Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book by Helen Williams (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book by Helen Williams Shaun Regan Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book. By Helen Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2021. x+ 217 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–108–84276–1. In this illuminating and often ingenious monograph, Helen Williams extends our understanding of the most striking visual and textual features of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, as they would have appeared to readers of its first edition (published in five instalments between 1759 and 1767). Six chapter-length case studies present forensic analyses of the novel's material and graphic devices: its 'manicules' (printed images of pointing hands); textual interpolations (notably the 'Abuses of Conscience' sermon in Volume 11); black, marbled, and other illustrated pages; and playful manipulation of catchwords and footnotes. If some of the textual effects under consideration here might easily seem small-scale, Williams's focus is nevertheless broad as well as narrow, as she situates these features in relation to an array of contemporary discourses and objects ranging from literary fiction to botanical illustrations, funereal iconography, and medical wrappers. Such novel contextualizations generate fascinating accounts of Sterne's creative practice with textual design, which confirm the author's close involvement in the printing and illustration of his narrative. A key aspect of Williams's method lies in separating particular devices into their constituent parts, her superb discussion of [End Page 611] the marbled page being a case in point. Before turning to the technique of marbling itself, Williams shows how unexpected any coloured page would have been, at a time when even the most prestigious works of literature rarely ventured beyond a touch of red ink to enliven a title-page, and always highlighted the (expensive) inclusion of colour as a distinctive selling point. As Williams observes, 'to include coloured ink and not advertise the fact', as Sterne does, constituted 'a lavish act of book design' (p. 105). The chapter goes on to present a complex contextual web—of medical packaging, obstetrics, and eighteenth-century rhinoplasty—as informing the meaning of the marbled page, situated as it is within an instalment of Tristram Shandy concerned with Tristram's safe delivery and the emasculating, nose-crushing efficacy of Dr Slop's forceps. Elsewhere, a chapter on the interpolated sermon shows how Sterne comically reverses the conventions of printed plays by placing the 'main dialogue', rather than stage instructions, within square brackets (p. 94). Throughout the study, Williams is not afraid to take analytical risks, pinpointing precursors that initially seem tangential but which ultimately reveal the provenance of particular effects. This is not least the case in a final chapter that aligns Trim's famous 'flourish', and the diagrammatic lines used to convey Tristram's narrative progress, with developing conventions for signifying movement in contemporary dance manuals. Beyond these bravura readings, there are a few surprising omissions and missed opportunities. One particular 'eighteenth-century book' notable by its absence is Sterne's other well-known work of fiction, A Sentimental Journey (1768), which Williams barely mentions. More broadly, the study would have benefited from fuller elaboration of the conceptual framework underpinning its inventive case studies. Issues around authorial originality and literary property, for instance, are raised in the opening chapter on manicules—yet the idea of originality, especially, is crucial to Williams's (repeated) claim for Sterne's 'unprecedented and surprising' use of available textual resources (p. 123). While a four-page coda reflects nicely on Sterne's frontispieces and marketing savvy, a chapter-length conclusion might have addressed more extensively how Sterne's textual-material practice corresponds to discussions of originality during the period itself, such as Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), a key work on the subject that was published in the same year as Tristram Shandy's first instalment. Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book is nonetheless a substantial and insightful study, which takes us significantly beyond previous discussions of Sterne's relationship to the book as material and visual artefact. Williams's account is itself original in two main respects: in the intensive and discriminating attention it accords the bookish features it examines and—as Williams herself contends—in its...