Laurence Sterne and the Eighteenth-Century Book

Abstract

LAURENCE STERNE AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BOOK CHAPTER 4: THE MARBLED PAGE I A NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OF NOSES (Broken) noses cast a long shadow in Tristram Shandy, especially in the second instalment (vols. 3 and 4) of Tristram Shandy, which carries the marbled page. It opens with Elizabeth's prolonged labour and Tristram's eventual arrival into the Shandy family, when his nose is crushed during a bungled forceps delivery. Walter is left reeling, and throws himself prostrate on the bed in an exasperated fury, as Tristram explains:No doubt, the breaking down of the bridge of a child's nose, by the edge of a pair of forceps,however scientifically applied,-would vex any man in the world, who was at so much pains in begetting a child, as my father was,-yet it will not account for the extravagance of his affliction, nor will it justify the unchristian manner he abandoned and surrender'd himself up to.To explain this, I must leave him upon the bed for half an hour,-and my uncle Toby in his old fringed chair sitting beside him. (3.30.144-5)Tristram goes on to account for Walter's vexation by explaining that his father had dedicated much of his life to collecting books on the history and natural philosophy of noses. He departs from this scene of woe to explain that many generations of Shandys have suffered from anxieties around noses. Tristram begins with his great-grandmother, who had insisted upon a marriage article which allowed her a large jointure due to her fiancé having little or no nose. This long-running family concern with the facial member goes some way toward explaining Walter's staying in bed for the rest of the volume, and his peculiar bibliographical bent.Walter's book collecting is passionate but it has been a challenge: despite the 'many millions of books in all languages, and in all possible types and bindings' which have been 'fabricated upon points not half so much tending to the unity and peacemaking of the world' (3.34.161), he can find very few written on the subject of noses. Those he finds are contradictory, like the works of Prignitz and Scroderus, the first of which argues that the size of one's nose reflects the capacity of one's fancy, and the other vice versa. 1 It 1 W.G. Day has shown that Sterne drew his references to Bouchet, Panocrates and Grangousier from John Ozell's footnotes to the nose passage in Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagrel. 'Sterne and Ozell', English Studies, 53 (1972), 434-436.

Recent approaches to paratext studies in eighteenth‐century literature

“…Wilkinson's superb monograph Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth‐Century Book (2017) successfully blends these two approaches, exploring paratextual elements via a bibliographic perspective and thus providing a complex and thorough analysis of the eighteenth‐century reception of Spenser. More recently, Williams (2021) presents a similarly ambitious and much‐needed study of Laurence Sterne's use of paratext, exploring catchwords, footnotes, and frontispieces alongside already popular elements of Sterne's texts such as the famous black page.…”