In Our Time - Tristram Shandy

Episode Date: April 24, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy. Sterne's comic masterpiece is an extravagantly inventive work which was hugely popular when first published in 1759. Its often bawdy humour, and numerous digressions, are combined with bold literary experiment, such as a page printed entirely black to mark the death of one of the novel's characters. Dr Johnson wrote that "Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last" - but two hundred and fifty years after the book's publication, Tristram Shandy remains one of the most influential and widely admired books of the eighteenth century.With:Judith Hawley Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonJohn Mullan Professor of English at University College LondonMary Newbould Bowman Supervisor in English at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.Producer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. UK slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In 1760, a London periodical called The Monthly Review published a review of two books by an Anglican clergyman. The first, a modest volume of sermons, was described as causing the greatest outrage against sense and decency that's been offered since the first establishment of Christianity.

The second, a novel was said to be not only scandalously indecent but absolutely dull. We advise the author to remain where he is in his swaddling clothes without insulting the public any further. So insults were so insulted with the public that they bought the novel in their droves. Its title, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentlemen, and its author, Lawrence Stern,

was celebrated and reviled in equal measure. It's an extraordinary book, full of bored of humour, literary experiment and lengthy digressions, although some people condemn the work as obscene or trivial later writers, including Voltaire, Coleridge, and Dickens, thought it a comic masterpiece, and today it's widely

regarded as a landmark in the history of the novel. With me to discuss Trist from Chaldeh, are Judith Hawley, Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway University of London, John Mullen, Professor of English at University College London, and Mary Newbold, Bowman Supervisor

in English at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. Judith Hawley, Stern was born a little over 200 years ago in Ireland. Will you give us a quick sketch of his background? Yes, Stern, as you say, was born in Ireland in Clonmel Tipperary. His mother was Irish. She wasn't very well-born. She was the daughter of a sutler, an army supplier,

and his father was an army officer. He was an ensign, which was a very low-ranking army officer. But his father had come from a pretty well-connected Yorkshire family, but he was the second son of a second son, so he didn't have very much of a prospect. He had to make his own way in life. Nevertheless, his father probably went into the army at a very low rank and then married beneath him.

His father was a bit of a black sheep in the family. His grandfather had been master of Jesus College, Cambridge, and then Archbishop of York. So he was very well connected in the church. And he had a whole series of uncles and cousins who were major landowners and churchmen in Yorkshire. But he had this rather rather, brackety childhood, travelling around after his father, but it's shuttling between England and

Ireland, and very unsettled, until at the age of 10 he was put in school at Hibahom, Halifax. And he had a very good schooling. He was a very good schoolmaster called Nathan Sharpton. Has his father died by this stage? His father didn't die until 1731. And, no, that's wrong, isn't it? Yeah, his father didn't. His father died earlier, but he went into school age 10 in Halifax and he ended up having to pay his own school fees when he left so he was in this sort of rather minor precarious position within a grand

family but he had a good education in Halifax and then went up to Jesus College Cambridge which as I said his great grandfather had been master of and there's a whole series of family connections at Jesus and he studied theology then he went to the church and went to York to become a What were rank was he in the cathedral?

He became a prebund. 1741 is a really crucial year for him. His uncle Jacques Stern decided to support him at this point. He got him a good vicarage. He got him a prebendry in the York Minster, which gave him an extra income and a bit of status within the church. And his interests were the church and sermons,

which he enjoyed doing, but also rather less usually. politics. Yes, Jacques was a really ambitious political figure himself, and he pretty much used his nephew, Lawrence, as a kind of hack writer for him. There's a disputed election in York in 1741, 1743, and Stern wrote a lot in the York Current, which is a newspaper sponsored by his uncle, and he wrote a series of often quite nasty political squibs against his opponents. Anonymously?

All anonymously, but at some point his initials were added to some articles and at some point his name came out. But for a number of years he was embroiled in writing pretty much on his uncle's behalf. Is he expressing political opinions that he held or that his uncle held? And if so, what were they? His uncle was very definitely a wig, a supporter of Walpole, so he's a court wig. What does that mean? That means that Horace Walpole, who was prime minister, who was, who's,

hold on the country was coming to an end. But what did he mean in terms of his views? It means that he supported a certain amount of Lockean liberty, so the sense of individual rights over property, the Protestant succession. He was very opposed to the Jacobite interest, which was very strong in York in the 1745 rebellion. John Mullen, so we've got that man there.

He's making a living. he's paying off his school fees to his mean uncle, he when did he turn to writing Tristram Shandy? It was late, he was 46. Yeah, he was. Between university and writing Tristram Shandley that led him to it. Yes, I mean, I think you can hear from this account that there isn't a profession called novelist in the 18th century.

And actually all the great novelists, the 18th century, come to writing novels rather late in their lives after having done other things. And, I mean, one of the great... Richardson DeFoe... DeFoe was almost 60 when he wrote Robinson Crusoe, his first novel. Richardson was in his 50s when he wrote Pamela. So they've always done something else first. And in a way, although the life that Judith describes

of sort of ecclesiastical backbiting and sort of local political satire turns out to stand stern well, actually, you would never know. Nobody would ever know. He was going to produce this extraordinary book, or a novel at all, actually. And I think academics are in the habit of, we have to explain things,

and sometimes we try and explain them away. And it's possible to sort of have a narrative which explains how Tristram Shandley almost inevitably came out of this, wonderful melange of learning and impecuniousness because he wrote in order to make some money and a satirical bent. But actually it's completely unpredictable. It's extraordinary and unprecedented that in his mid-forties, he sits down and after trying out sort of journalism and a bit of satirical writing, he has this extraordinary idea to produce this completely suey, generous book.

It's difficult to describe, but have a go. That's a kind of crypton factor for literary critics, yes. But there's a famous sort of entry in the Oxford companion to English literature, which tries to do this and sort of gives up halfway through. I can try to do better. The life and opinions are Tristram Shandy. It's a man sitting down to try to write the history of his life. That man's Tristram, not Stern.

So Tristram sits down and tries to write his life. and in doing that he constantly finds himself having to explain things which are at a sort of tangent to his narrative so if you don't like digressions don't read Tristram Shandy

because they're the very soul as Tristram says of his book The sunshine and the soul I think that one as well and and so where to start and in order to tell us his life. He has to start telling us about the things that formed his fortunes. He has to start

telling us about his family. And so one of the things that Tristram Shandy is, is a wonderful history, much of it of events before the supposed hero's birth ever takes place, of his relatives, of his father, he's extremely eccentric father, Walter Shandy, his uncle who lives in the village, Uncle Toby, his endlessly tolerant and bemused mother. the widow Wadman, the concupiscible widow Wadman, who's trying to net Uncle Toby as a second husband, and trim Uncle Toby's servant, and indeed it's a whole household,

the servants play as major a part as those who notionally employ them. And so you've got two things, if you like. You've got the narrator, endlessly digressing and ruminating. It's full of his knowledge, his bogus erudition, and his faux learning, and you've got the farcical events that take place in the household. And in the business of trying to tell this story,

it's written at a time where nobody quite knows what a novel is. So there's all these amazing freedoms the novelist can take, the narrator can take. So it's full of kind of quirky, devices, pictures even, illustrations of what it is that you're reading.

Well, I think we should print that out and bury it. Do you think that was all right? Under a stone, every life. in the country. Thank you very much. Mary Newbold, can we take that on? Can we talk a bit more about the non-plotting? It's a knob without a plotting, yet it can be said to be both progressive and digressive. So do you just give us, well, can you do us a bit more of that, please?

Yes, I suppose the chronology of Tristram Shandy itself is quite distorted, so we don't start with this story of a birth and ended up with Tristram growing up and going into adulthood, and that kind of plotting through the life of Tristram Shandy. He, uh, fragments the story of his own life across different points of his life and his personal history. And I suppose part of the way that he does that is through these digressions, these constant glances back to other times in his history, other moments in his past, to little stories that his family have told him at different points in his life, to try and piece together, if you like, the story of what his own life might be,

as well of his own opinions. So that idea of kind of fragmented chronology is very important to the way in which he pieces together. Throughout the whole nine volumes, this is a very kind of fragmented book through its publication, history anyway. The sense of time sense is very much shifted about. And I think he partly does that for, yes. Can you give the listener one instance? For instance, we start at the very beginning with his conception, the act of conception, and yet it isn't until volume three that he's born. So that can you just dwell or right a little so people have an idea? So relating back to some of the things that John was saying, that in order to try and trace back his life history, he's doing this through

speaking to his family members at various points in his life to try and remember what it was like when he was born or the time before he was born. So he's drawn anecdotes from Uncle Toby, anecdotes from his father, Walter Shandy, to find out a little bit about what his prehistory was. And it's that prehistory that forms the first part of Tristram Shandy in volumes 1 and 2. So what the story of his conception was between his mother and father, the kind of role that Uncle Toby played in that.

And how his family were reacting at the time of his birth. So before Tristram could even remember for himself the sorts of events that happened in his life. He needs to go back to what other people have remembered about that particular moment. I'm in this Yorkshire village at Shandy Hall. Shandy is a Yorkshire word at the time, meaning half crazy. Kind of crack brain, yes. The characters became, people became cult characters, didn't they? Can you talk just one of them to start? Uncle Toby. Can you tell us the fate of Uncle Toby in the imagination of readers?

So Uncle Toby would have been a very significant figure at the time. I mean, Tristram, Shandi was first began to be written in the period of the seven years war. So war was at the forefront of everybody's mind. Uncle Toby's a military figure. He was wounded at the siege of Nimour several years earlier in William III's... In the groin. In the groin, yes. The battle in the groin, absolutely.

Ruined by a sort of flying missile. The cause of much baudy later on. We interrupt you. Right. Where you go. Interruption is the theme. So, yes, Uncle Toby gets wounded in the groin, essentially becomes unable to take further action. as it were, and becomes very obsessed with military fortification and the whole concept of what it's like to create a siege,

the whole language of battles and fortification becomes his obsession. So he rates everything back to this particular language. So one person might say one word, like a hornwork, for instance. Uncle Toby takes that to mean something referring to military fortification. And everything for him revolves around this. But having said that, he's not particularly belligerent figure. He's very loving and very kind and very generous. and a real sort of figurehead for Tristram to look up to his uncle

as this really beloved figure who inspires him in many, many ways with his own feelings about kind of, I suppose, sympathy and compassion towards fellow human beings and even tiny creatures such as a fly. There's not space in the world for both of us, exactly, yeah. He puts him out of the window. But I think it's the affectionate nature

which drew people's affections towards it, wasn't it? Yes, Uncle Toby was a greatly loved figure, I think, in popular literature after Tristram Shandy, and was really upheld as this image of a war-loving in certain senses soldier figure, but who also had the capacity for compassion. I think that really inspired people. Judith Hawley, I've mentioned the opening of Tristram Shandy. It's one of the most celebrated passages.

Can you tell us a little more about it and how it sets the tone for Dublo and Tour throughout? Yes, the novel begins. I wish either my father or my mother had minded what they were about, for indeed they're both duty-bound in it, when they begot me. So it begins with the conception or rather it begins saying that his conception has already gone wrong.

It's, to begin a novel in your parents' bed while they're making you is shocking in itself but the tone of it is not bawdy. The tone of it is witty and clever and slightly weird and wrong footing

because there were erotic novels and there was pornography written at this time. But to say I wish I either my father or my mother in this sort of tone of wistful regret. But the mother says in the middle of this act. Pray, my dear, have you not forgot to wind up the clock? Yes, now that has a couple of meanings, doesn't it? Because he usually, before, his monthly activity, his monthly method is to...

Yes, Walter Shandy has two duties he likes to get out of the way. One of them is winding up the grandfather clock, and the other is winding up his wife. And she interrupts him while he's in the middle of his marital duty with this question, and it scatters and disperses the animal spirits. And one of the other... Is she not thinking that perhaps he hasn't wound up the clock enough for her? Well, we never really know whether Mrs. Shandy is... We haven't really know a lot, but we have to make guesses with this.

But she's either so bored, and this is such a mechanical activity, and her mind is wondering, he's really not fulfilling her, so she's really much more interested in the clock. But the other really odd thing about the scene is that the reader is there too. At the end of that chapter, the reader says, what was your father saying? Nothing. So Stern positions the reader in this relationship. The reader is encouraged to speculate about what his mother felt

or what his father was doing. And we become responsible for supplying bawdy meanings. It's a reader. I mean, Tristan Chal is full of readers. And quite a lot of them are sort of, I think, quite a lot of them are dullards, you know, who getting it wrong. I do not understand, sir.

And he sends Madam out of the room to go and re-read a chapter. I told you quite plainly that my father was not a papist. So this reader at the beginning, or if not reader, it's somebody he's having a conversation with. Tristan's talking. And he reports, you know, when his mother asks about the clock, his father says, good God, did ever women since the beginning of time, interrupt a man with such a silly question.

And hearing the word interrupt, this person, who might be us, except we're too clever to say this, says, interrupt, what was your first? father saying and the chapter ends with nothing because he wasn't saying anything. Because it's a different kind of interruption. So part of the pleasure

of the sort of suggestiveness of Tristan Shandy I think is that of course the readers, the readers in 1760 and us were much cleverer than these fools and moralists and dullards who keep getting in, keep stepping

into the novel to misunderstand what's going on. In a way, it's part of the humour and that's one part but you mentioned the word conversational and he it is that's one of the one of the pleasures of it and sometimes it can be very very frustrating is the conversation he's chatting to you all the time and he's forgetting things

and bringing new things in and you're across the table in a house in a pub wherever it is or can you talk about the way he uses that as his sort of basis for humour yeah I mean I never find it frustrating at all

but But it Because there are, because there are two things Read it with a head-cove in you. Oh, I'm... Yes, no. Well, I'm... No, I'm...

Come on, let's go now with it. You didn't find you. But your, I mean, your job is to not find it frustrated. I, okay. So there are two things going on. There are all these family concernments. There's the sort of farce of family life in Shandy Hall. And then there's the narrator talking about it.

And he does talk. And the whole book, if you opened it at random, you see even a system of punctuation, an extraordinary sort of dashes and asteris and things which sort of mimic the business of conversing. And I think conversation was a very sort of 18th century thing. It was an 18th century ideal. It wasn't just talk.

It was clever, knowing, witty exchange between people who sort of understood each other. But also part of his humour that he's trying to is the bringing in learning and learned ribbley, right, isn't it? Absolutely. So Uncle Toby misunderstand something. He must understand lots of things. He doesn't understand anything about sex, procreation, women,

all this stuff that's going on around him. And so Tristram will say, you know, well, how can we explain it? And then he will import John Locke's philosophical theories and start applying these to poor witless Tristram, poor witless Uncle Toby's misassociations of ideas. And it's actually a double joke because probably Lawrence Stend didn't really read properly, he just got it all out of, I mean, Judith knows about this more than me. He got it all out of encyclopedias and things.

And so it's a real, it's part of the humour of the book is it's there for people who want a shortcut to wisdom and a short cut to knowledge. It's all sort of inappropriately applied to farcical circumstances. I mean, there are lots of different levels of humour as the answer really, isn't it? He's playing all sorts of jokes in all sorts of ways. with learning, with scholarship, with character, with innocence, with bawdy and so on. Can I go to...

Do you want to be... Say something briefly... Yes, I wanted to say something about John Locke. John Locke, the author of an essay concerning human understanding to treatises in government, treats on education, is a very important figure for Tristram Shandy. He's one of the few sources

named explicitly, and he teases the reader about whether or not the reader has actually read John Locke. And he supplies a kind of blueprint for how the mind works. He's the Freud of the 18th century. And I think Stern knew his Locke so well that he could not only use

Locke's theory of the association of ideas, the duration of time, the succession of ideas, he could use them to explain how his character's minds work. But he'd actually make very precise jokes with the text. He inserts Baudy into Locke's text. So I think he knows it very well. And he's writing partly for a reader

who knows his lot well enough to know that when Stern talks illustrates how the mind works by talking about Dolly reaching for her thimble. Dolly is not in lock. It's a bawdy insertion of stones. Mary Newbolder, can you, do you want to say something otherwise? I was just going to say he does talk about how this is a history, not of life and opinions as we know it, but of what passes in a man's own mind. And that's why we get this really disjointed narrative

full of digressions and ideas darting backwards and forwards, because that's the way in which we think and remember things. One of the things that's striking about the book is other books inside the book. He refers to an enormous number of books. And let's start with the fiction that he refers to. tell us something about that? Yeah, so there were a range of fictional sources, some of them continental and some of them British, he was very, very keen on Habele. And from Habele, he drew

grotesque humour from Panto-Guil and from Gargantua, this idea of kind of the grotesque humour, but also witty wordplay. He didn't read Habele in the original language. He read it in a very lively translation where that idea of plianasm and of inventing words as you go along gave him a lot of his creative energy, if you like,

for the sorts of words that he invents in Trist from Shandy. He also draws on Cervent. He's very keen on Don Quixote, who he uses as a kind of template for the character of Parsons-Yorick, who's a very, very important figure, both in Tristram Shandy and also in Stern's life, because he self-identifies with Parsons-Yorick once the bit becomes enormously famous. So Sivantis kind of provides this model against which we can measure Parsons-Yorick, obviously with a Shakespearean reference there too. Hamlet, another really important source, as well as some of those more recent literary classics of English.

Swift, he mentions the tale of a tub. He imagines Tristram Shandy swimming down the gutter of time alongside a Tale of a Tub. And that's the kind of comparison he's drawing for himself with these quite witty satirical works like Tale of a Tub that Stone would have been very identifiable with contemporary readers. But he also, I suppose, is partly embedded in this tradition of prose narrative that John was mentioning earlier, that the novel at the time was still very much in flux. There weren't necessarily rules for what a novel should be and how it should be written. But present in publication history for many contemporary readers were books like Tom Jones, or Defoe's Robinson Crusoe or Samuel Richardson,

really important novelists at the 18th century. And he, Stern, writes a kind of book that isn't like theirs. It can be juxtaposed with theirs. Even if he doesn't actually explicitly mention these authors, he's deliberately invoking what they're doing by doing something completely different. Why do you think he plunders and plagiarises so much? Is it for the fun of it?

Or is it because he wants to stiffen his sinews? Maybe to stiffen the sinews, and maybe to do other things too. I think he's very keen on this idea that as a writer, you never write completely in a vacuum. You are constantly drawing on different sources of reading and of knowledge and of different types of experience. And that creates who you are,

the books that you read as much as the things that happen to you in life. And it's part of the sense in which you read books, but you also don't quite read them properly, as John was mentioning earlier, the idea that he's invoking the process of reading as much as the books themselves. Judith, you've mentioned Locke, so we needn't talk about Logger.

Sorry about that, but what are the other, Well, you can if you want, but there you are the other main intellect, because he draws in intellectual mentors, as it were, or reference points as well. He refers to several different groups of writers. A lot of them are the classical authors he would have studied at school and university. So Cicero, all of those sort of classical writers, rhetoricians. He also refers to the kind of the boring textbooks that he would have read at university, Bergus Dickius, Cluverius, and so on, these sort of learned,

commentators. There's another group of texts that he uses which to do with health. So Stern suffered from tuberculotus consumption. He had his first hemorrhage when he was an undergraduate at Jesus College and he obviously read a lot of stuff to try to heal himself. So there are lots of references to quite practical works on health. But then he also, he's very interested in the way in which the nervous system works. I haven't traced where he's got this material from, but the very, very precise descriptions of how the nerve works and how sensation in the body leads to an idea in the mind.

But he's bringing in Burton as well, isn't he? Yes. Of course, being a clergyman, the Bible keeps... Yes, the Bible, Shakespeare, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Monten. I think he has these books on his desk when he's writing. I think, I mean, there's a famous passage which seems to me to sort of sum up what Stern does at the beginning of one of his volumes where he sort of steps aside from all this learning

and bogus learning he's been pouring at us as if in horror and says, oh, must we always be repeating other people? Must we always be pouring wine out of old bottles into new bottles? And it's a great separation against plagiarism. And it's plagiarised from Robert Burton's anatomy and melancholy.

And a later... Which itself has plagiarised. And, you know, You know, in the early 19th century, when it first became apparent, how much of this extraordinarily idiosyncratic and invented book was in fact stolen from other places. There was a kind of revulsion against Stern, and a whole lot of people sort of said, oh, it's stolen.

Actually, he's not original after all. But I think now we think how wonderful it is. Just to pick up a little stitch, Burton himself nicked it. Yes, he did, yes. Oh, I can't remember. But it is... What did I would say?

Writers don't steal, they? He said mediocre writers imitate and great writers steal. But what is so brilliant about Stern? If you want to be a great writer, just can't steal as much as you can. Steal from the best. That's the way to do it. Well, that's okay. That's a tip.

The genius of Stern is that all of this learned material is put to the service of plot and character as well. Yes. So that discussion of where... Tristram comes from. He can't explain himself without explaining his family. It's also related to where does Stern come from. He comes from his literary forebears. Mary, Mary Neuble, can you tell us, he did various things with the book itself, the appearance of the book, the appearance of the print, the appearance of the pages. Can you give us some idea of what happened there?

Yeah, I mean, Stone's really invested in the idea that this is a material text. So on the one hand, that ties into the idea of drawing attention to the fact you're starting a new chapter, that you're finishing one volume and starting another. always drawing the reader's attention to the fact that this is a material object. But as John mentioned earlier, he does this in very concrete ways too, both in the typography of the book itself and in the visual elements that he includes. So by typography, I mean the spatial layout of the text on the page. He uses space between paragraphs and between books and between volumes in quite inventive sorts of ways so that the reader can create meanings for themselves, if you like, on these blank spaces.

And he also completely peppers the text with all sorts of typographical symbols that mean all sorts of variant things, depending on how lively your imagination might be. And I suppose the two most distinctive ones are the asterix. So, asteris can sometimes replace individual words where a star replaces a letter, and I suppose it doesn't take many leaps of the imagination to think what four stars might represent in terms of words.

But there are whole passages where Stern just prints strings of asteris that don't necessarily mean anything at all. And I suppose the point is that he's trying to engage the readers in a game, if you like, a game of trying to decode the text, of trying to unravel what those mysteries might be behind the asterix. And there are black pages, a black page and a black page. Yeah, so these are quite... The black page is the death.

The black page is, I don't know how to describe this woman, so do it yourself. Absolutely. So these appear at distinctive moments in the book. And the black page ties into that character of Parson Yorick, whom I mentioned earlier, whose death gets announced right at the beginning. Kind of Tristram's looking forward to a future moment. And he sighs, alas, poor Yorick, and he doesn't just say it once. He says it twice, because it's worth saying twice.

And he prints two black pages that kind of memorialise this particular moment. of death and they're very striking if you're a reader just leafing through the page. It's sort of I suppose a giant inflated full stop putting an end to Yorick's life even though it continues later. He sticks a couple of marble pages part way through the book and he calls these the motley emblem of my work

and I suppose they're supposed to signify a little bit the unique individuality that each reader takes away from it. And also the marble page also was unique in every copy. It would have been hand marbles. It's very expensive very difficult to do. They've got his publishers to do that way. We might come to the

publication in history. In a moment. John Mullen, Stern halfway through this, it was going to be 12 volumes, it ended up as nine. He went on a tour, and lots of that happened to him on the grand tour of the grand tour of you was rammed into the book. So how far do we see this as a portrait of the times?

Well, I think, yes, I mean, it was less a grand tour that he went on and more a kind of a trip to France of a sort of a recuperative trip. And a lot of it got into the novel. And that's partly not particularly to do with the Times, but to do with his habit of kind of just using whatever materials were to hand in his own life to put in his book. But it is also a kind of, I was just talking a bit earlier about conversation, how it's a peculiar 18th century thing.

And I think that there is a sort of sense that when you, when you read it, you get a specimen of the values and the kind of tone, the mixture of kind of intellectuality and kind of low humour and debunking. So it's a very characteristic of, I suppose, what people call the Enlightenment. And Stern may have been an obscure Yorkshire vicar, but he was also the first, in a way, literary celebrity of a new kind of age, a new kind of age in which what counted was the reading public and whether you sold your books

and if they liked your books, it didn't matter really whatever anybody said. And he came to London and then he went to Paris on this trip to France and he was a celebrity and he met all the intellectuals of the time. And the French loved it but didn't maybe quite get it. I don't know. Because they thought that all the sort of religiosity in it and the fact that it was written by a clergyman meant that it must be a sort of scathing atheistic attack

on superstition and they couldn't believe it when they met this man who managed to be a very new kind of specimen on the one hand I think a devout Anglican and a clergyman but on the other hand completely irreverent about every sort of assumed belief and habit that people in his society had can we talk just briefly Judith about the place that masculinity plays in the novel

Yes, it's been, it's been, well, it's, yes, it's a book, yes. It's been one of the controversial subjects of this book. You asked earlier about what does Mrs. Shandy feel while Walter is winding up the clock. The book is really dominated by the men of the household, by Walter Toby, who Mary's described very effectively as a soldier, but also a very sentimental man. Very few of the men who dominate the book are actually potent. You know, the shadow of impotence hangs over the entire family, including the Shandy family bull. Walter lives so much in his head that there's little activity in his breaches. Toby has been wounded in the groin.

Yorick is a kind of etiolated character. So it's dominated by men men's interests, but they don't seem to be able to dominate it sexually. John, can you tell us, excuse me, you've touched on this in your area of reflex, surely. Can you tell us how the later volumes reflected the readers' response to the earlier volume? Yes, because I think maybe one thing we didn't make clear enough early on is that this book was published over a period of some seven or eight years in lots of chunks, in installments. But it's not installments, they weren't installments as in, say, a Dickens novel,

where he knew in advance exactly how many installments there would be and the size of them and had a kind of game plan for the whole thing. Sturne Tristram, Stern's sort of alter ego, one of them, says in an early volume of Tristram Shandy, oh, you're going to have a couple of volumes every year, as long as I can live. And I think that was the sort of idea. And it appeared nine volumes, but actually five distinct chunks. And at first it was annually, but then he ran out of steam and went to France

and there was a big gap. And then with volume nine, the last one, he'd either got exhausted or bored and he did sort of bring it to an end. But it's keeping up with his life, as it were. And it's using the materials of his life as he's writing. And I mean, Stern's life. So, for instance, the thing you asked me about,

when it gets dodgy reviews, I mean, get some good reviews, but it also gets some dodgy reviews. and one of the interesting things about Shristram Chandis, it's the first big hit book of the first age of reviews, book reviewing has only just started. And people who say rude things get their rude things, parodied, mocked in the next installment, as it were.

And he actually turns around at one stage and says, oh, to some reviewer, and the reviewer knows who he is. Give me some more. Come on, it all helps me. It all helps the celebrity, the publicity of this. this extraordinary kind of machine, this event, this ongoing event, which is Trist from Cheney, as well as the sort of book. It's not any reviews, is it, Mary Newball?

Everybody's piling and wanted to help him. Absolutely, yes. He sort of says, you know, the shilling pamphletes, you know, let them write more. I think it creates more publicity, and that's great for his book. But it's amazing, the overwhelming number of imaginative responses. There were sequels and continuations, which fit in with this story that John's creating here about how bits of the story came along in dribs and drabs. So if you're an opportunistic writer, you pop in and you write the next bit of the story,

story. And that kind of thing was happening throughout the publication history of Tristram Shandy. But not just books and sequels. There were race horses named after Tristram Shandy. There were objects named after him card games, a recipe for a soup. I mean, it's really caught the popular imagination and got manifested in all these really quite imaginative ways. And he had reveled in all that, didn't it, Judith Hawley? What did you say, I write not to be but to be famous. Yes, he's reversing sibbers. I meant to be. That's right. And he loved that. Yes, he absolutely did.

And it's a sense in which we can, a bit we missed out in his youth, that one version of his young manhood in York is going to the races, going to dances, playing the game in all sorts of ways around the town. Yes, he hangs out with a rather rakeish crowd, John Hall Stevenson, was a pretty dodgy character with his own version of Hellfire Club. And one of the things he boasted about when he went to London was how many dinner invitations he had, how many parties he was going to. And his novel also has lots of allusions to celebrities at the time.

He honours David Garrick and William Hogarth. He gets Hogarth to do an engraving because he sort of praises his witty chisel. And Hogarth then supplies him with two engravings to use as a frontist piece. So he's really trying to be a celebrity. And as John alluded to, this happens abroad, not only in London. Yes. So Dennis Diderho, the great philosopher, greatly admires, Stern. Stone even gets his publishers

to send Diderot some copies of Locke's essay concerning human understanding. Diderot wrote his own Tristam Shandy's novel, Jacques La Fattelisse, which is not very good. He's big in Germany. The sentimental vote becomes very big in Germany, and you can still go and visit the graves of

fictional characters in Tristam Shandy. They built fictional graveyards in Germany, which you can now go and visit as a kind of theme park. How does this compare with other writers of the time, John Mullen? How does his celebrity, his success, taken up by the town and so. Well, I think there is something singular about it

because it's not that it's the first novel to sell lots of copies. And we should realise lots of copies by their standards is not lots by ours. But there's a much smaller reading public and it seizes everybody who can buy or borrow books in London in the early 1760s is talking about this.

Everybody. And I think what's completely new about Stern and about this sort of book which is part of his life, is that after a period in which, I mean, essentially, the whole business of marketing books has always been very distasteful, and writers who achieve popularity and fame have to kind of go through all sorts of maneuvers to claim that they didn't mean it. And often this consists, you know, I mean, great writers of the early 18th century like Pope and Swift,

sometimes pretend that they didn't write a book or that it got published by accident somebody took it and published it so now I've got to own up to it I'm terribly sorry meant to be a private document don't you know and Stern is a new kind of figure really I mean I often think

the Hay Literary Festival that would have been Stern's arena he would have loved it he would have loved the whole business which some authors now greet rather wearily that you have to be a publicist for your own work. And of course, it wasn't just that he did that in his person. He does it in his book. His book is all about him. And yet, we have to say, I mean, to anybody who might think of picking up this book,

so idiosyncratic, so eccentric, in a way, it's also, it is universal because you, you know, it's about how all of us are made by the weird accidents of our upbringing. It's got this bonkers family. and it's about how every family is bonkers. Mary. Yeah, absolutely. I think that point about Stern going about the place saying, I am Tristram Shandy, I am Posse and York, really helped to add to that celebrity culture.

But it really infiltrates why people carry on reading his books and carry on imitating them and adapting them, whereas something like Samuel Richardson's Pamela, again hugely popular, and again, imitated in lots and lots of ways, didn't have that longevity which Stern does have. And I think it's partly because he self-identifies with his fictional characters,

but also because he adds new stuff in the new installments of Tristram Shandy and with his subsequent publications like a sentimental journey which cater to a new kind of reading audience so it gives much more scope for people to play with his imaginative materials. There's a sense in which these early writers are creating a reading audience, isn't it, as much as catering to it. Is that right? Yes, I think that's right. Yes, because the kind of reading that most people were doing in the early 18th centuries,

the most published text are sermons. and Stern uses his novel to sell his sermons rather than the other way around. Sermons are a kind of performance art in the 18th century. I mean he published his own but he's supposed to have been very good at giving them. Yes and like the writer who probably the 18th century writer he most admired and imitated Swift whom he also enjoyed because he was a sort of a clergyman who made suggestive jokes. and, you know, Stern would be paid to give a sermon, as it were, in York Minster, and that was extra income. And he gave a sermon, it was a performance.

And then one of his own sermons gets into volume two of Tristram Shandy, where Uncle Toby's man-servant tries to perform it. I was going to move on to sentimental journey, but that's probably the time I'd bump into John Mullen again, and we do a program on sentimental journey. Yeah, let's have a separate program, please. We can't end you that. What was his legacy? Can you briskly tell me, Sorry with you, Mary. What influences I see as that book, a novel had, a book on other novelists? The idea of the self-conscious narrator, the idea of, if you like, stream of consciousness is something that modernist writers like Wolf and, like, Joyce, really take on board. They like the idea that you think out in writing as you go along, and that the trivial things in life really matter, and they form a substance of a narrative.

He had a major impact on those early 20th century writers from that point of view. He influenced philosophers like Nietzsche, who thought this is a book for, Free Spirits. Carl Marx, you try to write a Shandian novel. The physicality of the book, the idea of drawing attention to the page has been lasting influence. Jonathan Saffron Furs, extremely loud and up close, that uses a lot of his techniques. B.S. Johnson's Book in a Box, books with holes in them. These all come from first.

Yes, if you said, what is the most influential British novel of the last sort of 40 years, one contestant, I think, would be Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. The first page of Midnight's Children is straight from Tristram Shandy. And the whole book is straight in Tristanee. And I mean, and delightfully and pleasingly so. And I think it's the one great novel that writers, novelists still read. Thank you very much, John Mullen, Judith Hawley, Mary Newbold. And next week we'll be talking about the tale of sinew hair, a poem, an ancient Egyptian poem.

listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. The funny thing is that novelists, I mean it's kind of good, it's refreshing, but it's also quite funny how novelists from sort of Joyce to Kundera to Rushdie, they read Tristram Shandy and it's as if they were the first person to discover it. And it rushes into their own work. I don't think there's any. There's any. other novelist of older centuries who has that kind of influence. And do you think it's always enriching? Yes.

I feel with midnight's children. Well, because I think it's freedoms as such that it usually has the influence on I think another novelist of not making them say, oh so this is what I got to do but of making them think, oh God, so. I could do I can do that.

So it is an inherently liberating thing. It's a springboard for creativity, isn't it? Yeah. I don't know if you come across Martin Rosen's graphic novel version. But that takes Stern's ideas on board, but it does something completely different with them too. He adds all sort of references to film and to literary theory and all sorts of things. So it becomes a new creative enterprise in itself.

And Stern's home, Shandy Hall, in Yorkshire, is now run as a kind of creator centre. Patrick Wildgust has been great at bringing in artists and school children and all sorts of people to use Stern's work to produce something. I did, I did, I know. It's wonderful. I was very lucky because it was a lovely

summer morning and to go down that particular street that summer morning was wonderful. But when you're going to that house and it is the house in the book, isn't it? Oh, that's the parlour door. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But it did that for me very much so, yeah.

It's got a room full of it at the time as well. It was about 40, 50 years ago. Help us. Yes, I was walking around the... the Abbas, rather than you. Oh, yes. I went to it a long time ago, and Kenneth Monk,

the great sort of stern, the doion of stern studies were still alive and living in it. And he and his wife lived in it. And of course, he wouldn't, you know, you had to make a special booking. And he was upstairs. And he is a figure straight out of Shandy,

a man sort of too grumpy to communicate his erudition. And he was upstairs. And his wife was the office. Very charming, come around, and this dog named off. named after the servant in Trim who padded a slightly smelly Labrador

that padded around with you and you just thought yes I'm afraid it's probably a bit more tidy note did you sort of sit down and writing a book John did you think of sitting down and writing a book I always think of sitting down and writing a book and then I think better they're very welcoming they let you sit in the study yeah so I set in the study

and the shaft of light on the desk a head of Patrick's a very welcoming curator I think as much protective about the collection How well is he read nowadays by your students? I mean, how much is he enjoyed it? We make him a set text. He's a set text at UCL. He's an optional text at Royal Holloway.

And some years I've had 25 students. Last year, only five students signed up for the course, which is terrible disappointment. Is your charisma diminished student? Well, has the book's charisma? Is it having a bit of a dip at the moment or what? No, I think it was, I was competing against some other, much more popular 20th century,

21st century course. I think one of the great things about Tristram Shandy is that now, as when it first came out, there's a really good body of people who detest it and who say it's a waste of time. And that keeps its life, that helps keep it.

You know, EFR Leavis notoriously in his... Nasty irresponsible trifle. Yes, he said, yes. And it was in a footnote in his whole history of the English novel. It just got one sentence in a footnote. And I remember reading that before I'd read Trist from Shandy. And of course, instantly you want to read Trist from Shandy, don't you?

You think a book that's made him so cross, he's not even prepared to write about it, must be funny, and so it is. You still get that reaction from students. Some of them completely hate reading it. Some of them absolutely get it and get into it. And that's why the pleasure is always making them read it. I know you had to go at this, John, but that's fair enough. I think you had to be in a certain state of feeling quite healthy.

I had read it well, and I knew it well enough. but I read it again, obviously, for this. But I was battling a serious, bloody cold, and he's just at times very hard word. But maybe... Because, because I suppose, I'm used to being carried forward, you know, when I was not being carried forward.

I was used to being just... I'd gone on the train, the strain set off, and I went down, and that doesn't happen. Yeah. So you... I mean, but, men, you had to read it all for this programme. One of the...

I think one of the things I... The thing I try and tell students, for instance, is that you can read it as it was written. You can read it in little chunks, in some ways as a good way to do it. So when people originally had it, they didn't have this great big book, they had a little book, you know,

and then they had to wait a year for the next little book. Installments by books, that's one. Here's Tom Morris, since that's the end of our conversation. There are many more Radio 4, arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.com.com.com.

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