Laurence Sterne
Life before and after literary celebrity
Laurence Sterne was born in Clonmel in 1713 into an army family whose early years involved frequent moves. He later studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, and became a Church of England clergyman. His professional life in Yorkshire preceded the sudden literary fame that arrived in middle age. In 1759 he paid for the printing of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy after failing to secure the publication arrangement he wanted.
Their success transformed his public position. From 1760 he lived at Shandy Hall in Coxwold, where he continued the novel and wrote A Sentimental Journey. He also published sermons, travelled to France for his health and maintained a wide circle of literary and personal connections. He died in 1768. The clerical career and the experimental fiction were not separate lives: both depended on a practiced speaking voice and a keen sense of the relation between an audience and the person addressing it.
A life delayed by its own telling
Tristram Shandy announces the life and opinions of its narrator, then repeatedly discovers that explaining an event requires another story first. Digression is not an accidental obstruction to an otherwise straightforward biography. It becomes the means by which the book explores how memory, association and explanation resist a neat chronological line.
The narrator also makes the act of writing visible. He anticipates objections, negotiates with the reader and comments on his own progress. This can turn impatience into part of the comedy: wanting the story to move forward is itself an experience the novel has arranged for its audience.
The household and its private systems
Walter Shandy’s theories and Uncle Toby’s absorbed interests create different ways of organising experience. Their conversations are funny partly because a word or incident can enter two incompatible systems of significance. A speaker may be perfectly earnest and still fail to meet the other person’s meaning.
Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey offers another experiment in the relation between outward movement and inward response. Tristram Shandy remains distinctive in making the promised life almost inseparable from the problem of narrating it. The comparison helps show that Sterne’s interest in feeling was accompanied by an equally persistent interest in form.
Reading with the digressions
Instead of treating each detour as a delay to be overcome, ask what triggered it. A word, memory or misunderstanding may reveal a connection that ordinary chronology would hide. Keep an eye on who is speaking and on the difference between the time of an event and the time spent recounting it.
Read the direct addresses as part of the action. The narrator’s imagined reader is a character in the encounter, sometimes coaxed and sometimes teased. Where an edition includes typographical or visual experiments, notice how they change the act of reading; their effects may not all survive a plain-text presentation.