Question about Tristram Shandy

Cafe Society
1

I have a question about Tristram Shandy. Actually, I have lots of questions about it, but I’ve been rolling with it so far. :slight_smile:

In the chapters where the Shandy men visit Yorick the cleric to revoke Tristram’s baptism, why do all the others discussing the church doctrine have Latin (or Greek?) names? Didius, Triptolemus, Kysarcius, Eugenius, Phutatorius. Was it the fashion of the time for the clergy to adopt names that sound philosophical? Pseudonyms to disguise real life people being parodied?

Sorry If I’ve got the situation completely wrong. Reading books like this is for me like trying to read something in French - I can get the gist of it, but sometimes I miss small important words and completely miss what’s going on.

2

From the 17th to the 18th centuries — with a bit of leeway either end — many writers or thinkers adopted for public use Latin mostly, or Greek names that were either expressive of themselves, or direct translations of their surnames ( such as Piscator for Fischer or Fisher ), particularly in German lands.
It was an affectation.

3

And in this case, Tristram Shandy, it is heavily jocular, as so much British fiction of the 18th to 19th centuries happened to be.

British squires and lairds, the major audience of such fiction, were not a subtle people.

4

And, probably, pseudonyms to disguise real life people being parodied.

5

Not in the case of those choosing such pen-names for their own public use.

6

But “probably yes,” in the book we are discussing. It is a satire, after all.

7

Squires and lairds were certainly not the main audience; that was the burgeoning middle classes. Sterne’s book was a huge best-seller precisely because of this new audience for literature. And most of 18th/19th century British literature was not jocular at all. For every Sterne there was a Richardson, for every Fielding or Smollett a Defoe or Radcliffe, for every Dickens an Eliot. In short, comic novelists wrote humorous novels, other novelists wrote serious ones, and there were probably far more of the latter than former.

8

And for every Laurence Sterne the satirist there is a Laurence Sterne who published books of sermons. He preferred satire because it got him invited to better parties.

9

The middle classes, with a nonconformist morality, who aimed to be gentry.

Didn’t say it was — God knows how dreary and pompous it could get — I said:

'as so much British fiction of the 18th to 19th centuries happened to be.’

Myself, for the semi-jocular, I rather like an English genre so obscure it hasn’t got a name: kinda sub-Thackeray and Ainsworth, but less sentimental than either, dealing with adventurous 17th century Hollanders and Rhinelanders, written from the 1830s to '50s in a semi-satirical and semi-tongue-in-cheek terror vein. Imagine Mynheer van Doltz’s wooden leg coming to life after his death, looking for it’s master…

10

I’d read that.

11

Hey wait a minute - Triptolemus isn’t exactly subtle is it? :smiley: Perhaps Didius imagined himself as having the qualities of a male Dido or something.

I was reading a bit more during my breaktime and they discuss a case setting precedent that the mother is not kin to the son, which made me smile. I feel like there are a lot of references which amuse me imagining the circumstances of them, but must have been quite funny to a contemporary reader. I had to laugh when the preface turned up on page 100 and something. I’m liking this crazy book a lot more than I did Dickens.