A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation

Tristram Shandy

A full-cast dramatisation of this comic tale about an eighteenth-century gentleman who tries to tell his life story, but continually finds that he must digress...

Laurence Sterne was born in 1713, the younger son of a landowning Yorkshire family. He studied at Jesus College, Cambridge and was ordained in 1738. Sterne's dramas were mostly personal, including bitter quarrels with his wife and uncle, and some high profile affairs. The publication of the first volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy in 1759 made him famous throughout Europe overnight. He went on to complete the remaining volumes over the next seven years. Sterne died in 1768 of tuberculosis, the condition that had dogged him for many years.

A full-cast dramatisation of this comic tale about an eighteenth-century gentleman who tries to tell his life story, but continually finds that he must digress... 
 
Featuring some of the best-known and well-loved characters in English literature, including Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Dr Slop and the Widow Wadman. Beginning (or attempting to begin) at the moment of his own conception, Tristram Shandy recounts his progress through the world and utterly fails to stick to the point. 
 
Sterne's comic masterpiece is an extravagantly inventive work which was hugely popular when first published in 1759, and is now considered a landmark in the history of the novel. Its often bawdy humour and numerous digressions are combined with bold literary experiments, and 260 years after its publication it remains one of the most influential and widely-admired books of the 18th century. A joyful celebration of the endless possibilities of the art of fiction, Tristram Shandy is also a wry demonstration of its limitations. 
 
Also included in this release is a bonus programme - In Our Time: Tristram Shandy - in which Melvyn Bragg discusses the comic masterpiece with Professor Judith Hawley (University of London), Professor John Mullan (UCL) and Dr Mary Newbould (University of Cambridge). 
 
Cast: 
Tristram...Neil Dudgeon 
Mother...Julia Ford 
Father...David Troughton 
Uncle Toby...Adrian Scarborough 
Corporal Trim...Paul Ritter 
Dr Slop...Tony Rohr 
Obadiah...Stephen Hogan 
Susannah...Helen Longworth 
Great-Grandmother/Bridget...Ndidi Del Fatti 
Great-Grandfather/Pontificating Man/Death...Stuart Mcloughlin 
Bishop Hall/Le Fever...Hugh Dickson 
Widow Wadman...Deborah Findlay 
 
Dramatised by Graham White 
Directed and produced by Mary Peate 
A BBC Studios production

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Sterne's utterly original novel - the meandering, maddening 'autobiography' of one of literature's oldest comic characters.

Tristram Shandy is one of the funniest novels in the English language. It's also one of the first great experimental literary works

An amazing book, seeming like a modern experimental novel but written in the 18th century by an Anglican clergyman. You can dip in and out of it with constant pleasure.

Has inspired and provoked writers as various as Dickens, Joyce and Salman Rushdie

Tristram Shandy’s open, digressive form offers both an alternative to the inevitable reductions of plot and a foil to the tyranny of the will to system.

Sterne's utterly original novel - the meandering, maddening 'autobiography' of one of literature's oldest comic characters. 
 
Doomed to become the ‘sport of fortune’ by an interruption at the crucial moment of conception, Tristram Shandy’s life lurches from one mishap to another: his nose crushed by the doctor’s forceps during birth, christened with the wrong name, an unfortunate incident involving a slamming sash window… Discover the anti-autobiography of the hilarious Tristram Shandy. 
 
 WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY TOM MCCARTHY 
 
 ‘Tristram Shandy is one of the funniest novels in the English language. It's also one of the first great experimental literary works’ Independent

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The Penguin English Library Edition of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne 
 
'I am got, I know not how, into a cold unmetaphorical vein of infamous writing, and cannot take a plumb-lift out of it for my soul; so must be obliged to go on writing like a Dutch commentator to the end of the chapter, unless something be done ...' 
 
Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby, and a host of other characters, including Dr Slop, Corporal Trim and the parson Yorick. A joyful celebration of the endless possibilities of the art of fiction, Tristram Shandy is also a wry demonstration of its limitations. 
 
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

Born in Clonmel, Ireland, in 1713, Laurence Sterne spent the first ten years of his life moving from place to place within Ireland and also Yorkshire, as his father, an army ensign, was assigned and reassigned constantly. Educated at a grammar school near Halifax, Sterne took a place at Jesus College, Cambridge in 1733, two years after his father died of a fever in Jamaica. Going on to become a clergyman, he published four sermons during his lifetime - but it was for his literary works that he earned great acclaim, particularly The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, his nine-volume masterpiece, which made him a celebrity. 
 
Dogged by ill-health for much of his life, he took various recuperative trips to the continent, which informed his final work, A Sentimental Journey, published barely three weeks before his death in London in 1768 at the age of fifty-four.

A Sentimental Journey

An edition of Sterne's gloriously warm-hearted pastiche of travel-writing

A furiously witty response to Tobias Smollett's curmudgeonly 'Travels through France and Italy', Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy became a hugely influential work of travel writing in its own right. This Penguin Classics edition includes an introduction and notes by Paul Goring. 
 
When Yorick, the roving narrator of Sterne's innovative final novel, sets off for France on a whim, he produces no ordinary travelogue. Jolting along in his coach from Calais, through Paris, and on towards the Italian border, the amiable parson is blithely unconcerned by famous views or monuments, but he engages us with tales of his encounters with all manner of people, from counts and noblewomen to beggars and chambermaids. And as drama piles upon drama, anecdote, flirtation and digression, Yorick's destination takes second place to an exhilarating voyage of emotional and erotic exploration. Interweaving sharp wit with warm humour and irony with genuine feeling, A Sentimental Journey paints a captivating picture of an Englishman's adventures abroad. 
 
In his introduction, Paul Goring discusses Sterne's literary career and his semi-autobiographical depiction of Yorick, and sets the novel within the context of eighteenth-century travel writing and the vogue of sentimental fiction. This edition also includes a chronology, updated further reading and notes. 
 
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) graduated from Cambridge in 1737 and took holy orders, becoming a prebend in York Cathedral. His masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman made him a celebrity but ill-health necessitated recuperative travel and A Sentimental Journey grew out of a seven-month trip through France and Italy. He died the year it was published, 1768. 
 
If you enjoyed A Sentimental Journey, you might like Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, also available in Penguin Classics.

Irish-born Laurence Sterne graduated from Cambridge in 1737 and took holy orders, becoming a prebend in York Cathedral. His masterpiece, 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy' made him a celebrity but ill-health necessitated recuperative travel and A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY grew out of a seven-month trip through France and Italy. He died the year it was published, 1768. Paul Goring teaches English at Trondheim University in Norway and has completed a doctorate on Sterne's novels.

When Yorick, the roving narrator of Sterne's innovative final novel, sets off for France on a whim, he produces no ordinary travelogue. Jolting along in his coach from Calais, through Paris, and on towards the Italian border, the amiable parson is blithely unconcerned by famous views or monuments, but he engages us with tales of his encounters with all manner of people, from counts and noblewomen to beggars and chambermaids. And as drama piles upon drama, anecdote, flirtation and digression, Yorick's destination takes second place to an exhilarating voyage of emotional and erotic exploration. Interweaving sharp wit with warm humour, irony with sentiment, A Sentimental Journey paints a captivating picture of an Englishman's adventures abroad.

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it, with a rich metafictional narrative that might classify it as the first 'postmodern' novel. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby, and a host of other characters, including Dr Slop, Corporal Trim and the parson Yorick.

Laurence Sterne

Melvyn New

Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby and a host of other characters.

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