The Speed of Tristram Shandy

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.