London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1760

Tristram Shandy’s unusual approach to story-telling provides one reason why many readers have found it to be so baffling, and so engaging. This impression is enhanced by the book’s equally idiosyncratic typography and visual layout. The squiggly lines by which Tristram displays his haphazard approach to storytelling as ‘digressive’ and ‘progressive too, — and at the same time’ are one among many features in a book whose short and long chapters, gothic script, missing pages and eccentric punctuation repeatedly challenge not just how a novel’s elements should be organised, but how they should appear on the page. Sterne’s typography is particularly distinctive: he liberally sprinkles dashes of varying lengths, asterisks, and other symbols across his text. These came to be identifiable as ‘his’ – one commentator even called him ‘that dashite Sterne’ – and inspired countless imitations. Other visual features of Tristram Shandy are equally famous: the reader is confronted with two black pages that announce the death of parson Yorick in volume 1, with a dramatic gravitas clinched by way of allusion to Shakespeare. Yorick nevertheless goes on to play an important role in Tristram Shandy; Sterne even reused the character as the narrator of A sentimental journey, and adopted his pseudonym to publish two volumes of his own Sermons in 1760.
7720.d.1801, p. 72-3