Tristram Shandy was a sensation--first in England, then through all of Europe--from the time the first two volumes appeared in the winter of 176o. And despite Dr. Johnson's unflattering choice of the book to exemplify his dictum that "nothing odd can last," it maintained its renown (though at times somewhat dubiously) through the nineteenth century, to emerge in our own time as the most modern of eighteenth-century novels.
This edition of "the most modern of eighteenth-century novels" reprints the text of the first edition of the volumes of Tristram Shandy as they appeared from December 1759 to January 1767,including the two illustrations by Hogarth. Obvious errors have been corrected, but most of the conventions of eighteenthcentury printing, and all of Sterne's brilliant exploitations and expansions of these conventions, have been retained.
"Backgrounds" are provided by a chronology of Sterne's life and comments from his letters pertaining to the composition of the novel and his theory of fiction. Responses by Sterne's contemporaries--among them Walpole, Goldsmith, Richardson,and Johnson--begin the selection of critical materials. Earlynineteenth-century assessments by Coleridge, Hazlitt, Scott,and Thackeray are followed by twentieth-century critical essays by Lodwick Hartley, D. W. Jefferson, Toby A. Olshin, Wayne Booth, William Bowman Piper, Martin Price, Jean-Jacques Mayoux, Richard A. Lanham, Sigurd Burkhardt, J. Paul Hunter,Charles Parish, and Howard Anderson.
Preface
Chronology of Sterne's Life
The Text of Tristram Shandy
The Author on the Novel
To Robert Dodsley
To a Friend
To Robert Dodsley
To Dr. Noah Thomas
To Jane [?] Fenton
To Stephen Croft
To John Hall-Stevenson
To Lady Anna Dacre [?]
To Robert Foley
To Elizabeth Montagu
To Robert Foley
Criticism
Contemporary Responses
William Kenrick·Review of Tristram Shandy
From the Critical Review
From the London Magazine
From the Royal Female Magazine
Horace Walpole·Letter to Sir David Dalrymple
Letter to the Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure
James Boswell·From "A Poetical Epistle"
Letter to Lloyd's Evening Post
Thomas Gray·Letter to Thomas YVarton the Younger
Oliver Goldsmith·From The Citizen of the World
Edmund Burke·Review of Tristram Shandy
Samuel Richardson·Letter to Mark Hildesley
John Langhorne·Review of Tristram Shandy
Samuel Johnson·Conversation with Boswell
Early-Nineteenth-Century Criticism
Samuel Taylor Coleridge·[Steme's Wit and Humor]
William Hazlitt·[Sterne's Style]
Sir Walter Scott·Laurence Sterne
William Makepeace Thackeray·Sterne and Goldsmith
Twentieth-Century Studies
Lodwick Hartley·[The Genius of Laurence Sterne]
D. W. Jefferson·Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit
Toby A. Olshin·Genre and Tristram Shandy:
Wayne Booth·Did Sterne Complete Tristram Shandy?
William Bowman Piper·Tristram's Digressive Artistry
Martin Price·[The Art of the Natural]
Jean-Jacques Mayoux·Variations on the Time-Sense in Tristram Shandy
Richard A. Lanham·Games, Play, Seriousness
Sigurd Burckhardt·Tristram Shandy's Law of Gravity
Howard Anderson·Tristram Shandy and the
J. Paul Hunter·Response as Reformation:
Charles Parish·A Table of Contents for Tristram Shandy
Bibliography