Some of Sterne's contemporaries did not hold the novel in high esteem, but its bawdy humour was popular with London society. Through time, it has come to be seen as one of the greatest comic novels in English. Arthur Schopenhauer called Tristram Shandy one of "the four immortal romances."[3]
Samuel Johnson in 1776 commented, "Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last."[16][17] Schopenhauer privately rebutted Samuel Johnson, saying: "The man Sterne is worth 1,000 Pedants and commonplace-fellows like Dr. J."[18] George Washington enjoyed the book.[19] The young Karl Marx was a devotee of Tristram Shandy, and wrote a still-unpublished short humorous novel, Scorpion and Felix, that was obviously influenced by Sterne's work.[20][21] Goethe praised Sterne in Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, which in turn influenced Nietzsche.[20][22] Writing in The Times in January 2021, critic Michael Henderson disparaged the novel, stating that it "honks like John Coltrane, and is not nearly so funny."
Tristram Shandy has also been seen by formalists and other literary critics as a forerunner of many narrative devices and styles used by modernist and postmodernist authors such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Carlos Fuentes, Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie.[23] The critic James Wood identified the novel as a precursor to the "hysterical realism" of authors such as Rushdie and Thomas Pynchon.[24] Novelist Javier Marías cites Tristram Shandy as the book that changed his life when he translated it into Spanish at 25, claiming that from it he "learned almost everything about novel writing, and that a novel may contain anything and still be a novel."[25]
The success of Sterne's novel got him an appointment by Lord Fauconberg as curate of St Michael's Church in Coxwold, Yorkshire, which included living at Sterne's model for Shandy Hall. The medieval structure still stands today, and is under the care of the Laurence Sterne Trust since its acquisition in the 1960s. The gardens, which Sterne tended during his time there, are daily open to visitors.
The novel's success has resulted in permanent additions to the English lexicon;[26] within the text of Tristram Shandy Sterne describes the novel as "Shandean", coining a term which still carries the meaning that Sterne originally attached to it when he wrote, "I write a careless kind of a civil, nonsensical, good humoured Shandean book..."[27] Strongly influenced by Cervantes' Don Quixote, Sterne's Tristram Shandy also gave rise to the term "cervantic" (which Sterne at the time spelled "cervantick").[28]
Abolitionists
In 1766, at the height of the debate about slavery, Ignatius Sancho wrote a letter to Sterne[29] encouraging the writer to use his pen to lobby for the abolition of the slave trade.[30] "That subject, handled in your striking manner, would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many—but if only one—Gracious God!—what a feast to a benevolent heart!" he wrote.
In July 1766 Sancho's letter was received by Sterne shortly after he had just finished writing a conversation between his fictional characters Corporal Trim and his brother Tom in Tristram Shandy, in which Tom described the oppression of a black servant in a sausage shop in Lisbon, which he had visited.[31] This "tender tale" was published in Chapter 65 (Vol. IV) of Tristram Shandy.[32] Sterne's widely publicised 27 July 1766 response to Sancho's letter became an integral part of 18th-century abolitionist literature.[33]
There is a strange coincidence, Sancho, in the little events (as well as in the great ones) of this world: for I had been writing a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro-girl, and my eyes had scarce done smarting with it, when your letter of recommendation in behalf of so many of her brethren and sisters, came to me—but why her brethren?—or yours, Sancho! any more than mine? It is by the finest tints, and most insensible gradations, that nature descends from the fairest face about St James's, to the sootiest complexion in Africa: at which tint of these, is it, that the ties of blood are to cease? and how many shades must we descend lower still in the scale, ere mercy is to vanish with them?—but 'tis no uncommon thing, my good Sancho, for one half of the world to use the other half of it like brutes, & then endeavor to make 'em so.[31]
