London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1760

Tristram Shandy invites his reader to ‘imagine to yourself’ what the male midwife, Dr Slop, might look like on the basis of the sparse description he provides: his picture ‘may as certainly be caricatured, and conveyed to the mind by three strokes as three hundred’. Tristram quotes William Hogarth’s Analysis of beauty as a reference, ironically so given the artist’s eschewal of caricature as an art-form. It nevertheless seems appropriate that Hogarth should have provided the first book illustrations for Tristram Shandy in 1760: Sterne himself solicited the artist to apply his ‘witty chissel’ to depicting the scene in which Trim reads the sermon on ‘The abuses of conscience’ (which Sterne himself had actually preached). Hogarth later produced another plate illustrating Tristram’s unfortunate baptism in volume 3. His influential images set a scheme for how to depict Tristram Shandy’s scenes and characters, and in particular how to capture their comic quality, that was adopted by many subsequent illustrators.
7720.d.1801, frontispiece