On 29 January 1767, the ninth and last volume of a longrunning publication sensation was printed. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, penned by a country clergyman, Laurence Sterne, had something of the impact of Game of Thrones in our own century. Even though it seemed to be relatively conventional — the comical story of his family and childhood told by a fictional young writer from Yorkshire called Tristram Shandy — it was a bold and shocking experiment in new ways of delivering story through the medium of the novel, itself still a comparatively young form. The genre of the novel was to eighteenth-century culture what television is to the twenty-first — a popular form of entertainment that gripped the imagination to the concern of the elite and the governing classes.
The ninth volume was to turn out to be the last because Sterne died before he could write more. Sterne does not seem to have thought of it as the last episode. The final lines of the last volume, characteristically, do not suggest closure but a moment of distraction, another direction of travel for a novel that was consistently wayward. A servant called Obadiah tells a rambling story about his family’s disappointment when the bull they own is not able to sire a calf. Tristram’s mother interrupts Obadiah:
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