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By Root 1891 0

employs his theory of the “association of ideas” to account for his mother’s distraction of his father, as was noted (somewhat inaccurately) in the year of the book’s appearance by a pseudonymous contemporary: “But what does the winding up of the clock allude to—and how comes it this thought always entered his mother’s head once a month? This he very naturally accounts for by an assemblage of ideas, according to Locke.…” Jeremiah Kunastrokius [pseud.], Explanatory remarks upon the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (London, 1760), 11. Cf. I, ii below.

5. Good … same time: Sterne had used Walter’s exclamation and Tristram’s characterization of it in his Fragment, 1088.

CHAP. II

1. scattered and dispersed: The language of this sentence closely follows Rabelais (3.31; 3:207), and in the next sentence the catalogue of the parts of the body comes largely from 5.9.

2. HOMUNCULUS: little man. The belief was widespread that a fully formed person was contained in the individual sperm cell.

3. minutest philosophers: the most petty or trivial scientists. The phrase “minute philosopher” derived from Cicero and had a range of meanings in the eighteenth century, as in George Berkeley’s Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732), an attack on freethinking.

4. Lord Chancellor: chief justice.

5. Tully, Puffendorff: Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106–43 BCE), Roman author of De Officius (The Offices) and numerous other works; Samuel von Pufendorf (1632–94), a highly regarded German authority on natural law.

CHAP. III

1. Mr. Toby Shandy … anecdote: Toby as we come to know him is a very unlikely source for such a story. Toby’s name suggests the buttocks; cf. “Tickletoby’s mare” below, III, xxxvi, n. 3.

CHAP. IV

1. Pilgrim’s Progress: John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) had gone through thirty editions by 1759.

2. Montaigne: Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) “Upon Some Verses of Virgil,” Essays (3:82).

3. Horace … ab Ovo: Tristram reverses what the Roman satirist Horace (65–8 BCE) recommends in the Ars Poetica (c. 15 BCE), line 146ff.: the poet should start in the middle of things, not from the egg (“ab ovo”). Horace alludes to the long mythological story that precedes the opening of Homer’s epic The Iliad.

4. Turky merchant: member of the Levant company chartered to trade in Turkey.

5. association of ideas … Locke: See I, i, n. 4 above. Locke speaks of the “association of ideas” in Essay, 2.33. The controversial role of Locke in this book is discussed in the Introduction (xxviii).

6. Lady-Day: Feast of the Ascension, March 25.

7. Westminster school: a distinguished public (i.e., private) school for boys.

8. Sciatica: a painful condition of the hip and/or leg caused by a pinched sciatic nerve.

CHAP. V

1. fifth day of November: Guy Fawkes Day, when bonfires were lit to celebrate the discovery of the Roman Catholic “Gunpowder Plot” to blow up Parliament. Fawkes, as Mark Loveridge notes in Laurence Sterne and the Argument About Design (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1982), was born in York (216, n. 71). This is one of many local connections in Sterne’s book, which was originally published in York (vols. I and II).

2. near nine kalendar months: actually eight months—a suggestion, enhanced by other details, of Tristram’s possible illegitimacy.

3. disasterous: ill-starred (as the spelling makes clear); an astrological concept.

4. asthma: Asthma was regarded as the forerunner of consumption (tuberculosis).

5. misadventures and cross accidents: In “The House of Feasting and the House of Mourning Described” (Sermons, 4:18) Sterne uses the phrase to describe the human condition.

CHAP. VI

1. O diem præclarum: O glorious day (Latin), originally from Cicero, the conclusion of De Senectute (“O præclarum diem”).

2. a fool’s cap with a bell to it: the traditional headgear of the court jester.

CHAP. VII

1. midwife: Male midwives or doctors were controversial.

2. the ordinaries licence: The ordinary has the right to immediate jurisdiction in ecclesiastical cases.

3. rights, members, and appurtenances whatsoever: a standard