Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)

Tristam Shandy

• its bawdy humor was popular with 18th century London society
• filled with allusions and references to leading thinkers and writers of 17th and 18th centuries
• Pope, Locke and Swift were all major influences
• other influences include Rabelais, Cervantes, Montaigne's essays and John Locke
• Rabelais's influence is seen in the bawdy humor centered on the body
• references to Rosinante, the character of Uncle Toby (who resembles Don Quixote) and Sterne's own description of his characters' "Cervantic humor" points out Cervantes' influence on Sterne
• novel also makes use of Locke's theories of empiricism, or the way we assemble what we know of ourselves and our world from the "association of ideas" that come to us from our five sense
• characters:
• Walter
• Toby

It begins:

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing; -- that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; - and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humors and dispositions which were then uppermost; - Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, - I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see in me. - Believe me, good folks, this is not so inconsiderable a thing as many of you may think it; - you have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused from father to son, &c. &c. - and a great deal to that purpose: - Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in then of a man's sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracks and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, 'tis not a half-penny matter, - away they go cluttering like hey-go mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it. 

Another famous line: "writing, when properly managed, is but another name for conversation."