of clock-winding and procreation is presented as an instance of Locke’s theory of
sense-impressions.Instead of G–d’s ‘Let there be light’, the word spoken at the hero’s
creation is an enquiry about the clock. Clock-time and subjective experience and
language are at odds.
The narrator is not born until Volume IV, his nose being damaged in the process
by the obstetrical forceps of Dr Slop, who has taken too long to undo his carefully
tied-up bag of instruments. Tristram’s father writes a Tristra-paedia, or treatise upon
the education of Tristram, rather than educating him. The hero is breeched in
Volume VI,but does nothing. Much of the inaction is concerned with Tristram’s
beloved Uncle Toby and his hobby-horse, or obsession, with making impregnable a
set of military fortifications he has erected in the garden. An old soldier, he courts
the Widow Wadman until informed by Corporal Trim that her curiosity about204 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790
Fiction from Richardson to Edgeworth
1740 Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
1741 Richardson, Familiar Letters
1742 Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews
1747 Richardson, Clarissa(7 volumes, 1748)
1748 Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random
1749 Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling; Smollett, Gil Blas(trans. of Le Sage)
1750 John Cleland, Memoirs of Fanny Hill
1751 Fielding, Amelia; Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle
1753 Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison(7 volumes, 1754); Smollett, Adventures
of Ferdinand, Count Fathom
1755 Fielding (d.1754), Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon; Smollett, Don Quixote(trans. of
Cervantes)
1759 Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia(Voltaire, Candide)
1760 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy(9 volumes, 1767)
1761 (Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse)
1765 Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
1766 Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield
1768 Sterne, A Sentimental Journey
1771 Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling;
Smollett (d.1769), The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
1773 Mackenzie, The Man of the World
1774 (Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther)
1778 Fanny Burney, Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady’s Entry into the World
1782 (Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses; Rousseau, Confessions)
1785 Charlotte Smith, Manon Lescaut(trans. of Prévost)
1786 William Beckford, Vathek: An Arabian Tale
1788 Charlotte Smith, Emmeline
1789 Mrs (Ann) Radcliffe, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne;
Charlotte Smith, Etheline, or The Recluse of the Lake
1790 Mrs Radcliffe, A Sicilian Romance
1794 Mrs Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho; William Godwin, Caleb Williams
1796 Burney, Camilla, or A Picture of Youth; Matthew Lewis, The Monk;
Robert Bage, Hermsprong
1800 Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent