LAURENCE STERNE NOVELS Limited Edition incl Tristram Shandy. George Cruikshank illustrator

Description

THE NOVELS OF LAURENCE STERNE IN FOUR VOLUMES
Limited Edition. Tristram Shandy & Sentimental Journey

Scarce four-volume set:
the first three are ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ and the fourth is ‘A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy’.

All illustrated by George Cruikshank and published by The Navarre Society in a limited edition of 2000 copies.

Laurence Sterne was a renowned Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He wrote the novels ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’ and ‘A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy’, and also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics.

Having discovered his talent, at the age of 46, Sterne turned over his parishes to a curate, and dedicated himself to writing for the rest of his life. It was while living in the countryside, having failed in his attempts to supplement his income as a farmer and struggling with tuberculosis, that he began work on his best-known novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the first volumes of which were published in 1759. Sterne was at work on his celebrated comic novel during the year that his mother died, his wife was seriously ill, and his daughter was also taken ill with a fever. He wrote as fast as he possibly could, composing the first 18 chapters between January and March 1759. Due to his poor financial position, Sterne was forced to borrow money for the printing of his novel, suggesting that Sterne was confident in the prospective commercial success of his work and that the local critical reception of the novel was favourable enough to justify the loan.

The publication of Tristram Shandy made Sterne famous in London and on the continent. Sterne's novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman sold widely in England and throughout Europe. Translations of the work began to appear in all the major European languages almost upon its publication, and Sterne influenced European writers as diverse as Denis Diderot and the German Romanticists. The European critics of the day, who praised Sterne and Tristram Shandy as innovative and superior. Voltaire called it "clearly superior to Rabelais", and later Goethe praised Sterne as "the most beautiful spirit that ever lived".

‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’

Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy is narrated by the title character in a series of digressions and interruptions that purportedly show the "life and opinions" — part of the novel's full title — of Tristram. Composed of nine "Books" originally published between 1759-1767, the novel has more to do with Shandy family members and their foibles and history than it seemingly does with Tristram himself. However, it is through Tristram's relating the actions, beliefs, and opinions of his family members — primarily his father, Walter Shandy, and his paternal Uncle Toby — that the reader gets a clearer picture of Tristram's character.

The novel itself starts with the narration, by Tristram, of his own conception. It proceeds mostly by what Sterne calls "progressive digressions" so that we do not reach Tristram's birth before the third volume (of those originally printed). The novel is rich in characters and humour, and the influences of Rabelais and Miguel de Cervantes are present throughout. The novel ends after 9 volumes, published over a decade, but without anything that might be considered a traditional conclusion. Sterne inserts sermons, essays and legal documents into the pages of his novel.

Many of the innovations that Sterne introduced, adaptations in form that were an exploration of what constitutes the novel, were highly influential to Modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and more contemporary writers such as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. Italo Calvino referred to Tristram Shandy as the "undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century". The Russian Formalist writer Viktor Shklovsky regarded Tristram Shandy as the archetypal, quintessential novel," the most typical novel of world literature.". Some modern critic argues that, whatever its legacy of influence may be, Tristram Shandy in its original context actually represents a resurgence of a much older, Renaissance tradition of "Learned Wit" — owing a debt to such influences as the Scriblerian approach.

In 1766, at the height of the debate about slavery, the composer and former slave Ignatius Sancho wrote to Sterne, encouraging him to use his pen to lobby for the abolition of the slave trade. In July 1766 Sterne received Sancho's letter shortly after he had finished writing a conversation between his fictional characters Corporal Trim and his brother Tom in Tristram Shandy, wherein Tom described the oppression of a black servant in a sausage shop in Lisbon which he had visited. Sterne's widely publicised response to Sancho's letter became an integral part of 18th-century abolitionist literature.

"A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy"

This is pure character-driven, plotless fun. It's a travel tale in which the first-person narrator drifts from incident to incident and it is always the idiosyncratic power of his voice that carries us along. The only problem is that it's too short. Sterne died before he could complete his plan.

A furiously witty response to Tobias Smollett's curmudgeonly 'Travels through France and Italy', Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy became a hugely influential work of travel writing in its own right.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy has many stylistic parallels with Tristram Shandy, and indeed, the narrator is one of the minor characters from the earlier novel. Although the story is more straightforward, A Sentimental Journey is interpreted by critics as part of the same artistic project to which Tristram Shandy belongs. The book is also interesting as it is example of the 'sentimental' novel that was to become highly popular in the late 18th century, a style eventually parodied in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.

It is largely credited for starting the sentimental fiction subgenre - which can be a bit unfair to the book, since sentimental fiction is marked by ridiculous mawkish emotion. But Sentimental Journey rarely falls into such mawkishness. Rather, Sterne does an admirable job at balancing sincere emotion and irony around his rather peculiar travelling preacher Yorick who has decided to take a trip through France and Italy. Sterne is writing in the mode of travel fiction which was all the rage at the time. Sterne's twist, though, is that he focuses on the people of the towns he visits, rather than the places there.

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Undated but thought to be c1920s.
London: The Navarre Society.
Blue cloth with gilt lettering and fleur de lis design on spine

CONDITION:
Cloth hard covers with gilt titles and decoration on the spines, slight discolouration of the spines. Very light surface scuffing on the boards. Gilt top edges, untrimmed fore and lower edges. Vol I of Tristram Shandy has a lean forward at the spine. Binding is good. No inscriptions. Each volume has a tissue guarded frontispiece and decorated title page.

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