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ARBITRARY GOVERNMENT: "TRISTRAM SHANDY" AND THE CRISIS OF WHIG HISTORY
Author(s): JOHN OWEN HAVARD

Source: ELH , SUMMER 2014, Vol. 81, No. 2 (SUMMER 2014), pp. 585-613
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/24475634
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ARBITRARY GOVERNMENT: TRISTRAM SHANDY
AND THE CRISIS OF WHIG HISTORY
BY JOHN OWEN HAVARD
Writing to his London publisher in 1773, David Hume rem

in exasperation that England was "so sunk in Stupidity and Ba
and Faction that you may as well think of Lapland for an Aut
best Book, that has been writ by any Englishman these thirt
(for Dr Franklyn is an American) is Tristram Shandy, bad a
A Bemark which may astonish you; but which you will find
Reflection."1 In his earlier Essays, Moral and Political (1741-4
subsequently in his History of England (1754—61), Hume had
how partisan disputes could be overcome or at least displaced
forces of social progress—a view that was to receive vivid ima
expression in the fictions of his literary heir, Sir Walter Scott. R
upheavals had prompted Hume to revise this earlier view.2 Fo
the accession of George III in 1760, heated constitutional
created "an almost permanent sense of instability and crisis" in E
as mounting oppositional activity, together with increasingly
distance from the certainties of the past, created a general co
of tumult, dislocation, and confusion.3 The subsequent deca
calls by radical Whigs to reinvent the system of government
name of reclaimed liberties, raising the existing climate of unres
new pitch while igniting many of the debates that helped pro
American Revolution.
The quirky antics and irreverent perspective of Laurence Sterne's
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67) might
seem at first glance to be a million miles from the political crisis that
was to engulf the early decades of the new king's reign (as Hume's
comparison with the Laplander attests). At a remove from the kind of
stable spectatorial position modeled by his own invitation to "reflec
tion," Hume suggests, Sterne was nonetheless able to keep his distance
from the causes of the present discontents through a distinctively
"Shandean" obliviousness.4 Although some distance has been traveled
from Viktor Shklovsky's formalist proposal that the "content" of Tristram
Shandy becomes "reflection on the form itself," a tendency to read
Sterne's novel as closed off from the outside world has continued to be
ELH 81 (2014) 585-613 © 2014 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 585

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pervasive. Accounts of the novel as confined to the domestic sphere and
inclining towards solipsism, together with the "strengthening impulse
to value oddity for its own sake" that Jonathan Lamb has identified
in Sterne's development as an author, confirm this overall picture of
an inward-looking universe.5 Even if it does not entirely succeed in
harmonizing or overcoming the discordant elements of the universe at
large, Tristram Shandy has at least been seen to absorb them into the
cushioning of a safely contained world where humor and sentiment
act as salves for all wounds.6
But with Sterne, matters are rarely so straightforward. Despite
Sterne's own earlier involvement with election campaigning and his
satires of local church politics, critics have tended to see Tristra7n
Shandy—in line with its author's early retirement from party activity—
as marking a turn away from politics towards more human concerns,
much as its dedication invites prime minister William Pitt to retreat
with the book into the country.7 Yet, while Sterne apparently gave up
on his earlier satirical plans for his novel, to propose that he retreated
into a self-enclosed world of hobby-horses by way of characters "who are
uninterpretable in any other sense than that of their own indisputable
singularity" is premature.8 Attending closely to the hybridized mode
Sterne developed while writing Tristram Shandy, I will propose, reveals
that he modulated his satirical purposes to a broader array of targets
and more nuanced political ends, with wide-ranging implications.9
Although some critics have read the book as a party political satire,
discerning beneath its character portraits stock types and even indi
viduals known personally to Sterne, I contend that this approach is at
once too specific and not specific enough.10 The kind of situated political
reading invited, for example, by Tom Jones (1749), whose events take
place in 1745 and hence are contemporary with the Jacobite rebellion,
proves impossible for Sterne's novel, which distributes its action—such
as it is—over the better part of a century.11 Dates and dating feature
repeatedly and insistently in Tristram Shandy, yet the effect of the
novel's multiple interlocking timeframes is to create a kind of discon
tinuous present. Tristram finds himself anxiously circling around his
unsettled place in the contemporary moment, while at the same time
he remains in perpetual fear of being cut off from succession with the
past. As a result, I will propose, his circumstances dramatize a much
more widespread national predicament.
In what follows, I expand upon the political implications of the
novel's challenge to the premise of continuity by returning to three
neglected aspects of the novel: the portentous date of Tristram's birth,
586 Tristram Shandy and the Crisis of Whig History

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the political thinking of his father, and the "Gentleman" that Sterne
conspicuously appends to his protagonists name. In recent decades,
historians have called longstanding assumptions about the stability of
eighteenth-century Britain radically into question. Given the renewed
scrutiny of the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688-89 in particular, the
coincidence of Tristram's birth date with the anniversary of what one
historian has termed the "first modern revolution" similarly calls for
réévaluation.12 A suitably revised account of the political and social
upheaval over the subsequent century introduces new lines of approach
both to the parody of political theory mounted through Walter Shandy
and to the positions (and "Opinions") subsequently adopted by his son,
both of which come at illuminating angles of incidence to a rapidly
changing political world.13 Extending our purview to take account of
the multiple, competing frames of reference that Sterne goes out of
his way to introduce into the untidily organized world of Tristram
Shandy accordingly enables us to discern the novel's broad-ranging
and preemptive assault on the so-called Whig interpretation of history:
the now widely discredited presumption that the history of England
through the ages (and subsequently world history) represents the
inevitable triumph of progress and freedom, secured by the progress
from constitutional government into parliamentary and eventually
democratic rule.
In his classic study of the revolution against patriarchal authority
in eighteenth-century America, Jay Fliegelman proposed that Sterne's
novel developed a critique of the "transmission of ideology" between
generations.14 To a far greater extent than Hume and subsequent
readers have appreciated the difficulties confronted by Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman, as he tries to find his place between past and present
converge with the far more widespread predicament confronted in mid
eighteenth-century Britain, as the premises sustaining the established
order gave way to confusion and uncertainty. While Fliegelman claims
that Sterne's critique intersected with the thinking that helped to drive
the American Revolution, restoring the novel's curiously neglected ties
to the widespread upheavals in Britain during the same period makes
available some of the novel's more elusive—but similarly powerful—
implications for domestic political debate.
In Tristram Shandy, Sterne playfully exposed the gaps and contradic
tions between existing and emergent models of political understanding,
while undermining the unbroken transmission through time of institu
tions, property, and shared customs, feelings, and opinions—on which
Edmund Burke, for one, would subsequently base his vindication of the
John Owen Havard 587

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established constitution—with a barrage of almost constant interrup
tions and unfortunate accidents. While the novel cannot be considered
an allegory in any stable sense, nor be said to have an overarching
design (in the sense either of a blueprint or an agenda) to marry the
catastrophic world of the Shandys with a debunking of the emergent
Whig interpretation of the British constitution, its clashing frameworks
of understanding are thus all the more faithful to the unspooling of
earlier historical certainties. The wayward course taken, in turn, by
Tristram's "Life and Opinions" accordingly enables us to recover the
novel's sharply critical insights into the increasingly bewildering world
of politics and to appreciate anew its novel departures from the impasse
of the present.
I. THE ACCIDENTAL HISTORIAN
Tristram's account of his disruptive entry into human societ

presented less from the perspective of world histoiy than that o
entire solar system:
On the fifth day of November, 1718, which to the aera fixed on, w
as near nine kalendar months as any husband could in reason ha
expected,—was I Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, brought forth in
this scurvy and disasterous world of ours.—I wish I had been bo
in the Moon, or in any of the planets, (except Jupiter or Satur
because I never could bear cold weather) for it could not well ha
fared worse with me in any of them (tho' I will not answer for Venu
than it has in this vile, dirty planet of ours,—which, o' my conscienc
with reverence be it spoken, I take to be made up of the shreds an
clippings of the rest.15
This wrenching introduction to what Tristram elsewhere terms

Fragment of Life" (T, 3) registers at a cosmic scale the novel's un
accommodation with the human condition that confines us to this
"vile, dirty" world while reaching for the moon and stars. Its more
down-to-earth implications are no less profound. This planet "is well
enough," as Tristram goes on to inform us, "provided a man could be
born in it to a great title or to a great estate" or acquire "employments
of dignity or power; but that is not my case" (T, 10). We will return
to the questions of status raised here and their political implications;
for now, however, we can leave these concerns waiting, like Mrs.
Shandy, on the stairs, as we consider the more immediate political
implications of what David Wellbery has termed Tristram's "accident
of birth" ("Zufall der Geburt").16

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In his account of Sterne's "poetics of contingency" ("Poetik der
Kontingenz"), Wellbery has discussed the implications of Tristram's
chaotic birth for enlightenment notions of language and belief.17 By
exposing fractures in the edifice of Whig history, the hazardous moment
of Tristram's birth points to similarly crucial fault lines in the political
thinking of eighteenth-century Britain. The importance of Tristram's
date of birth would not have been lost on contemporary readers. The
anniversary of the plot by a group of Catholics including Guy Fawkes
to blow up Parliament in 1605, the fifth of November was also—and
arguably more significantly—the day in 1688 that William of Orange
and wife Mary landed on the English coast at Torbay, thus setting
into motion the revolutionary events which toppled James II and
culminated in the new constitutional settlement and Bill of Rights.18
The anniversary of the Revolution—together with William's birthday
on the fourth of November—was marked throughout the subsequent
century, in almanacs, calendars, sermons, and songs, as well as by a
wide variety of private and public celebrations, meetings, commemo
rations, and festivals.
In one of a great many such events, William Hogarth's "Foundling"
artists held their annual meeting every fifth of November "in honor
of the Revolution of 1688, of liberty and of Protestantism."19 Yet the
anniversary also occasioned intense controversy. Most famously, in a
sermon preached on 5 November 1709, Henry Sacheverell denounced
the political and religious legacy of the revolution from a High Church
perspective, prompting his "show trial" at the hands of the Whigs.20
While a sermon by Richard Price on 4 November, 1789, heralded a
new era of factiousness by summoning England's revolutionary legacy
in support of recent events in France (thereby prompting the outraged
response of Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in
France [1790]), the preceding century had seen the Revolution repeat
edly invoked across the political spectrum in a variety of domestic
disputes and ideological debates, imbuing the date with unstable and
overdetermined significance.
Sterne might have been expected to have a rose-tinted perspective
on the "Glorious Revolution." Born into a family of second-generation
Whigs, in the early 1740s he had employed his pen, at the behest of
his uncle Jaques, to uphold the "Cause of Liberty and Protestantism"
by writing in support of Robert Walpole's ministerial Whigs against the
local "Tory" paper.21 The personal feud with Jaques Sterne—a notori
ously thin-skinned, vindictive individual who was, to be sure, no Uncle
Toby—and the bitter partisanship that prompted Sterne to turn away

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from what he described as this "dirty work" was of a piece, I would
argue, with his encroaching recognition that any principled basis for
upholding the values of the constitution and stable government had
irreparably splintered.22
Sterne was not prompted, as Henry Fielding apparently was, to
employ his fiction to depict ways that a form of virtuous Whiggism
could be made compatible with stable government.23 Yet his conclusion
that he was no "party-man" need not simply indicate his disengagement
from politics, nor the abandonment of conflict and debate for more
diffuse Whig sympathies.24 When read with a view to the mounting
crisis of Whig history, the tangled legacies invoked by the novel—from
Tristram's birth onwards—present a more complex picture of the
convergence of motives behind the development of Sterne's fiction than
existing accounts of his politics have credited. As a coincidence whose
possible meaninglessness hints at the arbitrary core of the established
system of government, Tristram's birth date is thus heavily pregnant
with significance, supplying a pointed political dimension to what
Mark Loveridge has termed the argument about design engaged by
Sterne's fiction. Bearing a fraught legacy that continues to hover over
the novel, this totemic date infuses its worldview with the suggestion
of a higher power which "broods over or behind the human action
and affects its course."25
In the world of Tristram Shandy, however, not much goes according
to plan. E. M. Forster memorably proposed that a god is hidden in
Sterne's novel, but "his name is Muddle."26 In addition to the wayward
path taken by Tristram's "Life and Opinions"—aptly captured in the
image of meandering lines by which he depicts the "digressive" and
"progressive" (T, 64) course of his narration—Försters comments also
point to a further aspect of Sterne's novel: its confused, stumbling,
accident-prone quality.27 "Accidental" was understood broadly in the
eighteenth century, encompassing anything not specifically planned,
but brought about through circumstances rather than design. While
Sterne's wandering novel certainly adheres to the more capacious
definition of accidental, the novel also abounds—as Forster and
others have noted—with the kinds of "accident" more familiar to our
ears: the unforeseen, unprepared-for events that rupture the surface
of normality and interrupt the assumed course of things.28 Rejecting
assumptions about autonomous agency and interiority, critics have
recently reemphasized the role of "accident" in the early English novel
and reframed discussions of action in such a way that, as Jonathan
Kramnick observes, internal and external laws of causation may turn

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out to be inextricable from one another.29 This susceptibility of mental
states "to a kind of limitless causation" has obvious purchase on the
chaotic world of Sterne's novel.30 More particularly, Tristram Shandy
can enable us to extend these problematized accounts of agency and
intention across to the domain of historical causation, with implications
that reach far beyond the Shandy family.
By gesturing to the breakdown of any relationship that would inte
grate the lives of its characters with the workings of a higher power or
the operations of a stable universe, Tristram Shandy indexes a larger
crisis of political agency. Although it does not have much of a plot to
speak of, its almost obsessive preoccupation with causation has seen
its localized episodes read as parodies of novelistic procedures. Its
disruption of the interdependent logics of temporal succession and
mental association has similarly prompted critics including Ian Watt to
read the novel as a parody of realist narrative methods.31 By reaching
beyond the immediate horizons of the novel, however, to understand
"time" instead as what J. G. A. Pocock terms the "dimension of contin
gent happenings," the confused experience of events that afflicts the
Shandy family comes to reflect their participation within a much less
insular condition.32 The name for the "time-dimension" in its broadest
sense, Pocock proposes, is "history."33 When read in these expanded
terms, in its anxiety about the way things never happen in the ways
expected (or in an order that makes sense), Tristram Shandy accord
ingly raises the unsettling prospect of a history filled with—indeed,
comprised of—accidents. By throwing its already chaotic picture
of how individuals steer their way around the contingencies of the
universe together with questions of larger historical import, Tristram
Shandy thus takes on the guise of what we might term an accidental
historical novel.
In The Historical Novel, Georg Lukâcs influentially identified a
tradition of historical fiction, inaugurated by the example of Walter
Scott, in which historical development comes to be assimilated to
a dialectical model of progress.34 As Lukâcs observes, Scott depicts
"historical crisis" as a "fate" suffered by interconnected groups of
people, divided by events into warring parties.35 Despite their vacilla
tion, the hero of the Waverley novels ultimately defends the accom
plishment of a compromise by which earlier conflicts are absorbed
into the new order.36 Although Tristram Shandy may not seem to
have obvious lines of narrative development, or at least any which
reach far beyond the minutiae of the Shandy household, the fate of
its characters is nonetheless similarly intertwined with history in both
obvious and oblique ways.

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While the emergence of historical fiction proper would see
competing levels of history sorted out, differentiating "the authori
tative discourse of the past" as well as the contingency of isolated
events from stadial, progress-oriented accounts of development, in
Sterne these multiple layers collide messily with one another.37 The
sequential resolution of a chain of catastrophes, which in turn open
up new conflicts, from Lukâcs's account of Scott, appears otherwise in
Tristram Shandy : as a string of calamités, each of which may simply
represent one catastrophe among many. Yet while Scott's novels yoke
the lives of its central characters together with world-historical events
only to assert the ultimate passivity of his gentlemanly heroes in the
face of larger forces, in the lives of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and
his extended family, Sterne presents a far more volatile picture of the
relationship between individual agency and historical change.
The Shandys are not a fortunate family. Indeed, Tristram prefaces the
account of his birth into this "scurvy and disasterous" world by blaming
the course of his life on "Fortune" herself: thanks to this "ungracious
Duchess," he has been "pelted" with "a set of as pitiful misadventures
and cross accidents as ever small hero sustained" (T, 10-11). Tristram
accordingly finds himself within a distinguished lineage of ill-fated
heroes and unlucky lovers. Yet his relation to "Fortune" takes on
further significance given the complex evolution of this category both
in early modern political thought and eighteenth-century society as a
whole. Pocock's account reaches back to Boethius—an important influ
ence on Geoffrey Chaucer—for whom "to act in politics is to expose
oneself to the insecurities of human power systems, to enter a world
of mutability and peripeteia whose history is the dimension of political
insecurity," a dimension known as "Fortune."38 The general principle
of Fortuna gets developed, Pocock proposes, in opposition to virtue
(or virtus), a complex characteristic that passed from fortitude to the
active—originally Machiavellian—capacity to remold circumstances (a
notion that "country" ideologists including Bolingbroke and to some
extent Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift were later to reinvent).39
While "Fortune" comes to be "swallowed up in the twin concepts of
Providence and Fate" in Pocock's schema, the term also took on more
familiar, "modern" resonances, with new conceptions of wealth distri
bution and accumulation.40 Reinvented forms of providential thinking
nonetheless continued to coexist in complex ways with recognition of
probability and physical laws, as well as the proliferating varieties of
worldly "fortune" making.41

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Fortune, fate, providence, (bad) luck, and accident—what is to
blame for the condition of the Shandys and to what extent do they
take on part of the "blame" themselves?42 The case of Tristram's great
uncle, Hammond Shandy, proves instructive here. The knots on Dr.
Slops bag prompt a suitably tangled reflection from Tristram:
In the case of knots,—by which, in the first place, I would not be

understood to mean slip-knots,—because in the course of my life and
opinions,—my opinions concerning them will come in more properly
when I mention the catastrophe of my great uncle Mr. Hammond
Shandy,—a little man,—but of high fancy:—he rushed into the duke
of Monmouth's affair. (T, 150)
Although Tristram only ever refers to his uncle in this single oblique
instance, the moment is especially pertinent to the larger question
of action—or its absence—in the novel, not least as one of the rare
instances when Tristram addresses the "opinions" advertised in the
title of the novel. The son of Charles II, Monmouth—immortalized as
Absalom in Dryden's poem on the Exclusion Crisis—was the darling
of the Whigs and, following the death of his father in 1685, launched
an uprising against James II, coordinated with a further rebellion
led by Argyle in Scotland. They failed catastrophically. Monmouth's
impotent uprising, as it were, stands as a deflationary counterpoint to
the successful revolution just a few years later, the Jacobite tragedy
anticipated as Shandean farce. While comic—in the way that tragedy
can be comic—Hammond's involvement with this affair is not particu
larly funny, especially once we surmise that he met his end in the
form of a noose.
In Sterne's probable historical source for Tristram Shandy,
Monmouth is persuaded by Argyle to launch his rebellion only after—
in a manner not at all unlike that of Clarissa Harlowe—he "had long
held out against his Sollicitations [sic]."43 In the case of Hammond
Shandy—a man of "high fancy," who "rushed into" this affair—we
find a familiar Shandean confusion of action and motivation, in which
intention, will, and consent are all but overwhelmed by the ineluctable
throng of external circumstances and their all too real chains of material
consequences. It seems particularly fitting that the one time a Shandy
has the chance to participate in a revolutionary event of potentially
world-historical significance, he turns out to choose the wrong one. Yet
the lamentable fate of Hammond casts a longer shadow, introducing
questions about agency and historical change in which not only the
Shandys are implicated.

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In addition to confirming the congenital ineptitude of the Shandy
family, Hammonds catastrophe reveals a further level of connection
with Tristram: their shared relation to historical and, in particular,
revolutionary change. "Revolution," Hannah Arendt observes, origi
nally implied a turning back, drawing upon the parallel astronomical
meaning to suggest an irresistible movement "removed from all influ
ence of human power."44 This sense was first used, as Arendt notes,
for the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and subsequently with the
same sense for the events of 1688. With the nineteenth century, the
belief that events were driven by historical "necessity" took over and
this conviction prompted participants in the bloodshed of the French
Revolution to "play whatever part" they could "rather than remain
outside the play." As such, Arendt observes, they "were fooled by
history, and they have become the fools of history."45
The Shandys, we know, are fools (the name means as much). In
Hammond their crack-brained ways step over onto the historical stage.
Confusing the experience of conviction for an event written in the
stars, his erroneous judgment unleashes forces of violence, which turn
back against him. The unstable compound of freedom and necessity
summoned by the fate of Hammond, a "little man," extends in turn
to the challenges confronted by Tristram, the "small Hero" of his Life
and Opinions, who has similarly been "pelted" with a set of "pitiful
misadventures and cross accidents." His "catastrophe"—not least in
its astrological register—adds further weight to the force of Fortune
and together with Tristram's birth date frames the action of the novel
in relation to a portentous historical horizon.
The fleeting, indirect appearance of this distant relation may suggest
a repressed historical trauma, invoking the far from bloodless back
ground to the Revolution whose violence also stands behind Toby's
military exploits.46 As Katie Trumpener rightly observes, the dominant
note of Toby's repeated whistling "Lillabullero" is more likely to be
post-revolutionary English triumphalism than the traumatic experi
ences of the Irish.47 The disconnect that the novel introduces into
the narratives of Whig history nonetheless opens out into a far less
self-assured picture of the national and imperial identities these events
purportedly secured both for England and its colonial peripheries. As
with the potentially evacuated significance of Tristram's birthday, the
added contingency introduced into the narrative of the Revolution
here shadows its already divisive legacy with further disintegration.
Toby's battle wound serves as perhaps the most direct reminder of
the multiple ways in which the history of the Shandy family is bound

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up with the events that saw William topple the regime of James II,
ostensibly securing a newly stable system of government for the English
people. In Trim s own account of his and Tobys military exploits, the
elements of this national myth coincide with the untidy fallout of
events on the ground:
King William was of an opinion, an' please your honour, quoth Trim,
that every thing was predestined for us in this world; insomuch, that
he would often say to his soldiers, that 'every ball had its billet.' He
was a great man, said my uncle Toby—And I believe, continued Trim,
to this day, that the shot which disabled me at the battle of Landen,
was pointed at my knee for no other purpose, but to take me out of
his service, and place me in your honours, where I should be taken so
much better care of in my old age—It shall never, Trim, be construed
otherwise, said my uncle Toby. (T, 515)
If William s—and by extension, England's—belief in a divine plan is

not sufficiently undermined by the gentle mockery of Trim and Toby's
Panglossian outlook here, then this confidence certainly appears much
more flimsy in the light of William's own history in battle, where he
was almost killed by a stray bullet as he prepared for the "Battle of
the Boyne."48
The history of the three kingdoms would have looked rather different
(to put it mildly) had William been less fortunate. Indeed, the question
Tristram poses following the scene of his own conception that begins
the novel—"Now, dear Sir, what if any accident had befallen him in his
way alone?" (T, 7)—can be posed equally of William himself, whose
perilous voyage to England in the first place coincided with the date
of Tristram's eventual birth. The account of the spermatozoon trav
eling through Tristram's mother's body can accordingly be read as a
mock-epic reinscription of William's crossing by sea, while his fretting
about the "foundation . . . laid for a thousand weaknesses both of body
and mind" (T, 7) by this troubled passage ("which no skill . . . could
ever afterwards have set to rights" [T, 7]) obliquely invokes the Bill of
Rights of 1689, whose supposed fixity is similarly called into question
by its contingent origins.49
The novel is endlessly open to suggestion, of course, and by following
its leads in this way we risk falling into a trap Sterne has knowingly
set for us. From its rollicking first sentence onwards, the opening
chapters of Sterne's novel throw out innumerable lines that intertwine
Tristram's account of his own troubled conception and birth with the
similarly uncertain origins of the English system of government. By

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shadowing the realized historical narrative of uninterrupted succession,
providential deliverance, and national triumph with the possibility of
alternative, Shandean outcomes, Tristrain Shandy nonetheless hints
at the potent possibilities Catherine Gallagher has identified in coun
terfactualism.50 In suggesting that the Revolution could have never
happened, moreover, the novel implies that the disintegrated, fraying
remnants of its legacy may effectively point to the same conclusion.
In the figure of Walter Shandy, the novel directly introduces these
competing models of government as one of the impinging realities
that contribute to the confusion of the novel and thus the threat of
psychological danger and instability that sensitive critics have discerned
beneath the novels fun and games. As I will now go on to show, a fuller
accounting of Walter s "political reasoning" (T, 46), as Tristram describes
the posturing of his father, reveals that this disquieting confusion is not
so easily limited to the Shandy household. When the "animal spirits"
transfused from father to son are "once set a-going," Tristram informs
us, "whether right or wrong, 'tis not a half-penny matter,—away they
go cluttering like hey-go mad" (T, 5-6). We can say much the same
of the political theory whose wayward dissemination the ramshackle
proceedings of Sterne's novel help to make newly legible.
II. MODEL GOVERNMENT
In sharp contrast with emergent accounts of the English polit

system as a "child of Time and of Providence," Tristram Shandy
untimely child of an almost directly antithetical set of forces e
a much more equivocal and unsettled picture of the government
the "muddled, incoherent events of 1688" had apparently brou
into being.51 When Swift had the ship of Lemuel Gulliver split
rock on the fifth of November, he invoked the divisive legacy o
Revolution, which the "split" perspective developed over the co
of his voyages to the different lands of Gulliver's Travels has
seen to engage from various angles.52 At a greater distance of t
the challenge of smoothing over a fraught moment of succession
combined in Sterne's era with an increasing sense of distance f
the revolutionary past.
With the passage of time, the connection between the political wo
of the present and the constitutional order apparently set in pla
the Revolution was at risk of seeming increasingly tenuous, ev
the so-called balanced constitution celebrated by Montesquieu a
William Blackstone became a source of national pride. The desir
596 Tristram Shandy and the Crisis of Whig Histor

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put God, king, and history back together again after their Humpty
Dumptylike fall in the seventeenth century" in Brendan McConville s
pithy phrase—itself bound up more generally with a "need for cosmic
coherence between the human and divine orders, between history
and Providence"—saw an emphasis on presenting the "relationship
between the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dynasties ... as an
undisturbed line."53
We find one of countless examples of this search for "cosmic coher
ence" in a sermon commemorating the inauguration of his "Present
Majesty" published around the time of Tristram Shandy. Entitled
"National Mercies Considered" the sermon is typical of the ways in
which the events of the Revolution and their legacy were subsumed
within a synthetic providentialism. The deliverance of the Jews—and
by extension the English nation—was not the product of "chance or
fortune," the sermon asserts, nor was it "projected or executed by any
atchievement or plan of human device, which might soon again be
defeated by superior strength or policy from without, or from force of
accidents from within."54 It was not, moreover, effected "from change
of circumstances, humours and passions of men, all which generally had
a sway in the rise and fall of kingdoms" but instead by the "power and
goodness of God" and by "a chain of great and mighty deliverances."55
With the "long and undisturbed possession" by a people of its liber
ties, the remembrance of these mercies might appear at "too great a
distance from their hearts" such that with an "excess of freedom" and
the restlessness of imaginary burdens, they might seek to enquire into
foundations of inherited ceremonies or even begin to question their
obligations.56 While the "subversion of our constitution" by James II
may have brought the country to the "edge of a precipice," God used
his power for us as much as the Israelites, the sermon reminds its
eighteenth-century audience, "to fix a wavering persecuted people,
and settle them upon such foundation, as must make them happy."57
It should not be altogether surprising that the author of this sermon
was Laurence Sterne. The discrepancies between Sterne's role as a
clergyman and as the author of bawdy fictions were widely remarked
upon. As Ian Ross has shown in a valuable discussion of Sterne's
sermons and their reception, in addition to their shared exploration
(albeit with different emphases) of similar themes, including provi
dence, fortune, and self-knowledge, the worldview of the sermons
can be understood as complementary, if not altogether compatible,
with that of Tristram Shandy.58 Yet while Ross is no doubt correct
that the "sober yet ultimately optimistic picture of human existence"

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in the sermons "at times appears as a mirror image of the comic yet
sometimes bleak world of Tristram Shandy," when it comes to the
question of constitutional order as reflected by the respective works,
this mirror can only be construed as a multiply broken one.59
By comparing Tristram's diagram of his own wayward narration with
the providentially directed lines of God s sovereign power, whose influ
ence was earnestly surveyed by contemporaries of the Revolution and
echoed in visual depictions of its events, we can see this divergence
in its starkest terms. While Sterne's sermon kept the constitution at
arm's length from the influence of accident, chance, fortune, or even
human agency, the fallen, materialist world of Sterne's novel cannot
prevent their messily combined influence from crashing onto the
scene, pointing to the chain of potential interruptions, digressions, and
accidents that threaten to knock the temporal transmission of stable
constitutional models (including received accounts of their origins)
dramatically off course.
We receive a strikingly self-assured picture of the workings of the
eighteenth-century political system at the start of the preceding reign
in The Newtonian System of the World, The Best Model of Government
(1728), an allegorical poem published shortly after the accession of
George II to the throne.60 Extending the providential reading of the
Revolution into an elaborate parallel between the political system and
the solar system, the poem celebrates—and, we might add, seeks to
justify—the consequences of the "fix'd Succession" to which all "Britons
owe / All the sure Happiness they feel below" (T, 31). The laws of the
natural universe, the structure of governance, and forces of mutual
attraction are harmoniously conjoined in a celebratory vindication of
the nation's "mixed" constitution. It is not so with Tristram Shandy.
The order so carefully maintained by The Newtonian System is delib
erately and conspicuously thrown into disarray in the parallel universe
of Sterne's novel, where succession is anything but fixed and disorder
all but guaranteed.61 As the poem shows, the eighteenth century
developed a complex reconciliation of Newtonian principles with
providential intervention.62 In the distinctly unprovidential universe of
Sterne's novel, where the only way is down, these developments point
in precisely opposite directions. The universal "Attraction" celebrated
by the poem is paralleled by the crucial role of sentiment in Sterne's
novel. While in The Newtonian System, these laws of attraction extend
the natural workings of the universe, however, the pervasive role of
sentimental attachment in Sterne's novel is perhaps better understood

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in a supplementary capacity, as the superadded coping mechanisms of
a world in which the stars all too frequently fail to align.
As these responses to the new reign of George III and the accession
of his predecessor reveal, reconciling received accounts of the political
system to changing realities required creative work. The competition
between proliferating models of political understanding nevertheless
gave rise to increasingly evident tensions. In comments that uncan
nily anticipate the turbulence of subsequent decades, Walter Shandy
laments that "so many things in this world were out of joint;—that
the political arch was giving way;—and that the very foundations
of our excellent constitution in church and state, were so sapp'd as
estimators had reported" (T, 129-30). The awkward transition from
established political theories into new forms of thought represents an
important background to Tristram Shandy. In the "political reasoning"
of Tristram's father, these competing models enter into the operations
of the novel directly.
Walters determination to manage the birth of his son is motivated in
part by the desire to uphold established models of power at all levels,
including household governance. In the first volumes of the novel, the
movement of Tristram's mother between the town and the country,
where she plans to give birth, prompts from Walter a disquisition on
the political fallout of the "current of men and money towards the
metropolis" from the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign "down to
his own time" (a situation which has become "dangerous to our civil
rights") (T, 43). By contrast, having Tristram's mother's "lying-in" in
the country, Walter fears, would "infallibly throw a balance of power,
too great already, into the weaker vessels of the gentry, in his own,
or higher stations; which, with the many other usurped rights which
that part of the constitution was hourly establishing,—would in the
end, prove fatal to the monarchical system of domestick government
established in the first creation of things by God" (T, 44). As Tristram
hastens to remind us, his father was a "gentleman," knowledgeable
"in philosophy,—wise also in political reasoning,—and in polemical
... no way ignorant" (T, 46). Lamenting the failure to dissect received
knowledge and apply it to "civil matters, as well as to speculative truths"
(T, 129), Walter accordingly strives to offset the "out of joint" world
by upholding balanced government at all levels, establishing a direct
parallel between the forces that organize the world of the novel and
those which organize the wider world. Yet the problem with Walter's
political disquisitions is not simply that, together with his plans for
Tristram's birth, they are foiled by an uncooperative universe.

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As Sterne's original readers would no doubt have recognized, even
when taken on their own terms Walters political theories constitute
what an early twentieth-century study of Sterne's politics describes
as "inimitable nonsense."63 Once we try to determine what his not
so-modest proposals would mean in practice, it becomes especially
apparent that Walter often speaks at cross-purposes with himself.
Walters conflicted visions for the basis of the "balance of power," which
return to models of the body politic that reach back into the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries and also look forward to the emergent disci
pline of political economy—thus leading him to a particularly confused
vision of blood and spirits overwhelming the head, culminating in the
stoppage of circulation and death— reflect more than mere eccentricity.
The "delectable parody" that Sterne stages through Walter comprises
a key part of a more general satire of the excesses of learning, plans
for which can be identified amidst the earliest starting points for the
novel.64 Aspects of Sterne's characterization nonetheless support more
specific claims that Walter represents "an ironic vestige of the Country
party's ideal of the retired Patriot" including elements of the "Country
Interest" known to Sterne from the York elections and even recalling
a specific local "Tory" squire known personally to the author.65 Yet,
the overall picture of Walter points in many more directions than
these neatly superimposed descriptions would suggest. We need not
conclude that localized targets for critique are subsumed within a
more general satire, as the unidirectional emphasis of most accounts
of the novel's satirical origins tends to suggest. The elastic timeframe
of Sterne's novel, in which the period spanning Tristram's birth down
to the moment of his writing collide, quite deliberately makes Walter
historically—and thus politically—impossible to place. Rather than
reinforcing existing partisan stereotypes, or escaping from all "types
and precedents" whatsoever, as Lamb proposes, Sterne might instead
be said to lend his character portraits a prismatic quality, whereby they
invoke an interlocking set of determinate contexts and norms to hop
back and forth between external contexts and self-reference at whim.66
From his appeals to Filmer to his fears for the constitution, Walter
Shandy looks back to the patriarchal and authoritarian "Tory" thinking
of preceding centuries while registering elements of subsequent
opposition, patriot, and "Country" positions. By going out of his way
to introduce discordant elements into his portrait of Walter, Sterne
pointedly highlighted the incoherence and confusion that accrue around
attempts to maintain a single "position" over time. He thus gave this
perennially relevant theme a sharply topical edge. The incompatible

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elements that enter haphazardly into Walters political reasoning,
comic as the resulting hodgepodge may be, point to enduring sources
of tension within the traditions of political thought whose competing
doctrines Walter strives to uphold (not least the coexistence of contrac
tual thought and patriarchal ideology).67
The decades preceding the publication of Sterne's novel saw "the
supersession of one party system by another," as the existing parties
fragmented into myriad new interests.68 The rattlebag of arguments
and concerns that enter haphazardly into the "political reasoning" of
Walter Shandy thus directly dramatizes the challenges associated with
managing the decline of established party identities. The figure most
closely associated with the forces that were to decisively alter the
physiognomy of national politics in this complex period of transition
was William Pitt, to whom Sterne chose to dedicate the first volumes
of Tristram Shandy. The "Great Commoner," Pitt represented forces
that had dramatically unsettled the ruling Whig elite in recent decades
by serving as the rallying point for a renovated "Country" opposition
and the figurehead for a newly popular—and middle class—politics.
Yet rather than pointing to a brave new world of unified patriotism and
imperial conquest, the broad base of "Patriot" support on which Pitt
had launched himself to power and the coalition on which he would
base his subsequent imperial strategy were precarious entities. The
Tory squires, middle-class urban interests, and popular mobs from
which Pitts earliest support had been forged made strange bedfellows,
as Sterne would have known from his earlier involvement in Yorkshire
politics. When in the dedication to Tristram Shandy, Sterne invited
Pitt to retreat with his book into the country, he was acutely aware of
Pitt's connections with the same overdetermined field of divisions that
had prompted Sterne to conclude he was no party-man and abandon
partisanship in disgust. He would similarly have recognized that Pitt's
success papered over the intractable political and ideological legacies
with which he had animated his portrait of Walter Shandy.
In light of this tangled backstory, the relatively straightforward (and
far from Shandean) manner in which critics have tended to approach
the dedication may seem surprising. Lamb suggests that Sterne "sets
satire aside" to engage in an uncritical celebration of Pitt's disinterested,
"Patriot" position, while in her account of the cultural work of empire
Carol Watts proposes that the dedication introduces Tristram Shandy
as a window onto the imperial present.69 Yet we need not press very
hard on Sterne's invitation to take his book "into the country" to see
Pitt's position—and the plinth of national unity on which it rested—as

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more contingent, precarious, and internally compromised than these
critics would be inclined to allow. The fallout of the Seven Years' War
would bear out this conclusion as, in true Shandean fashion, subsequent
events continued to "trip up" Pitt in the past, rather than begetting
the future.70 While Sterne could not, of course, have anticipated the
ensuing collapse of Pitt's imperial strategy when he wrote his dedica
tion (with the bells of recent imperial victories perhaps literally ringing
in his ears), he remained well aware that he was addressing a moving
target. The contemporary satire which had Pitt boast that the "oftener
I altered my opinion the more I was esteemed for my consistency"
would, moreover, soon describe a more pervasive national condition.71
The accession of George III threw the time out of joint. As Sterne
wrote to a distant friend a few months later from London, the new
king had sought to return matters of government to "first principles."
"I wish you was here," Sterne wrote, "to see what changes of looks and
political reasoning, have taken place in every company, and coffee
house since last year; we shall be soon Prussians and Anti-Prussians,
Bute's and Anti-Bute's, and those distinctions will just do as well as
Whig and Tory—and, for aught I know serve the same ends."72 These
developments, which had created massive disruption at court, also
dramatically altered broader political alignments, as Sterne's letter
acutely registers. The changes, which had posed Pitt against the
Earl of Bute, the king's controversial adviser and subsequent head
of ministry—Pitt favored ongoing subsidies to Prussia while Bute
and the King sought to develop a more insular foreign policy—were
only the most recent in a long series of reversals that had led to Pitt's
being widely pilloried as a flip-flopper. The competing approaches to
foreign policy and the national interest as well as the shifting factional
allegiances that Sterne spliced together in his letter thus mark not only
the beginnings of a larger crisis of partisanship that was soon to engulf
the reign of the new king, but also the pervasive sense of dislocation
characteristic of a changed political world.
III. RECEIVED OPINIONS
Where, then, might the "Life and Opinions" of Sterne's protago

fit into the increasingly bewildering world of modern politics? I
telling that, when Sterne wrote of the "changes of looks and poli
reasoning" that had created widespread upheaval in London,
employed the same distinctive phrase he had used of Walter Shan
the preceding year. In addition to carrying over his satirical account
602 Tristram Shandy and the Crisis of Whig Histo

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Walters nonsensical "political reasoning" into the present, his comments
also call attention to a more fundamental breakdown of existing models
of political understanding. In the years ahead, the constitutional
upheaval begun by the king's newly active role in ministerial politics
would combine with an explosion of new political writing to fuel wide
spread oppositional activity—including debates over the constitution,
prerogative, and perceived overreach of government power that would
feed a mounting imperial crisis that culminated in the loss of the
American colonies—and widespread disorder. The confusion Sterne
attributed to Walter seemed to have become a national condition.
As such, the wayward course of Tristram's "Life and Opinions"
took on a newly topical light. A contemporary pamphlet reveals that
Sterne was not alone in discerning points of connection between the
confused scenes depicted in his novel and the shifting demands of the
political present. Explanatory Remarks on the Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, a satirical pamphlet published following the first two
volumes of Sterne's novel, purported to clearly lay open the "Morals
and Politics of this Piece" to its readers.73 In tbe latter sections of this
work, one such politically-minded reader of the novel, "Mr. Profound,"
announces to the patrons of a coffee-house that "Tristram Shandy is one
compleat system of modern politics." After quoting Walter's comments
on throwing too great a "balance of power" into the "weaker vessels of
the gentry," he asks: "What can he mean here . . . but pecuniary influ
ence in elections, particularly in boroughs?" and concludes by noting
the wisdom of Walter's fear that "the political arch was giving way."74
In much the same manner as the haphazard and selective reading
practiced by Walter Shandy himself, Mr. Profound, shown opening
the book seemingly at random, creates a further mismatch—between
past and present, theory and practice—by failing to get the joke that
Walter himself is a bad reader.
As witnessed in his claim that Tristram Shandy is "one compleat
system of modern politics," Explanatory Remarks takes Sterne's satire
one step further. The pamphlet proceeds in part along the same lines
as the parodie "Key" that Sterne had appended as the postscript to
A Political Romance. Published in 1759, the same year that Sterne
completed the first volumes of Tristram Shandy, that allegorical
satire had portrayed a recent controversy over preferments in the
York Church as a battle over an old "Watchcoat"; the subsequent
"Key" sees the coat read as an allegorical depiction of Gibraltar, while
the respective characters are seen to represent the King of France,
George III, and other national leaders. In a Shandean spirit, the satire

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targets those overly zealous readers who misread the novel in light of
their own hobby-horsical preoccupations, spinning out "Personages,
Opinions, Transactions, and Truths" such that every man turns the
story to what was "swimming uppermost in his own Brain."75 The same
can be said for Mr. Profound in Explanatory Remarks, who appeals to
the contemporary significance of the novels various episodes as part
of his praise for Tristram's use of "metaphor."76 Yet while both works
comically highlight the limitations and pitfalls of reading for "political"
significance, their implications are ultimately very different.
The "Key" to A Political Romance sees Sterne's satire found in
the street and taken to a small "Political Club" in the city of York,
where it "was publickly read to the Members," who agreed, "by a
great Majority, That it was a Political Romance; but concerning what
State or Potentate, could not so easily be settled amongst them."77
Although the members of the club misread the scale of the allegory,
taking characters and occurrences with local referents for national
leaders and major geopolitical events, they are not misled as to the
original "political" objective of Sterne's satire, even if they utterly miss
the ecclesiastical corruption and partisan infighting that are its actual
targets.78 By contrast, Explanatory Remarks highlights the challenge,
if not the fool's errand, of attempting to pin down the "politics" of
Sterne's novel in the first place. When Mr. Profound reads the Siege of
Namur in Tristram Shandy as depicting the recent defeat of Admiral
Byng at Fort St. Philip's in Minorca and Toby's wound as "the distress
the nation was thrown into thereupon," he highlights not only the
navel-gazing presentism of contemporary political discourse but also
the broader challenge of making the present intelligible in terms of
the settled events and received knowledge of the past.79
The difficulties that the pamphlet suggests are inherent to any
attempt to situate Sterne's novel politically affirm that the moorings
provided by past certainties were slipping away while at the same time
pointing to the widespread upheaval—echoed in Sterne's account of
the London coffee-houses—of a period in which the structure of poli
tics and extent of the political nation were widely seen to be moving
in various, seemingly incompatible directions. The very challenge of
relating Tristram Shandy to the changing physiognomy of national
politics—to say what, if anything, its "politics" are—thus indexes a
much larger crisis of political theory and practice. Not for nothing, we
might conclude, does the pamphlet end up killing Mr. Profound off.80
The difficulties confronted by Tristram as he tries to keep his "Life
and Opinions" on some kind of track are symptomatic of this changing

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climate. At a particularly topical moment in Explanatory Remarks,
the "President" of a coffee-house discussion, asking what bearing
Germany has on a war for trade and navigation ("trifling—I repeat it
very trifling"), concludes his his "popular and sagacious" harangue by
turning to a fellow patron of the coffee house—Tristram himself!—
greeting him as a "'man after my own heart" whose "political notions
are as clear and self-evident as my own.'"81 The joke is hard to miss.
Tristram does not, of course, have self-evident notions about anything,
least of all politics. Nonetheless, Mr. Profound subsequently quotes
at length from Sterne's novel, interjecting with cries of "Oh excellent
metaphor" and "Great—Great Tristraml" before turning to ask his
fellow coffee-house patrons what they think of "this great political
writer."82 The passages from the novel to which he responds, however,
are all extracted from the lengthy disquisitions of Walter Shandy. As
an unwitting surrogate for Tristram himself, the bungled efforts of Mr.
Profound to channel the received opinions of Walter into an account of
the modern political world illuminate the very different path taken by
Tristram as he attempts to negotiate the multiple legacies bequeathed
to him by the preceding generation.
Although the failure of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman to provide very much of Tristram's advertised "Life"
beyond his protracted birth has been widely remarked upon by
readers and critics, his missing "Opinions" have been given far less
attention. Explanatory Remarks reminds us that the opinions we do
receive in the novel are not Tristram's, but those of his father. While
Jay Fliegelman proposed that the challenges to the "transmission of
ideology" depicted in Sterne's novel participated within the broader
transatlantic critique of paternal authority that helped reshape the insti
tutions of hereditary government, in mid-eighteenth-century England
the intractable legacies of the past inevitably weighed more heavily than
they might from the distance of the American colonies.83 The tangled
inheritance bequeathed to Tristram, which encompasses his father's
opinions as well as the home from which he writes, sees the Burkean
vision of continuity multiply scrambled, but with little suggestion of
what might set matters on a surer footing in the future. The poignant
efforts throughout Tristram's narration to maintain points of connection
with the past, by rehearsing Walter's opinions ("My father would say
. . . ") as much as by wearing his slippers, serve as metonyms for the
pervasive sense of loss that echoes through the deserted hallways of
the novel. The disconnect and threat of being cut off that perpetually
shadow Tristram's narration disclose an intergenerational rupture with
potentially drastic social and political consequences.

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In much the same way that the widening gulf between past and
present, of which Tristram becomes acutely aware when writing his
"Life," calls the premise of continuous personal identity into question,
then, his efforts to maintain an ongoing attachment to his father open
out into much wider-ranging questions about national identity. The
perplexities Tristram faces when trying to find his place are nowhere
more readily apparent than in the "Gentleman" appended to the title of
the novel. As Michael McKeon has argued, the dialectical procedures
of the early novel gave form to an earlier, potentially revolutionary crisis
of status inconsistency that circled around this title.84 The moment
at which Tristram is writing falls before the nascent class conflicts of
the later eighteenth century. Yet he also finds himself at a significant
remove from earlier generations in which distinctions of birth, if not
entirely clear cut, could at least be rendered as intelligible conflicts.
In the late eighteenth-centuiy moment of Sterne's novel, the
unstable basis of the "gentleman"—newly ungrounded in blood,
property, or exclusive codes of behavior—was reflective of a mounting
wave of discontent. As well as the various offshoots of the "Stupidity
and Barbarism and Faction" that Hume was to lament, these tensions
were also to issue in specific challenges to the unequal basis of existing
constitutional representation. The son of a merchant, who has retired
to his paternal estate, the contradictory situation of Sterne's protago
nist sets him at the heart of these increasingly intractable debates. In
his free-floating affections and kaleidoscopic views, on the one hand,
and his practically neurotic attachments to the inheritance that fixes
his status, on the other, Tristram risks falling through a particularly
unfortunate generation gap.83 Rather than a neutral designation of
fact or the site of a dialectical resolution, the "Gentleman" appended
to Tristram's name appears instead as an anxious historical question.
We can return here to Tristram's account of his birth and the
questions concerning status—and, we can now add, class—that we
left waiting patiently on the stairs. The "accident of birth" that sees
Tristram born on the date of the 1688 Revolution not only highlights
the radical contingency at the putative foundation of the existing
constitution, but also extends to a broader critique of the arbitrary
basis of the social order it helped sustain. Tristram observes that this
dirty planet is well enough "provided a man could be born in it to
a great title or to a great estate" or acquire "employments of dignity
or power; but that is not my case" (T, 10). In doing so, he treats his
own precarious claim on the title of "Gentleman" as homologous, in
its very contingency, with the inequality endemic to society at large.

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These disparities would take on increasingly acute importance with
demands for the reform of parliamentary representation.86
In subsequent decades, the cracks these developments exposed in
the apparently secure constitutional edifice were subsumed beneath
more explosive debates, however. Events in France gave rise to revo
lutionary challenges to the established order, but also the counter
revolutionary reaction, which would ensure effective constitutional
stasis for a further generation. In Sterne's novel, we can see the fault
lines of these subsequent debates in embryo, while glimpsing more
radical possibilities, which subsequent developments in the spheres
of politics and letters would work to close down. Following Trim's
dramatic response to the sudden death of Bobby Shandy ("Are we not
here now," Trim had asked, striking his stick on the floor, "and are we
not . . . gone! in a moment!"), Tristram remarks:
I perceive plainly, that the preservation of our constitution in church

and state,—and possibly the preservation of the whole world—or what is
the same thing, the distribution and balance of its property and power,
may in time to come depend greatly upon the right understanding of
this stroke of the corporals eloquence. (T, 325-26)
The implications of such a sudden breakdown of the existing constitu

tional, political, and social order would be radical indeed. But Tristram
is only joking, of course. In the flippant equation between the strokes
of his fiction and what a subsequent generation would term the foun
dations of political justice, Sterne ultimately points at the collapse of
any meaningful relationship between the two.
In the same letter that he commented on the changes of "political
reasoning" in London, Sterne responded to criticisms of his humor in
Tristram Shandy, remarking that "write what I will... [I] must expect
to have a party against me of many hundreds—who either do not—or
will not laugh.—'Tis enough if I divide the world;—at least I will rest
contented with it."87 The distance between the factious world of Sterne's
early party political journalism and the smooth, eloquent flourishes that
dominate his later fiction—culminating with Yorick's fluid movements
between spheres in A Sentimental Journey (1768)—traces a parallel
transition from a deeply divided perspective on a vexing world and its
abandonment for a self-contained and internally organized alternative
universe. Rather than seeking to assert the predominance of one over
the other—to put the contextual cart before the Shandean horse, or
subsume the politics of partisanship under the fiction of feeling—we
might most profitably understand Tristram Shandy as ranging broadly

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and at whim across a spectrum spanned by these two extremes. As
the move to A Sentimental Journey suggests, the pull towards the
latter may ultimately take precedence, for Sterne as for so many of his
subsequent readers and critics. The claim that one system of parties
may "for aught I know" serve the same ends as any other adopts a
self-protective posture of supposed indifference that is echoed in the
bemused resignation readers have found so central to the world of
the Shandys. Yet as this unlikely pairing of "rest[ing] contented" with
"divid[ing] the world" reminds us, the Shandean stance of retreat,
staged both in Sterne's fiction and what—with due caution—we can
call his politics, was anything but straightforward.
State University of New York at Binghamton

NOTES
1 David Hume to William Strahan, 30 January 1773, in The Letters of David Hum
2 vol., ed. J. Y. T. Greig (New York: Garland, 1983), 2:269.
2 For the political context of Humes letter, see J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism a
Religion, Volume 2: Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge Un
Press, 2001), 190-91; and Donald W. Livingston, "English Barbarism: 'Wilkes a
Liberty,'" in Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume's Pathology of Philosop
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), 256-89.
3 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxfor
Clarendon Press, 1989), 331. For the refurbishment of radical Whiggism in p
1760 England, see Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, a
Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 199
209-18. For the impact of fears that the English constitution was under threat in
American colonies, see Bernard Bailyn, "The Logic of Bebelhon," in The Ideolog
Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), 94-1
4 In the same letter to Strahan of 30 January 1773, Hume criticized a recent boo
of travel writing for being too much in the "Shandean" style.
5 Jonathan Lamb, "Sterne and Irregular Oratory," in The Cambridge Companion
to the Eiehteenth-Centuru Novel, ed. John Bichetti (Cambridge: Cambridge Un
Press, 1996), 156.
6 See Viktor Shklovsky, "A Parodying Novel," in Laurence Sterne: A Collection
Critical Essays, ed. John Traugott (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 61-7
Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity : Public, Private, and the Divis
of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005); and John Richetti, T
English Novel in History, 1700-1780 (New York: Routledge, 1999). For a challen
to accounts of the novel as "autotelic or self-enclosed" see Mark Loveridge, Lauren
Sterne and the Argument About Design (Totowa: Barnes & Noble, 1982), 39. For tw
important contextualizing accounts of the novel, see Tom Keymer, Sterne, the Moder
and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002); and Carol Watts, The Cultural W
of Empire: The Seven Tears' War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (Toron
Univ. of Toronto Press, 2007).
7 See Lewis Perry Curtis, The Politicks of Laurence Sterne (London: Oxford Uni
Press, 1929).

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8 Lamb, 156.
9 In October 1759, Laurence Sterne concluded a letter to the future publisher of the
first two volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy: "All locality is taken
out of the book the satire general" (Sterne to Robert Dodsley, 5 October 1759, in
The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, vol. 7, The Letters of Laurence
Sterne: Part One, 1739-1764, ed. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd [Gainesville: Univ.
Presses of Florida, 2009], 7:97). For the earliest version of Tristram Shandy, including
its relations to A Political Romance (1759), Sterne's allegorical satire of the York church
(in the tradition of Jonathan Swift's Tale of a Tub), see Arthur H. Cash, Laurence
Sterne: The Early and Middle Years (London: Routledge, 1975), 278-82; and Marcus
Walsh, "Scriblerian Satire, A Political Romance, the 'Rabelaisian Fragment,' and the
Origins of Tristram Shandy" in The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne, ed.
Tom Keymer (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), 21-33.
10 See, for example, Adam Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Flume (Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), 142,152-53; and de Voogd, "Uncle Toby, Laurence Steme,
and the Siege of Limerick," in The Clash of Ireland: Literary Contrasts and Connections,
ed. C. C. Rarfoot and Theo D'haen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989), 45.
"Compare Paul Monod, "Tom Jones and the Crisis ofWhiggism in Mid-Hanoverian
England," in "Cultures ofWhiggism": New Essays on English Literature and Culture
in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. David Womersley (Newark: Univ. of Delaware
Press, 2005), 268-96. Monod employs the context of "the '45'" to read Fielding's
novel as a partisan political allegory, in which the foundations of good government
are depicted in microcosm (282).
12 As Steve Pincus has recently asserted—and a mounting wave of revisionist schol
arship has confirmed—the Revolution of 1688-89 was "the decisive event in Rritish
history" for eighteenth-century Rritons (1688: The First Modern Revolution [New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2009], 13).
13 For the role of constitutional debate in the political and social upheavals of the
subsequent century, see Wilson, The Sense of the People; Mark Knights, Representation
and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation,
1707-1837 (1992; repr. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2009); and Eliga H. Gould, The
Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution
(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000).
14 Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against
Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982), 36.
See also 62-66.
15 Steme, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New
and Joan New (London: Penguin, 2003), 10. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page
number and abbreviated T.
16 David Wellbery, Seiltänzer des Paradoxalen: Aufsätze zur ästhetischen Wissenschaft
(Munich: Hanser, 2006), 7.
"Wellbery, 7.
18 The conjoined anniversary and its anti-Catholic resonance are noted in The Florida
Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, vol. 1-3, The Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New, Richard A. Davies, and W. G. Day (Gainesville:
Univ. Presses of Florida, 1978-84), 3:52-53. Although the Gunpowder plot imbued
the events of 1688-89 with a shared sense of deliverance from so-called popery, the
significance of the Revolution can be seen to subsume that of the earlier event.

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19 Colley, 59. For the various ways the date was celebrated and commemorated, see
Wilson, "Inventing Revolution: 1688 and Eighteenth-Century Popular Politics" The
Journal of British Studies 28.4 (1989): 349-86. For a valuable discussion of how the
date of Williams birth—which was, like that of Tristram, premature—contributed to
his image as the "Protestant Deliverer," see Manuel Schonhorn, "Here Comes the Son:
A Shandean Project," in The Age of Projects, ed. Maximillian E. Novak (Toronto: Univ.
of Toronto Press, 2008), 280-81.
20 See Brian Cowan, "Mr. Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere," Eighteenth
Centunj Studies 37.3 (2004): 357-58.
21 Curtis, 36.
22 Sterne, "Memoirs of the Life and Family of the late Rev. Mr. Laurence Sterne,"
in Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. Curtis (1935; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1965), 4.
23 Monod proposes that one of Fielding's purposes in writing Tom Jones was to address
a crisis in Whig political thinking that had become acute by the 1740s.
24 For Sterne's Whig sympathies, see Ian Campbell Ross, Laurence Sterne: A Life
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 89. In the "Memoirs" where he described partisan
campaigning as "dirty work," Sterne noted of his uncle, "he was a party-man; I was
not" (4).
25 Loveridge, 31. Loveridge characterizes both the narrative and conspiratorial plots
that appear preliminary to the events of Sterne's novel in these terms. See Loveridge,
30-39.
26 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (Middlesex: Penguin, 1962), 117.

27Compare Forster: "[Fjacts have an unholy tendency to unwind and trip up the past
[in Tristram Shandy] instead of begetting the future, as in well-conducted books" (117).
28 See Sigurd Burckhardt, "Tristram Shandy's Law of Gravity," ELH 28.1 (1961):
70-88.
29 Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford:

Stanford Univ. Press, 2010). For accident in the early novel, see Sandra Macpherson,
Harm's Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Press, 2010). See also Christian Thorne, "Providence in the Early Novel, or Accident
If You Please," Modern Language Quarterly 64.3 (2003): 323—47.
30 Kramnick, 27.
31 See especially Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and
Fielding (1957; repr. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), 290-94.
32 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic
Republican Tradition, rev. ed. (1975; repr. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003), 3.
33 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 5.
34 See Georg Lukâcs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell
(Middlesex: Penguin, 1969). For contemporary alternatives to this "progressivist history
of linear progressions, paradigm shifts, and epistemic breaks," see Katie Trumpener,
Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1997), 151.
35 Lukâcs, 42.
36 See Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1963). More recently, critics have emphasized the irony and ambivalence that
accompanies Scott's apparent acceptance of Whiggish narratives of progress. See Judith
Wilt, Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1985); and Andrew Lincoln, Walter Scott and Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Univ. Press, 2007).

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37 Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the
Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 10.
38 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 36.
39 See Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 37.
40 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 39. For the eighteenth-century reinscription of
earlier vocabularies, see Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political
Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1985).
41 Compare Thorne. As will become clear, I disagree with Thome's Whiggish sugges
tion that "one of the signature projects of eighteenth-century narrative was to purge
itself of is inherited providential conventions" (330).
42 For the distinction between "blame" and "responsibility" and associated concep
tions of direct and indirect liability, see Macpherson, Harm's Way.
43 [Paul] Rapin de Thoyras, The History of England, 15 vol. (London, 1731), 15:28.
Compare Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685-1720
(London: Allen Lane, 2006), 73-94. As Toni Bowers has shown in her recent study of
the strategies employed by authors to imagine new kinds of sexual and political agency
in the wake of seventeenth-century debates over consent and resistance, Monmouth
himself was depicted both as a seducer of the people and the victim of seduction in his
own right. Samuel Richardon's Clarissa (1748) similarly reimagines the Tory doctrine
of passive obedience in sexual terms (Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and
the Problem of Resistance, 1660-1760 [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011]).
44 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963; repr. London: Penguin, 2006), 37.
45 Arendt, 48. For a parallel discussion of freedom and necessity with similarly
suggestive implications for the political status of action in Sterne's novel, see Kramnick.
46 For the fierce retribution following the Monmouth rebellion and its possible class
bias against the lower orders, see Harris, 81-89.
47 See Trumpener, 46. Compare de Voogd, "Uncle Toby," 43.
48 Harris, 446.
49 For the adventures of the sperm as "intertwined" with William's crossing, see Lisa
Forman Cody, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth
Century Britons (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), 108.
50 See Catherine Gallagher, "When Did the Confederate States of America Free the
Slaves?" Representations 98.1 (2007): 53-61.
51 J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675-1725 (London:
Macmillan, 1967), 16. Plumb, in this seminal account, goes on to observe,
[B]y the middle 1720s the English political system had begun to assume
the air not only of stability but also of historical inevitability; it had
become a child of Time and of Providence, an object of veneration,
the Burkeian fantasy, and a halo of glory was forming about those
muddled, incoherent events of 1688, events that had so very nearly
spelt anarchy and ruin to the English nation. (16)
For challenges to the premise of "political stability" in this period, see Wilson, The
Sense of the People-, Pincus; and Knights.
52Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, ed. Claude Rawson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
2005), 16. While Ian Higgins rightly foregrounds the generality and obliquity of Swift's
satire (and cautions against reading the novel as an allegory of strictly contemporary

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political events), the various lands Gulliver visits nonetheless engage with multiple
aspects of the degeneration of existing institutions and ideals that Swift particularly
identified with the post-1688 world. See F. P. Lock, Swift's Tory Politics (Newark: Univ.
of Delaware Press, 1983), 168-79; and Higgins, Swift's Politics: A Study in Disaffection
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 154-55.
53 Brendan McConville, The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America,
1688-1776 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2006), 192, 193, 197.
54 [Sterne], The Sermons of Mr. Yorick, 4 vol. (London: 1768), 3:173-74.
55 [Sterne], The Sermons of Mr. Yorick, 3:174.
56 [Sterne], The Sermons of Mr. Yorick, 3:166.
57 [Sterne], The Sermons of Mr. Yorick, 3:186-87, 184-85.
58 See Ross, 215-49.
59 Ross, 233.
60 See J. T. Desaguliers, The Newtonian System of the World, The Best Model of
Government (Westminster: 1728). For a discussion of the poem in the context of the
accession of George II, see Langford, 11.
61 Compare Burckhardt's account of Sterne's "narrative machinery" (80).
62 See W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England 1714-1760 (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1977), 87-88.
63 Curtis, 126-27. Curtis relates this "delectable parody," in part a travesty of Sterne's
earlier political journalism, to his effective abandonment of the Whigs (127).
64 For the "Rabelaisian Fragment," a bawdy satire on learning and the church, whose
"tutor" figure was a precursor for Walter Shandy, see Walsh. For Sterne's adaptation
of Augustan satirical models, see Ronald Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth
Century England (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), 248-58.
65 Potkay, 153; and Cash, 91. Potkay proposes that Sterne employs Tristram's father to
mock "the past and lingering pretensions of the Country party," thereby accomplishing
his "belated and tender revenge against the Opposition" (153).
66 Lamb, 156-57.
67 For the convergences between Filmer and John Locke with regard to practices of
marriage, servitude, and slavery that were exported to and further revised in the New
World, see Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in
Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010).
For the endurance of patriarchal thinking into the eighteenth century as a whole see
J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660-1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political
Practice During the Ancien Regime, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000).
For the "paternalistic bent" of the Patriot Whigs and Tories of the 1740s and '50s in
particular, see Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the
Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000), 49.
68 Clark, "The Decline of Party, 1740-1760," The English Historical Review 93
(1978): 500.
69 Lamb, 161; and see Watts, 51.
70 Forster, 117.
71 William Pitt, quoted in Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise
and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714-1783 (London: Allen Lane, 2007), 463.
72 Sterne to Stephen Croft, 25 December 1760, in The Letters of Laurence Sterne:
Part One, 1739-1764, 7:177.
13 Explanatory Remarks on the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy; wherein, the
Morals and Politics of this Piece are clearly laid open (London, 1760).

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74 Explanatory Remarks, 44, 46.
75 [Steme], A Political Romance . . . To which is Subjoined a Key (York, 1759), 45.
Explanatory Remarks, 41.
77 [Sterne], A Political Romance, 31.
78 For the centrality of the Church to politics in the long eighteenth century, see
Clark, English Society, 1660-1832.
79 Explanatory Remarks, 45.
80 Explanatory Remarks, 48-49.
81 Explanatory Remarks, 36-37.
82 Explanatory Remarks, 42^3.
83 The events of 1688-89, Fliegelman proposes, can be understood in one sense as
having "redefined the nature of parental authority" (13), replacing hereditary succes
sion with a freely chosen monarch; the more limited understanding of institutional
complexities that Brendan McConville has identified in the colonies confirms that
such an interpretation would have more traction in North America. As he shows,
American revolutionaries appealed to the principles of 1688-89 in their resistance
of the Parliament whose sovereignty the Revolution had in fact established. See
McConville, 273-74.
84 See McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (1987; repr. Baltimore:
John Hopkins Univ. Press, 2002), 171. The adaptability of "gentleman" as a category
arguably helped cause the American Revolution, while containing the need for one
at home. See Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York:
A. A. Knopf, 1992), 24—26; and Nicholas Hudson, Samuel Johnson and the Making of
Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 12.
85 In important respects, Tristram recalls the socially—and psychologically—precarious
status of contemporary merchants and colonial "gentlemen." See David Hancock,
Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic
Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 40-46, 279; and
Kenneth A. Lockridge, "Colonial Self-Fashioning: Paradoxes and Pathologies in the
Construction of Genteel Identity in Eighteenth-Century America," in Through a Glass
Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal
Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997), 274-339.
86 William Paley, for example, observed that, depending on where in the kingdom his
estate falls, a man could be one of ten thousand whose votes decide a single representa
tive, or one of twenty; if "accident has thrown my birth, or habitation, or service into
another town," moreover, "I have no representative at all" (The Principles of Moral
and Political Philosophy, 2 vol. [Dublin, 1785], 2:214-15).
87 Sterne to Stephen Croft, 25 December 1760, 7:177.

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ARBITRARY GOVERNMENT: "TRISTRAM SHANDY" AND THE CRISIS OF WHIG HISTORY

Author(s): JOHN OWEN HAVARD

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/24475634

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BY JOHN OWEN HAVARD

Writing to his London publisher in 1773, David Hume rem

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586 Tristram Shandy and the Crisis of Whig History

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John Owen Havard 587

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I. THE ACCIDENTAL HISTORIAN

Tristram's account of his disruptive entry into human societ

This wrenching introduction to what Tristram elsewhere terms

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John Owen Havard 589

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In the case of knots,—by which, in the first place, I would not be

John Owen Havard 593

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594 Tristram Shandy and the Crisis of Whig History

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If William s—and by extension, England's—belief in a divine plan is

John Owen Havard 595

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II. MODEL GOVERNMENT

In sharp contrast with emergent accounts of the English polit

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III. RECEIVED OPINIONS

Where, then, might the "Life and Opinions" of Sterne's protago

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