Tristram Shandy Study Guide

Laurence Sterne was born in 1713 in Ireland, where his father served in the British army. The family moved frequently, and Sterne was eventually sent to school in Yorkshire before studying at Cambridge and becoming a priest. Already busy writing sermons, Sterne’s secular literary career began in 1759 when he published his satirical pamphlet A Political Romance. Though the Church suppressed his controversial pamphlet, Sterne also published the first volume of Tristram Shandy that year and found unexpected success in London society. Sterne remained both ill and deep in debt as he continued to publish eight more volumes. His recuperative trips to France did little to address his underlying health problems. Sterne’s marriage to Elizabeth Lumley, meanwhile, was an unhappy one, and he carried on an extended affair with Eliza Draper in 1767. In 1768 Sterne published A Sentimental Journey, a travelogue of France and Italy and quasi-epilogue to Tristram Shandy which contains extended references to Sterne’s affair. He died a month later at age 54.

The 18th century transformed nearly all spheres of life in Britain:. Scientific progress revitalized technology, trade, and medicine. The expansion of the British empire rapidly broadened its citizens understanding of the world, and the spread and development of literature and philosophy engendered fierce debates about the nature of progress, society, and art. These changes are part of a broader cultural movement known as the Enlightenment, whose advocates argued for the historical necessity of human “progress.” At the same time, these rapid social advances only served to underscore the cruel, “unenlightened” forms of society that endured, such as slavery, colonialism, and war. Tristram Shandy responds to the Enlightenment, both praising and criticizing it with a degree of sarcastic remove that exemplifies the Enlightenment’s destabilizing effects, which exposed the gap between how society is imagined and how it functions. Sterne pointedly asks whether rationality can overcome the whimsical, even foolish nature of humankind—and if those qualities are such a bad thing after all.

While Tristram Shandy is considered by many to be the pinnacle of 18th-century British literature, it is far from representative. Indeed, Sterne’s experimental novel draws from a much wider array of sources, including the Bible, Shakespeare, military science, esoteric philosophy, and, in particular, experimental European fiction of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote and François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel stand out as two especially obvious influences, and Sterne explicitly references, borrows from, or otherwise engages with these works throughout Tristram Shandy. Sterne’s preference for continental European writing was mirrored in the novel’s reception: though popular in London society, Tristram Shandy found its most enthusiastic supporters in France and Germany, influencing authors Voltaire, Goethe, Heine, and Balzac, among others. One notable exception is Sterne’s engagement with his fellow British writer Jonathan Swift, whose Tale of a Tub Sterne references throughout Tristram Shandy.