CHAPTER

4
The Speed of Tristram Shandy
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Joseph Drury

https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198792383.003.0005
Pages
108–142
Published:
November 2017

Abstract
The expansion of the turnpike system and the introduction
of steel springs to carriages in the mid-eighteenth century
led to a sudden increase in the speed at which people,
goods, and information could travel around Britain. Some
celebrated the profits and pleasures afforded by this new
culture of mobility. Others, including Rousseau, warned
that technological improvement was not being matched by
comparable advances in health, happiness, and virtue.
This chapter reads the radical digressiveness of Laurence
Sterne’s Tristram Shandy as a response to the alienating
moral effects of the conventional modern novel’s linear,
end-oriented narrative machinery. By derailing narrative
progress—a rupture signalled in volume VII by the
shattering of Tristram’s post-chaise—and withholding
closure altogether, Sterne sought to deliver his readers
from the circuit of desire, frustration, and disappointment
he understood to organize both the experience of reading a
modern novel and living in a modern technological
society.

Keywords:
Laurence Sterne, digression, closure, reading,
post-chaise, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, mobility,
transportation, sentimental, alienation
Subject:
Literary Studies (18th Century)

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