The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Summary

Tristram Shandy promises to tell the life and opinions of its narrator, a Yorkshire gentleman, and spends most of its nine volumes failing to reach his life at all. Tristram begins with the moment of his conception in March 1718, when his mother interrupts his father at the critical instant to ask whether he has remembered to wind up the clock. That interruption, he says, scattered the animal spirits that should have escorted the homunculus, and it explains the misfortunes of his whole existence. The household at Shandy Hall supplies the comedy. Walter Shandy, Tristram's father, is a retired Turkey merchant who loves systems: he believes that the shape of the nose and the choice of a Christian name govern a man's fortunes, and that a gentle birth protects the brain. His brother, Captain Toby Shandy, was wounded in the groin at the siege of Namur in 1695; to explain his wound he builds, with his loyal servant Corporal Trim, a scale model of fortifications on the bowling green and refights the campaigns of Queen Anne's wars. Each man rides his hobby-horse, Tristram's word for a ruling passion. Mrs. Shandy, placid and literal, rarely understands either of them. Parson Yorick, a plain-spoken clergyman, dies early in the book, and his death is marked by a page printed entirely black. Tristram is not born until the third and fourth volumes. Dr. Slop, the Catholic man-midwife, is sent for; Obadiah has tied his bag of instruments in knots; and the new forceps crush the infant's nose. When the sickly baby is to be christened Trismegistus, the maid Susannah garbles the name and the curate baptizes him Tristram, the name Walter thinks the worst of all. Further accidents follow: news of the death of Tristram's elder brother Bobby, which Walter answers with a learned oration on death and Trim with a dropped hat; a falling window-sash that injures the five-year-old Tristram; and Walter's Tristrapaedia, an educational system that takes so long to write that the child outgrows it. Along the way come Slawkenbergius's Latin tale of a stranger with an enormous nose, Ernulphus's curse, the deathbed of the poor Lieutenant Le Fever, whose son Toby takes in, a marbled page, a blank page for the reader to draw the Widow Wadman, and diagrams of the book's own crooked plot lines. Volume VII sends Tristram galloping through France to escape Death. The last volumes return to Toby's courtship of the Widow Wadman, which ends when her anxious questions about the site of his wound are understood. The book closes with Walter's complaint about his town bull and Yorick calling the whole thing a cock-and-bull story. Volumes I–II appeared at York in December 1759 and were published in London in January 1760; the rest followed in 1761, 1765 and 1767. The library text is the Project Gutenberg edition, which gathers all nine volumes in four parts.

Top Lessons

• Hobby-horses and the people who ride them

  Walter's systems and Toby's fortifications make both brothers absurd, yet Tristram treats a man's hobby-horse with indulgence so long as he does not force others to ride it. The book asks readers to laugh at ruling passions while loving the people who have them.

• The comedy of theory

  Walter Shandy has a learned theory for everything: noses, names, the seat of the soul, auxiliary verbs and childbirth. Every one of them is defeated by an accident, a knot, a falling sash or a maid's memory. Sterne mocks the learned pedant who prefers a system to the child in front of him.

• Kindness as the measure of a man

  Uncle Toby, the book's least learned man, is its best. He frees the fly, cares for Le Fever, and swears that the dying man shall not die; Tristram's narration makes his goodness the warm center of the comedy.

• Writing against time

  Tristram notices that he has taken a year to write one day of his life, so that he can never catch up with himself. The digressions, blank and black pages and the flight from Death in Volume VII turn the book into a meditation on how memory and storytelling struggle with mortality.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Tristram Shandy is a valuable document of mid-eighteenth-century obstetrics. The rivalry between the village midwife and Dr. Slop, a man-midwife armed with the new forceps, reflects the real contest over who should attend births; Slop is generally taken as a caricature of the York physician and obstetric writer John Burton, with whom Sterne had local quarrels, though the identification rests on tradition and circumstantial evidence. Walter's theories draw on older physiology: animal spirits, the homunculus, the seat of the soul and the danger of pressure on the infant's head during birth, which he hopes to avoid by a Caesarean delivery. Toby's groin wound from Namur and his years of convalescence connect the comedy to the care of wounded soldiers. The hobby-horse is a pre-clinical study of fixed ideas, and the opening chapters adapt Locke's association of ideas, an important source for later associationist psychology. Sterne himself had consumption and suffered lung haemorrhages; Volume VII, with its flight from Death and Tristram's cough, is often read in that light. Such biographical readings are interpretive.

• Vol. I, Chs. 1–4

  The interrupted conception, the scattering of the animal spirits, and the association of ideas between the clock and the marriage bed.

• Vol. I, Chs. 7, 13 and 18

  The village midwife, the marriage settlement and Walter's insistence on sending for a man-midwife.

• Vol. II, Chs. 1–5

  Toby's groin wound at Namur, his long recovery, and his turn to the study of fortification to explain where he was hurt.

• Vol. III, Chs. 8–16, and Vol. IV, Ch. 27

  Dr. Slop's knotted bag of instruments, the newly invented forceps, and the injury to the infant's nose.

• Vol. VI, Chs. 6–10

  Toby and Trim's care of the dying Lieutenant Le Fever at the inn.

• Vol. VII, Ch. 1

  Tristram, coughing and ill, resolves to flee from Death across France.