It was the publication later that same year of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, in a small edition of 500 or so copies, printed in York during the last weeks of 1759, that changed Sterne's life - and literary history. From then until his death, just eight years later, Sterne was one of the most celebrated figures of his day, famous not merely among a literary elite but as a celebrity known even to those who never read a word he wrote.
. . . What was it about The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman that had first captivated so many and transformed the life of Laurence Sterne in the space of a few, crowded weeks? Most simply, perhaps, it made readers laugh - often in spite of themselves. A more precise, though still very partial, answer might be that Tristram's fictional autobiography has one of the most arresting opening sentences - baffling and beguiling - in all of English literature:
"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing; - that not only the production of a rational Being was concern'd in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; - and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours amid dispositions which were then uppermost: - Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly - I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me."
Certainly it is hard to imagine any prospective purchaser, however casually drawn to Sterne's work by its title-page, who would not be intrigued by this account by the narrator of his own conception and wish to read further. Evidently the heady conflation of autobiography, heroic romance, mock-medical speculation, and bawdy in a single sentence engaged the attentions of the very first readers, drawing them into a comic narrative seemingly designed at once to raise and then frustrate their expectations. One (enduringly popular) character was introduced only to be killed off immediately, his death marked by the curious, and curiously familiar, lament: Alas, poor YORICK!, followed by a solid black leaf, in sign of mourning. The further these first readers read on, the more intrigued, amused, and frustrated they became.
Neither is it any wonder that readers were sometimes baffled, for the first instalment of Sterne's novel included - among much else - a hero who fails to get himself born throughout two volumes, an ordained jester, a (fictional) marriage settlement, a (real) theological judgement concerning inter-uterine baptism, passed in 1733 by the doctors of the Sorbonne and printed in the original French, my uncle Toby, hobby-horses, the man-midwife Dr Slop, and an excellent if apparently provocative Anglican sermon, read aloud by a servant, Corporal Trim, to an audience of three, one of whom - a Roman Catholic man-midwife - quickly falls asleep (the scene Hogarth opted to depict in his frontispiece). Even in an age notably free in its understanding of prose fiction, Tristram Shandy appeared, as Samuel Johnson was later famously to remark, "odd".
At times even professional readers were baffled. A reviewer in the prestigious Critical Review seemed completely at a loss: "This is a humorous performance, of which we are unable to convey any distinct ideas to our readers." Readers perplexed by this admission would not necessarily have found more distinct ideas elsewhere - although they would have found plenty of evidence that this was a book they might want to read for themselves, a work at once amusing and intriguing. In the first months following publication Tristram Shandy was variously described in print as "droll", "ingenious", and "entertaining" and accounted "sensible", "pathetick", "humane", "poignant", and even "profitable" - that is, morally improving. Sterne himself was likened to comic or satirical writers from Juvenal and Lucian to Rabelais and Cervantes, and, among modern authors, to Swift and Fielding.
NOT all was praise. Sterne had been quickly made aware by his first Yorkshire readers - though he must have known it himself - that his work would be accounted indecent, or worse. Such criticism was to make itself felt soon enough. Alongside more favourable evaluations, Tristram Shandy was accused of being disfigured by "wantonness", "bawdy", "mean, dirty Wit", and "obscenity", while its author was at best, a "jester", at worst, "scabby". Before he had any idea of how great a success his book would become, and still mindful of the abuse he had suffered nearly 20 years before as a political journalist, Sterne was uneasy about the censure Tristram Shandy might receive. He aggressively characterized critics of his work as "squeamish" but he nervously exhorted one correspondent "'till you read my Tristram, do not, like some people, condemn it". Even amid the acclaim accorded him in London, there were moments when he wondered whether he had been right to give his own love of Rabelaisian humour so loose a rein. It was the bishop of Gloucester, Dr William Warburton - author of The Divine Legation of Moses, but also editor of the far from uniformly decorous works of Alexander Pope - who, on presenting Sterne with a purse of guineas, added to it an admonition to mend his style.
To a man who had spent much of his life in a largely fruitless endeavour to win the favour of ecclesiastical - and lay - patrons, such a warning could not simply be ignored. It is easy to believe that words of advice recently offered by his sensible and well-intentioned friend Marmaduke Fothergill rang in his ears: "Write & Welcome", but "get Your Preferment first Lory!" To put such prudential considerations behind him was not the work of a moment. In 1760 the propriety of any gentleman's writing for financial gain was not yet beyond dispute - the more so if the gentleman in question was also a clergyman. Earlier in the century, one of Sterne's own favourite authors - Jonathan Swift, dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin - had turned his face against profiting directly from his extensive writings. Thomas Gray, a near-exact contemporary of Sterne, and a layman, was equally insistent in declining to seek financial reward from the publication of his work, ceding his manuscripts to his publisher gratis. Laurence Sterne, in the first flush of his new-found celebrity, revealed his own anxiety: "I fear you think me very poor, or in debt", he told one correspondent. Denying that he was driven to the writing of Tristram Shandy by want, the struggling parson wrote, in a self-conscious protestation of independence, "I thank God tho' I don't abound - that I have enough for a clean shirt every day - and a mutton chop - and my contentment with this, has thus far (and I hope ever will) put me above stooping an inch for . . . estate." Perhaps it was recurring thoughts of a life lived out in constantly frustrated hopes of preferment and of desires confined within the narrow compass of clean shirts and mutton chops which led Sterne so rapidly to change his mind. At all events, within a few weeks change he certainly did - though it may be that he was forced to recognize how little real choice he had in the matter. On their first appearance the volumes of Tristram Shandy printed in York gave no indication even of their provincial origin, still less any hint as to the fact that their author was a clergyman.
When that fact became known, critical and polite opinion, at least in some quarters, turned hostile; it was the doubtful propriety of a clergyman's authorship of a bawdy novel which particularly exercised Bishop Warburton. Perhaps Sterne might have successfully countered criticism of the indecency of Tristram Shandy by the publication of his sermons, had he not chosen to profit from the success of his novel by issuing them under the provocative title of The Sermons of Mr Yorick.
Whatever their verdict on the sermons themselves - and despite the fact that half-a-dozen bishops were among the subscribers - reviewers were quick to condemn the impropriety of a clergyman exchanging his gown for a jester's cap. Unable easily to retreat, Sterne determined to stand his ground. Increasingly he put behind him a hesitation to incur the censure of sober clerics like Warburton, and with it his fears of the vituperation that mediocre reviewers and moralizing critics might heap upon him. In the spring of 1760 Sterne accepted that he could not simultaneously enjoy public acclaim and take refuge from its attendant ills. Forced to choose between them, he set his face against the frustrations of his past and elected to accept the abuse plentifully heaped upon him. In so doing Sterne expressed faith in his ability to retain the personal esteem of his new-found aristocratic patrons, while profiting from the commercial possibilities open to him as an author. Even as he half-heartedly endeavoured to retain Warburton's good opinion, prior to the eventual break between them, Sterne could affect to regret the misrepresentation to which his writing had laid him open and to "wish from my heart, I had never set pen to paper, but continued hid in the quiet obscurity in which I had so long lived". In truth, he wished no such thing. Informing Stephen Croft in Yorkshire that "there is a shilling pamphlet wrote against Tristram", Sterne added, tellingly, "I wish they would write a hundred such."