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1700Congreve, The Way of the World
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1700John Dryden, Fables
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1702Queen's Royal Cookery
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1704East India Company sales catalogue
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1711The Spectator
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1712Jonathan Swift, A Proposal...
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1715Sugar in Britain
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1719Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
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1721Bartholomew Fair
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1724Trade and the English language
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1729Swift, A Modest Proposal
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1730East India Company: Bengal textiles
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1731English arrives in the West Indies
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1733Hogarth, Harlot's Progress
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1738Cities in chaos
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1738Polite conversation
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1738James Miller, Of Politeness
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1740Samuel Richardson, Pamela
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1742Advert for a giant
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1743Muffin seller
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1747The Art of Cookery
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1749Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
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1755Johnson's Dictionary
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1759Sterne, Tristram Shandy
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1762Lowth’s grammar
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1762Rousseau, The Social Contract
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1764Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
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1773Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
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1775Captain Cook's journal
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1775Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
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1780Burns, Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
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1780Anglo-Indian newspaper
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1781Notices about runaway slaves
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1782First British advert for curry powder
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1789Storming of the Bastille
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1789Olaudah Equiano
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1790William Blake's Notebook
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1791Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
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1791Walker’s correct pronunciation
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1792Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman
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1794Songs of Innocence and Experience
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Intro
'--Shut the door.--was begot in the night, betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighteen. I am positive I was.'
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, is a witty and highly original novel. Its title makes it sound like a typical 'bildungsroman': the 'novel of experience' that charts an individual's growth from childhood to maturity. In reality, it is a strikingly modern attempt to chart the difficulty of writing such an account. In trying to tell the story of his origins, Tristram gets bogged down by his desire to make his explanations as precise and all-encompassing as possible: he goes off on tangents, is led up blind alleys, and sometimes descends into inarticulacy, with words giving way to squiggles, asterisks and occasional blank pages. His digressions - on topics as diverse as siege warfare, the naming of children, the importance of having a large and attractively-shaped nose, and his own accidental circumcision - are often extremely funny.
Laurence Sterne was criticised by some of his contemporaries for his borrowings from other texts, but Tristram Shandy is praised today as a very early example of metafiction.
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