London: T. Becket and P.A. Dehondt, 1762

For all that the genre was still in its infancy Tristram Shandy challenged supposedly conventional ideas about what a ‘novel’ should be: how its ingredients should be arranged, and how it should look. Sterne’s idiosyncratic narrator produces an equally erratic narrative of his life story, in which he repeatedly thwarts any expectations of a linear plot or chronology. Tristram illustrates this using a diagram depicting the haphazard routes his plot has followed in volumes 1-5, typical of the inventive visual devices with which readers of Tristram Shandy would by now have become familiar. Its narrative literally begins ‘ab ovo’, before its hero is even born. Tristram aims to show how any ‘life’ is made up of ‘opinions’ just as much as concrete facts or dates. In writing his history of ‘what passes in a man’s own mind’ he draws extensively on the many books he has apparently read, by John Locke, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Robert Burton. The effect is hugely entertaining and frustrating in equal measure in a book whose perplexing mixture of disparate qualities led one early reader to describe it as ‘sensible – humorous – pathetic – humane − unaccountable!’
CCD.5.65, p. 152-3