Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne, 1713 - 1768, Tristram Shandy, nine volumes, 1759 – 1767. A must-read is the Everyman’s Library edition, with an introduction by Peter Conrad, c. 1991, but included in Everyman’s Library as early as 1912.

197 pages; 111 chapters. 

In the introduction, these four novelists were, perhaps, the “founding fathers” of the English novel: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne, and Cervantes, though not English.

Mentioned in passing in the introduction: Marianne Moore, Jane Eyre, Don Juan (Byron), Hamlet, Whitman’s Prelude, and many others, particularly Fielding’s Tom Jones.

From page viii of the introduction,

“… Sterne discovers a new way of writing and a new way of understanding human nature which makes his book a sacred text both for Romantic poets and modern novelists, who like him want to liberate literature from its self-imposed and unnecessary rules.”

Everyman's Library was founded in 1906 and relaunched in 1991. It aims to offer the most complete library in the English language of the world's classics. Each volume is printed in a classic typeface on acid-free, cream-wove paper with a sewn full cloth binding.

I first read Tristram Shandy some years ago, probably in 2004 or thereabouts when I was at the height of my reading program which began in 2002. I was, at that time, reading about the evolution of the novel. Until much later, I did not know how "important" Richardson's Clarissa and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe were in that development, both of which I read about that time. It is no easy "thing" to get through Clarissa. 

To some extent, I suppose, Laurence Sterne was the Mark Twain of his era.