coat for his wife and a jerkin for himself." A small edition of this squib was printed at York, 1759, but, on the advice of Sterne's spiritual superiors, burnt—all but a few copies. It did not make for edification, that is, it did not screen, as the work of a good churchman should, the petty greed and folly which mask under the solemn habiliments of the Church.
Seventeen fifty-nine was a momentous year for Laurence Sterne. His mother died, but that didn't trouble him. His uncle, the canon, died—but that didn't trouble him—leaving him no legacy, which troubled him so much that he refused to wear the mourning he had prepared in celebration of the event. His wife went mad, but that troubled him little; he humored her in it, for he was engaged in an impassioned flirtation—thought to be the cause of his wife's madness—with a professional singer, to whom he was sending wine, honey, sweetmeats and vows of distracted love "to eternity." At the same time he was writing the first instalment of "Tristram Shandy." His hero's name means "the sad crack-brained fellow," and he meant the book to give a true portrait, or rather impression, of himself and his peculiar humor.
It does. The characters, the opinions, the novel style—with its discovery of the intimacy-making uses of punctuation and the pause in the sentence—are Shandian, and so are this most outrageous plot and this most absurd of all conceivable artistic "points of view."
Here is an author undertaking to tell what took place below stairs between the time when his mother's pains came upon her and the time of his own birth. With expectation of the poor woman's deliverance to supply "suspense," the discussions of Walter Shandy,
