Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives by John Sutherland

living at Coxwold, nicknamed ‘Shandy Hall’.
    Technically what
Tristram Shandy
bequeathed to English fiction was immediacy – ‘writing to the moment’. His sign manual is the ‘dash’ – typically a ‘5 em’ thing which lubricates the frictionless pace of narrative (speeding up one’s reading in the process).
Tristram Shandy
, with its expressive typography (super large capitals, different fonts, the creative use of white space and blocked pages) is a tribute to the growing skill of the mid-eighteenth century London printing trade. The fluidity Sterne aimed at was that of speech. ‘Writing,’ he wrote, ‘when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.’
    He did not have long left to converse with the world. While seeing the fifth and sixth volume of
Tristram Shandy
through the press, in 1761, he suffered his worst ever haemorrhage of the lungs. Recuperation in the warm climates of France and Italy was prescribed. Over the next few years these sunny excursions to nowhere in particular would solidify as Sterne’s second great book,
A Sentimental Journeythrough France and Italy, by Mr. Yorick
. Half-travel book, half-egotising, it codified the period’s cult of sentimentality – a vein even more lucratively exploited by Oliver Goldsmith in
The Vicar of Wakefield
(1766). Sentimentalism was one of the ways in which Sterne changed the psychology of his age. Whether his sermons (sell-out occasions when he delivered them in fashionable London pulpits) were as efficacious on the morality of his time is doubtful. But they proved another source of income.
    And he needed income. A life of grand touring was expensive, and Sterne’s style of life at home was now lavish.
Tristram Shandy
was in its ninth volume as his life drew to a close. His last months were consumed by consumption and a passionate late-life love affair with a married woman, Eliza Draper.
The Journal to Eliza
(modelled on Swift’s
Journal to Stella
) is his last work, an exercise in stylised ‘spiritual adultery’. He was unfaithful to Eliza, though, as to all the women in his life. He died after a trip to London on publishing business in the company of Hall-Stevenson. In a macabre postlude, Sterne’s corpse was stolen from its resting place and recognised – just before dismemberment – on a medical school dissection table at Cambridge: the body was reinterred. The skull was then disinterred in the 1960s from the mass grave in which Sterne’s remains had been buried and reinterred, yet again in Coxwold. As was observed, it could be seen as payback for all the Yorick jokes Sterne had perpetrated.
    Critical opinion about Sterne will forever be divided. A novel which begins with coitus interruptus and features characters called ‘Kysarcius’ was not designed to please moralists. Samuel Richardson found the work ‘gross’ – although he granted it was not sexually ‘inflaming’. No maidenheads were put at risk by young bucks reading Sterne. F. R. Leavis, while banishing
Tristram Shandy
from the Great Tradition of English fiction, summed up a pervasive line of objection with his stern verdict: ‘irresponsible (and nasty) trifling’.
    The Victorians in general disliked him. Thackeray (who none the less learned some useful narrative tricks from Tristram) was harsh in his judgement on the unmanliness of Sterne the man: ‘he used to blubber perpetually in his study, and finding his tears infectious, and that they brought him a great popularity, he exercised the lucrative gift of weeping; he utilised it, and cried on every occasion. I own that I don’t value or respect much the cheap dribble of those fountains.’ Critics of a traditional mind find Sterne irritatingly eccentric. Hence Dr Johnson’s strikingly wrong prediction to Boswell: ‘Nothing odd will do long.
Tristram Shandy
did not last.’ In his authoritative study,
The Rise of the Novel
, Ian Watt excludes Sterne on the grounds of