Print Culture in Transition: Tristram Shandy, the Reviewers, and the Consumable Text

Print Culture in Transition: Tnstram Shandy, the Reviewers, and the Consumable Text Shaun Regan Among eighteenth-centuryworks ofprose fiction, Tristram Shandy is arguably both the most concerned with, and the most dependent upon, the material conditions of its production. From the "rashjerks, and hare-brain'd squirts" ofTristram's pen to the anxiety engendered by unsold volumes, Sterne's text is self-conscious about the physical act ofwriting and the economic realities of authorship.1 As readers have long recognized, moreover, some of Tristram's nicest jokes inhere in subtle manipulations of layout and form which are realizable only through the conventions of print.2 In the main, critical attempts to provide a broader context for this comic play ofprint have proceeded diachronically, relating Sterne's text either to the general historical movement from an oral/aural to a visual, printbased culture, or to Scriblerian satires upon literary hack-work and the early-century explosion of printed matter. For all its insights, this work has had the unfortunate consequence of deflecting attention 1 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: The Text, ed. Melvyn New andJoan New, The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, vols 1-2 (Gainesville : University Presses ofFlorida, 1978), 3:28, 254; 8:6, 663. References are to the original volume and chapter numbers and to the page number in the Florida edition. 2 Thesejokes continue to be excavated in ever more detail; see especially PeterJ. De Voogd, "Tristram Shandy as Aesthetic Object," Word and Image 4 (1988), 383-92, and Christopher Fanning, "On Sterne's Page: Spatial Layout, Spatial Form, and Social Spaces in Tristram Shandy," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10 (1998), 429-50. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Numbers 3-4, April-July 2002 290EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION away from the specifically contemporary features of Sterne's print comedy.3 In this essay, I argue for a more synchronic reading by considering two discourses that characterized English print culture during the third quarter of the eighteenth century: satires upon review criticism, and the debate over literary property. By reading Sterne's text through these discourses, my aim will be to reposition Tristram both textually and culturally: textually, by differentiating between local effects which have often been lumped together in previous readings; and culturally, by locating the work more precisely within the print culture of its own day. The third quarter of the eighteenth century witnessed significant realignments in what can be termed the "cultural ideology" of print. AsJames Raven notes, while the actual technology ofprint had remained "fundamentally unchanged" for two hundred years, the period 1750 to 1800 was marked by the heightened "scale and competitiveness of new production and selling strategies."4 This continuing growth in print culture was accompanied by changing attitudes towards commercial publishing. For the later-century successors of Pope and Swift, certainly, the commercialization of literature could still appear to involve processes of textual production which reduced the work of art to the level of any other manufactured good. The conservative sense that literature's descent into commerce had resulted only in a regrettable démystification is nicely restated, for instance , in the first volume ofJohn Brown's influential attack on luxury , An Estimate ofthe Manners andPrinciples ofthe Times (1757): "The Laurel Wreath, once aspired after as the highest Object ofAmbition, 3 For the Scriblerian reading (though with contrasting emphases), see Melvyn New, Laurence Sterne as Satirist: A Reading of "Tristram Shandy" (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1969), and J. Paul Hunter, "From Typology to Type: Agents of Change in EighteenthCentury English Texts," Cultural Artifacts and the Production ofMeaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body, ed. Margaret J.M. Ezell and Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 41-69. Both Hunter and Fanning draw upon distinctions between oral/aural and print culture, as does Roger B. Moss, "Sterne's Punctuation," Eighteenth-Century Studies 15 (1981-82), 179-200. A useful complication of this overview is Michael Vande Berg's discussion of the later-century resurgence of a rhetorical tradition which "conceived of writing in oral terms." "'Pictures of Pronunciation': Typographical Travels through Tristram Shandy andJacques le Fataliste," Eighteenth-Century...