The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [274]
3. rib: jocular for “wife,” an allusion to Eve.
4. running divisions: a musical notion, “the execution of a rapid melodic passage,… esp. as a variation on a theme” (OED).
5. stage: coach stop.
CHAP. XVII
1. thirteen months after: The total time elapsed from their marriage until his birth is thirteen months.
2. perseverance … bad one: Florida notes Sir Thomas Browne’s “Obstinacy in a bad cause is but constancy in a good,” Religio Medici (1742).
CHAP. XVIII
1. the famous Dr. Maningham: Sir Richard Maningham (1690–1759) began practice after 1718, though the retrospective Tristram may simply mean that one could not have known about him at that time. He died in May, so if Sterne was actually writing at the time Tristram says (see n. 3 below), this was a fortuitous reference, or he added it later.
2. scientifick operator … book: Sterne satirizes John Burton, M.D. (1710–71), in his portrayal of the male midwife Dr. Slop. Burton published An Essay towards a Complete New System of Midwifery, Theoretical and Practical (London, 1751), which put forward some of his theories. See Cash, Early and Middle Years, 179–80 and 201–2.
3. March 9, 1759: Tristram gives specific writing dates that seem to correspond to the dates Sterne writes: additionally, March 26, 1759 (I, xxi), August 10, 1761 (V, xvii), and August 12, 1766 (IX, i).
4. Jenny: Doubt has been thrown on the traditional identification with Catherine Fourmantel because this passage was probably written before they met. See Cash, Early and Middle Years, 292. Florida quotes appositely Yorick’s claim of “having been in love with one princess or another almost all my life, and I hope I shall go on so till I die” (Sentimental Journey, 6:44).
5. cheapening: bargaining for.
6. body national … body natural: The comparison of the body politic and the human body was commonplace.
7. Squirality: probably Sterne’s coinage for “Squirearchy,” which dates only from the nineteenth century.
8. country-interest: This group opposed Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745), who served as minister of the treasury (prime minister, as we now understand the term) from 1721 to 1742. They were usually taken to be Tories; Sterne was a Whig.
9. Grand Monarch: Louis XIV of France.
10. weaker vessels: This biblical characterization of wives is from 1 Peter 3:7.
11. Sir Robert Filmer’s: As a Whig, Sterne opposed the defense of absolute monarchy in Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680), contested by John Locke, whose quotation and discussion of Filmer (1588–1653) in Two Treatises of Government (1690), 1.8, may be the source of Sterne’s knowledge.
12. Te Deum: Te deum laudamus (“We praise you, God”). Known for its first words, this ancient hymn became a victory anthem.
13. friendship between the two sexes: a commonplace concern. The Athenian Oracle in 1703, for example, moots the question “Whether a tender Friendship between two Persons of a different Sex, can be innocent?” (1:26–27).
14. sentimental: This complex term with which Sterne was closely associated came into vogue at least a decade before the publication of Tristram Shandy. For nuanced accounts see John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
15. French Romances: Sterne may have meant long seventeenth-century prose fictions, but he might equally have meant such recent novels as Claude-Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon’s Les Égarements du coeur et de l’esprit (The Wayward Head and Heart, 1736), which he knew. Sterne does not use the word “novel” in Tristram Shandy; roman is the French term for both romances and novels.
CHAP. XIX
1. Christian names: Walter’s theories link him to the father of Martinus Scriblerus, Cornelius, whose concern for his son