been impossible. Although Tristram Shandy and
Laurence Sterne are not the same, there is, nevertheless, a causal
relationship between them. Sterne's life did not lead to his writing
the book; biography cannot explain literary creativity.5 On the
other hand, it seems reasonable to hold that if Laurence Sterne
had lived a different kind of life, he would have written Tristram
Shandy differently, if he had written it at all. The converse appears
equally reasonable: Tristram Shandy made possible the writing
of A Sentimental Journey·, and two successful literary ventures
must have made Sterne's life different from what it otherwise
would have been.
It is hoped that an insistence on the causal relationship between
Sterne and his work - that although Tristram cannot be identified
with Sterne, the conditions in Sterne's life affected the way the
novel was written - will have at least a small part in offsetting
the injustice done to man and novel by the long-continued identi-
fication of Sterne and Tristram and by the recent tendency to
neglect Sterne the author. Because Sterne had Tristram begin the
4
Alan B. Howes, Yorick and the Critics: Sterne's Reputation in England,
1760-1868 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1958), p. 5, n. 7.
5
In SRL (January 20, 1940), p. 17, Alexander Cowie protested that
W. B. C. Watkins had used biography to explain the creativity of Swift,
Johnson, and Sterne in Perilous Balance: The Tragic Genius of Swift, and
Sterne (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1939).
 14 THE AUTHOR AND HIS WORK

novel by relating the begetting of the narrator-hero, and because

Tristram continued to deal with sex even to the end of the cock-
and-bull story, Sterne himself was called "Smutty Sterne".6 Be-
cause Sterne fashioned a Tristram who wept easily and described
other characters who wept still more easily, Sterne was called
"sentimental".7 Although recent investigations have begun to
make doubtful that the facts of Sterne's life warranted his being
called either smutty or sentimental, the injustice was done more
to the man than to the author.
It would seem that the method of arriving at the condemnation
of Sterne the man would have hindered recognition of Sterne the
artist and of Tristram Shandy as a work of art. It is difficult to see
how Sterne could have been regarded as a creative artist instead
of a journalist when the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy
were believed to be those of Laurence Sterne. It is equally difficult
to see how Tristram Shandy could have been regarded as an im-
aginative construct instead of a journal. But despite the conclu-
sions to which the identification of Sterne and his work led, he
continued to be called a "novelist" and his work continued to be
called a "novel". Although it is puzzling how they could have
been so regarded in the face of the identification, it must be ad-
mitted that they received a certain amount of fair treatment. It
was, however, not enough. The identification too long delayed the
investigation of Sterne as a creative artist and of Tristram Shandy
as a product of creative artistry.8
A few examples will perhaps serve as an index of the damaging
effect of the circular reasoning about Tristram Shandy. Because
the book dealt with prurient matters, Sterne was smutty minded;
6
Howes, op. cit., p. 7, n. 5, asserts that little verification can be found
for Dr. Johnson's calling Sterne "licentious and dissolute in conversation".
Howes also states that Dr. Johnson's assessment of Sterne's character has
long been regarded as most damaging.
7
Ernest Dilworth in The Unsentimental Journey of Laurence Sterne
(New York, King's Crown Press, 1948), argues the case for the lack of
mawkish emotionalism in Tristram Shandy as well as in A Sentimental
Journey.
8
Herbert Read in The Sense of Glory (New York, Harcourt Brace and
Company, 1930), pp. 126 f., argued that Sterne's being accepted as a
popular writer precluded "the need to explain his achievement".
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