Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Abridged Read online

  He lies buried in the corner of his churchyard, in the parish of ___, under a plain marble slab, which his friend Eugenius laid upon his grave, with no more than these three words of inscription serving both for his epitaph and elegy.

  ALAS, POOR YORICK!

  Ten times a day has Yorick’s ghost the consolation of hearing this inscription read over with a variety of plaintive tones, denoting pity and esteem: no-one goes by the grave without stopping to cast a look upon it, and sighing as he walks on,

  ‘ Alas, poor Yorick!’

  CHAPTER 13

  It is now high time to mention the midwife again, merely to remind the reader that there is such a person, whom I am going to introduce for good and all. But as unexpected business may intervene, ’twas right to take care that the poor woman should not be lost in the meantime; because when she is wanted, we cannot do without her.

  I think I told you that this good woman’s fame had spread to the very edge of that circle of importance, which every soul has surrounding him; – and by the way, whenever ’tis said that some one is of great importance in the world, this circle may be enlarged or contracted in a compound ratio of their position, profession, knowledge, abilities, height and depth (measuring both ways).

  In the present case, if I remember, I fixed its diameter as about four miles, which not only took in the whole parish, but extended to the skirts of the next. She was, moreover, very well regarded at various houses and farms within another two or three miles.

  But I must here inform you that all this will be more exactly shown in a map, now in the hands of the engraver, which, with many other developments of this work, will be added to the end of the twentieth volume, – not to swell the work, for I detest the thought of such a thing, but by way of commentary, illustration, and a key to such passages as shall be thought to be of dark or doubtful meaning, after my life shall have been read by all the world; – which, between you and me, and in spite of all that the reviewers of Great Britain may write or say to the contrary, I am determined shall be the case. – I need not tell your worship, that all this is spoke in confidence.

  CHAPTER 14

  Upon looking into my mother’s marriage-settlement, in order to clear up a point before proceeding any farther in this history – I had the good fortune to pop upon the very thing I wanted, before I had read for a day and a half. It might have taken me a month; which shows plainly, that when a man sits down to write a history, even if only the history of Tom Thumb, he has no idea what confounded hindrances he is to meet with in his way, or what a dance he may be led before all is over.

  Could a writer drive his history straight forward, as a muleteer drives on his mule, without ever once turning his head either to right or left, he could foretell to the hour when he should get to his journey’s end; but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible. For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations to make as he goes along, which he cannot avoid. He will have views perpetually catching his eye, which he can no more help stopping to look at than he can fly; he will moreover have various

  Accounts to reconcile:

  Anecdotes to pick up:

  Inscriptions to make out:

  Stories to weave in:

  Traditions to sift:

  Personages to call upon:

  Panegyrics to paste up: – All which both the man and his mule are quite exempt from.

  To sum up; there are archives at every stage to be looked into, and records, documents, and endless genealogies that he must read. – In short, there is no end of it. For my own part, I declare I have been at it these six weeks, making all the speed I possibly could, – and am not yet born. I have just been able to tell you when it happened, but not how; – so that you see the thing is still far from being accomplished.

  These unforeseen stoppages, which I had no conception of when I first set out – but which, I am now convinced, will increase rather than diminish as I advance – have made me resolve not to be in a hurry; but to go on leisurely, writing and publishing two volumes of my life every year; – which, if I can make a tolerable bargain with my bookseller, I shall continue to do as long as I live.

  CHAPTER 15

  The article in my mother’s marriage-settlement, which I told the reader I was at pains to search for, is so much more fully expressed than I could do it, that it would be barbarity to paraphrase it. – It is as follows.

  ‘And this Indenture further witnesseth, That the said Walter Shandy, merchant, in consideration of the said intended marriage to be had, and to be well and truly solemnised and consummated between the said Walter Shandy and Elizabeth Mollineux aforesaid, doth grant, covenant, condescend, consent, conclude, bargain, and fully agree to and with John Dixon, and James Turner, Esqrs. the above-named Trustees. – To Wit, That in case it should hereafter so fall out, chance, happen, or otherwise come to pass, That the said Walter Shandy, merchant, shall have left off business before the time that the said Elizabeth Mollineux shall, according to the course of nature, have left off bearing and bringing forth children; and that, in consequence of the said Walter Shandy having so left off business, he shall in despite and against the free-will, consent, and agreement of the said Elizabeth Mollineux, make a departure from the city of London, in order to retire to, and dwell upon, his estate at Shandy Hall, or at any other country-seat, castle, hall, mansion or grange-house, now purchased, or hereafter to be purchased, or upon any part or parcel thereof: That then, and as often as the said Elizabeth Mollineux shall happen to be enceint or pregnant with child or children lawfully begot, or to be begotten, upon the body of the said Elizabeth Mollineux, during her said pregnancy, he the said Walter Shandy shall, at his own proper cost and charges, upon good and reasonable notice, which is hereby agreed to be within six weeks of the said Elizabeth Mollineux’s full reckoning, or time of supposed delivery, – pay, or cause to be paid, the sum of one hundred and twenty pounds for and unto the use and uses, intent, end, and purpose following: That is to say, That the said sum of one hundred and twenty pounds shall be paid into the hands of the said Elizabeth Mollineux, for the well and truly hiring of one coach, to carry and convey the body of the said Elizabeth Mollineux, and the child or children with which she shall then be pregnant, unto the city of London; and for the further paying and defraying of all other incidental costs, charges, and expenses, in and about, and for and relating to, her said intended delivery and lying-in, in the said city or suburbs thereof. And that the said Elizabeth Mollineux shall and may hire the said coach and horses, and have free ingress, egress, and regress throughout her journey, in and from the said coach, without any let, suit, trouble, disturbance, molestation, discharge, hindrance, forfeiture, eviction, vexation, interruption, or incumbrance whatsoever. And that it shall moreover be lawful for the said Elizabeth Mollineux, when she shall well and truly be advanced in her said pregnancy, to live and reside in such place or places, and with such relations, friends, and other persons within the said city of London, as she at her own will and pleasure shall think fit.’

  In three words, ‘My mother was to lay in, (if she chose) in London.’

  But in order to put a stop to any unfair play on my mother’s part, which a marriage-article of this nature opened a door to – and which indeed would not have been thought of, but for my uncle Toby Shandy – the following clause was added:

  ‘That in case my mother should, at any time, put my father to the trouble and expense of a London journey, upon false cries and tokens; – for every such instance, she should forfeit all the rights which the covenant gave her on the next such occasion.’

  This was only reasonable; – and yet, I have always thought it hard that the whole weight of the article should have fallen entirely, as it did, upon myself.

  But I was born to misfortunes: for my poor mother, whether it was wind or water, or simply the swell of imagination in her; – or how far a strong desire to be with child might mislead her judgment: – in short, whether she was deceived or
deceiving in this matter, is not for me to decide.

  The fact was this: that in late September 1717, the year before I was born, my mother carried my father up to town much against the grain: when no child appeared, he insisted upon the extra clause; so that I was doomed, by marriage-articles, to have my nose squeezed flat to my face.

  How this event came about, and what a train of disappointments has pursued me through my life from the compression of this single member, – shall be laid before the reader all in due time.

  CHAPTER 16

  After this false alarm, my father, as anybody may imagine, came back down with my mother into the country in a pettish humour. The first five-and-twenty miles he did nothing but fret and tease himself, and indeed my mother too, about the cursed expense, of which he said every shilling might have been saved; – then what vexed him more than everything else was the provoking time of the year, which, as I told you, was late September, when his wall-fruit and greengages were just ready for picking. ‘Had he been whistled up to London upon a Fool’s errand in any other month, he should not have cared.’

  For the next few miles, his subject was the heavy blow he had sustained from the loss of a son, whom he had reckoned upon as a second staff for his old age, if Bobby should fail him. The disappointment of this, he said, was ten times more than all the money which the journey had cost: rot the hundred and twenty pounds, he did not mind it a rush.

  From Stilton to Grantham, nothing in the whole affair provoked him so much as the condolences of his friends, and the foolish figure they should both make at church on Sunday; of which he gave so many satirical descriptions that my mother declared, on these two stages she did nothing but laugh and cry in a breath, all the way.

  From Grantham till they had crossed the Trent, my father was out of patience at the vile trick which he fancied my mother had played him.

  ‘Certainly,’ he said to himself, over and over again, ‘the woman could not be deceived. If she could, what weakness!’

  – Tormenting word! which led his imagination a thorny dance, and played the deuce with him; for as soon as the word weakness was uttered, it set him upon counting how many kinds of weaknesses there were, of body and mind; and then he would brood for a stage or two together, how far the cause of these vexations might have arisen out of himself.

  All in all, he had so many disquieting subjects fretting in his mind, that my mother, whatever her journey up, had but an uneasy journey of it down. In a word, (as she complained to my uncle Toby,) he would have tired out the patience of any flesh alive.

  CHAPTER 17

  Though my father travelled homewards, as I told you, in none of the best of moods, pshawing and pishing all the way down, yet he kept the worst part of the story to himself: which was his resolution to hold my mother to my uncle Toby’s clause in the marriage-settlement. It was not until the very night in which I was begot, which was thirteen months after, that she had the least idea of his intention: when my father, happening, as you remember, to be a little annoyed and out of temper, took occasion as they lay chatting gravely in bed afterwards, to let her know that she must keep to the bargain made between them in their marriage-deeds, and lie-in with her next child at home, to balance last year’s journey.

  My father was a gentleman of many virtues, but he had a strong spice in his nature which might be called either the virtue of perseverance, or the vice of obstinacy. Because my mother knew this, she knew ’twas no use remonstrating; so she resolved to sit down quietly, and make the most of it.

  CHAPTER 18

  As it was that night agreed, or rather determined, that my mother should lie-in with me at home in the country, she planned accordingly. When she was three days, or thereabouts, gone with child, she began to think about the midwife, whom you have so often heard me mention; and before the week was through, she had come to a decision; – even though there was a scientific operator within eight miles of us, who had wrote a five shilling book upon midwifery, in which he had not only exposed the blunders of midwives, but had added many curious improvements for the quicker extraction of the foetus in cases of danger. Despite this, my mother was absolutely determined to trust her life, and mine with it, into the old woman’s hand only.

  – Now this I like; when we cannot get the exact thing we wish, never to make do with the next best: – no; that’s pitiful beyond description; it was only a week ago from this very day, – which is March 9, 1759 – that my dear, dear Jenny, observing I looked a little grave, as she stood fingering a silk at five-and-twenty shillings a yard, told the mercer she was sorry she had given him so much trouble; and immediately went and bought herself stuff at tenpence a yard. ’Tis the same greatness of soul; only in my mother’s case, she could not heroine it as she might have wished, because the old midwife had really some claim to be depended upon, having had near twenty years’ success in the parish, without one accident which could be laid to her account.

  Nevertheless, my father had some uneasiness about this choice. Quite apart from his love for his family, he felt himself particularly concerned that all should go right in this case; – because of the extra sorrow he lay open to, should any evil befall his wife and child in lying-in at Shandy-Hall. He knew that in such a misfortune, the world would add to his afflictions by loading him with the whole blame of it.

  – ‘Alas, had Mrs. Shandy, poor lady! only had her wish of going up to town to lie-in, which, they say, she begged for upon her knees, and which considering the fortune which Mr. Shandy got with her, was no great matter – the lady and her babe might both have been alive at this hour.’

  This, my father knew, would be unanswerable. Yet it was not merely to shelter himself, nor through care for his offspring and wife, that he was so extremely anxious about this point. My father had extensive views of things, and dreaded setting a bad example to the public.

  He was aware that all political writers had agreed and lamented for centuries that the current of men and money towards the metropolis, upon one frivolous errand or another, was so great as to become dangerous to our civil rights, – though, by the bye, a current was not the image he preferred: a distemper was here his favourite metaphor. He would turn it into a perfect allegory, by maintaining that in the body national, just as in the body natural, when the blood was driven up into the head faster than it could find its way down, the circulation must stop, and death follow.

  There was little danger, he would say, of French invasions; nor was he pained by corruption in our constitution, which he hoped was not so bad as was imagined; but he feared that in some violent push, we should go off, all at once, in a state-apoplexy.

  My father was never able to give the history of this distemper, without the remedy along with it.

  ‘If I were an absolute monarch,’ he would say, hitching up his breeches as he rose from his arm-chair, ‘I would appoint judges, at every avenue of my metropolis, who should note every fool’s business who came there; and if it was not important enough to leave his own home, they should be all sent back, like vagrants, to the place of origin. By this means I should take care that my metropolis did not totter through its own weight. The head should be no longer too big for the body; the limbs should regain their natural strength. Good cheer and hospitality should flourish once more; and country Squires acquire more influence.

  ‘Why are there so few palaces and gentlemen’s seats in the French provinces?’ he would continue, with some emotion. ‘Why are the few remaining Chateaus in so ruinous a condition? Because, Sir, in that kingdom all interest is concentrated in the court, and the looks of the Grand Monarch: by whose moods every Frenchman lives or dies.’

  Another political reason which prompted my father to guard against the least evil accident in my mother’s lying-in in the country, was that any such event would throw a balance of power into the weaker vessels of the gentry. This would, in the end, prove fatal to the monarchical system of domestic government established in the first creation of things by God.
r />   In this point he was entirely of Sir Robert Filmer’s opinion, that the institutions of the greatest monarchies in the eastern parts of the world were, originally, all stolen from that admirable prototype of Great Britain; which, for a century, he said, had gradually been degenerating into a mixed government, which seldom produced anything but sorrow and confusion.

  For all these reasons, my father was for having the man-midwife by all means, – my mother by no means. My father begged she would for once give up her prerogative in this matter, and let him choose for her; – my mother, on the contrary, insisted upon her privilege to choose for herself, and have no help but the old woman’s.

  What could my father do? He was almost at his wit’s end; talked it over with her in all moods; argued the matter with her like a Christian, – like a heathen, – like a husband, – like a father, – like a patriot, – like a man. My mother answered everything only like a woman; which was a little hard upon her; for as she could not fight it out behind such a variety of characters, ’twas no fair match: – ’twas seven to one.

  What could my mother do? She had the advantage of a small reinforcement of personal chagrin, which bore her up, and enabled her to dispute the affair with my father on equal terms. In a word, my mother was to have the old woman, and the man-midwife was to have licence to drink a bottle of wine with my father and my uncle Toby in the back parlour, – for which he was to be paid five guineas.

  Before I finish this chapter, I must warn my fair reader not to take it for granted, from an unguarded word or two which I have dropped in, that I am a married man. The tender mention of my dear, dear Jenny, with some other touches of conjugal knowledge here and there, might have misled the most candid judge into such a presumption. All I plead for, Madam, is strict justice: do not prejudge till you have better evidence than you have at present.

  Not that I wish you to think that my dear, dear Jenny is my kept mistress; – no, that would be flattering my character in the other extreme, and giving it a freedom, which, perhaps, it has no right to. All I aim for, is the utter impossibility, for some volumes, that you should know how this matter really stands. For my dear, dear Jenny! may perhaps be my child. Consider – I was born in the year 1718. – Nor is there anything unnatural in the idea that my dear Jenny may be my friend.