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Updated: May 26, 2025
The world has imagined because I wrote Tristram Shandy that I was myself more Shandian than I really ever was. 'Tis a good-natured world we live in, and we are often painted in divers colours, according to the ideas each one frames in his head." It would, perhaps, have been scarcely possible for Sterne to state his essentially unhealthy philosophy of life so concisely as in this naïve passage.
"I have," he says, "such entire confidence in my wife that she spends as little as she can, though she is confined to no particular sum ... and you may rely in case she should draw for fifty or a hundred pounds extraordinary that it and every demand shall be punctually paid, and with proper thanks; and for this the whole Shandian family are ready to stand security."
The point was what edition should be used the first or the last; this latter having, of course, the advantage of the author's latest revision. In the course of these Shandian enquiries, the passage in Thackeray's lecture occurred to me where he mentions having been shown Eliza's Diary by a "Gentleman of Bath."
To indulge the former is to be "Shandian," that is to say, coarse and carnal; to devote oneself to the latter, or, in other words, to spend one's days in semi-erotic languishings over the whole female sex indiscriminately, is to show spirituality and taste.
James is an inexplicable cousin. Nature hath her unities, which not every critic can penetrate; or, if we feel, we cannot explain them. The pen of Yorick, and of none since his, could have drawn J.E. entire those fine Shandian lights and shades, which make up his story. I must limp after in my poor antithetical manner, as the fates have given me grace and talent.
They belong to the post-Shandian period, and are in obvious imitation of the Shandian style; while in none of the earlier ones not even in that famous homily on a Good Conscience, which did not succeed till Corporal Trim preached it before the brothers Shandy and Dr. Slop can we trace either the trick of style or the turn of thought that give piquancy to the novel.
And we get a foretaste of the familiar Shandian impertinence in the remark which follows, that "there are many good similes subsisting in the world, but which I have neither time to recollect nor look for," which would give you an idea of the parson's astonishment at Trim's impudence.
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