The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [330]
DEDICATION
1. The asterisks may be filled with “Pit[t]” and “Chatham,” the earldom which Pitt (to whom Sterne dedicated the second edition of volumes I and II in 1760) received in 1766. Pitt was not in the ministry (“out of place”) from 1761 to 1766.
2. gentle Shepherd: a nickname for George Grenville, derived from Pitt’s mockery of him in Parliament. Grenville, in the course of the debate on the Cider Bill of 1764, insistently asked the House “where” it could obtain tax money if not from cider. Pitt “ ‘replied in a musical tone,’ in the words of a favorite [air], ‘Gentle Shepherd tell me where.…’ Mr. Grenville, after this, retained the appelation.” See William Belsham, Memoirs of the Reign of George III (1796; 1:101–2); from an air in William Boyce’s serenata Solomon (1742). Morris Golden calls attention to the general use of the nickname in “Periodical Context in the Imagined World of Tristram Shandy,” The Age of Johnson 1 (1987): 256–57, 260 n. 14.
3. Whose Thoughts … company: Sterne mocks the “simple” Grenville and his followers in lines parodying Alexander Pope’s on the “poor Indian” in Essay on Man (1.99–106, 111–12; Pope, 3.1:27–28).
CHAP. I
1. time and chance: Ecclesiastes 9:11: “time and chance happeneth to them all.” See also Sterne’s sermon 8 on this topic (4:74–80).
2. mote: Matthew 7:5: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”
3. 12th day of August, 1766: possibly the very date he wrote it, though he claimed to be already writing the ninth volume on July 23 (Letters, 284).
4. violation of nature: parodies William Wollaston’s notion in The Religion of Nature Delineated (1722), 9, that “nothing can interfere with any proposition that is true, but it must likewise interfere with Nature …, and consequently be unnatural or wrong in nature” (noted by Graham Petrie in his edition of Tristram Shandy [Penguin Books, 1967]).
CHAP. II
Volume IX is by far the shortest in the book. In this volume and no other, Sterne’s chapters began on fresh pages starting with chapter ii, probably to make it look longer. The arguments for the formal completeness or incompleteness of the book are considered in the Introduction (xix–xxii). Sterne died in 1768.
1. buckle: “The state of the hair crisped and curled” (Johnson).
2. had not … Grace: Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty: “it is quantity which adds greatness to grace” (30).
3. armour: punning on a condom.
4. Le Fevre’s: This is the only instance of the name being spelled as it would be in French, and is probably a misprint.
CHAP. III
1. alout: “quite” (OED); an obsolete spelling for “all out.”
CHAP. IV
1. flourish … stick thus: New suggests that the “flourish seems to resemble eighteenth-century illustrations of the motions of a spermatozoon.”
CHAP. VI
1. negro girl: In response to a letter from the ex-slave Ignatius Sancho praising Toby, Trim, and Sermon 10, “Job’s Account of the Shortness and Troubles of Life, considered” (4:91–102), Sterne claimed he was coincidentally writing “a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro girl” (Sancho to Sterne, July 21, 1766; Sterne to Sancho, July 27, 1766; Letters, 282–83, 285–87). This episode, which enables Sancho’s favorites Toby and Trim to moralize on slavery, seems made to order. For an account of Sancho, see Sukhdev Sandhu, “Sterne and the ‘Coal-Black Jolly African,’ ” The Shandean 12 (2001): 9–21. “Slut,” as in VII, ix, is here a term of affection, not disapprobation, though it contains overtones of lower status.
2. sportable: “capable of being sportive” (OED), the sole illustration.
CHAP. VII
1. Wynendale: The battle was fought September 28, 1708. See Tindal, 4:84–86.
CHAP. VIII
1. breeches: John Ray, A Compleat Collection of English Proverbs (1678), 57: “he that woos a Widow, must down with his Breeches,