Tristram Shandy, Boyhood, and Breeching

This article explores responses to a boy’s transitioning from wearing frocks or frock-coats to breeches in the long eighteenth century. With particular reference to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the article describes the complexities of a rite of passage that was both universal to all boys and particular for different classes, and even for each family. Not only novelists like Sterne, but also poets (Mary Barber, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charles and Mary Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge) and the authors of medical treatises wrote about this important event in a boy’s life, what it meant, and its paradoxical nature—as is evident in Sterne’s novel—as a sign both of freedom and a new restraint.