Creating Character in “Chiaro Oscuro”: Sterne’s Celebrity, Cibber’s Apology, and the Life of Tristram Shandy

“I wrote not [to] be fed, but to be famous,” declared Laurence Sterne, corresponding with a critic shortly after the 1759 debut of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.¹ Most recent scholars have interpreted Sterne’s statement as an earnest (if somewhat naïve) confession of his interior motives, and have marveled at the suddenness and the serendipity of his ascension to celebrity in the decade between his authorial debut and his untimely death.² Capitalizing upon his similarities to characters in his fiction (namely, the narrator Tristram and the parson Yorick, with whom Sterne shared a vocation), Sterne crafted his public identity around his fictional personae: he signed his letters as Tristram, published his sermons as Yorick, and cavorted through London as the crack-brained fool, “Shandy[ing] it away” in what Thomas Keymer calls “a highly visible form of performance art, through which Sterne’s social existence could become an extension of his fictional text.”³ If Sterne composed his fiction as a bid for fame, he got his wish.

And it is certainly tempting to interpret Sterne’s clever quip as a true confession—tempting both because Sterne seems to invite such interpretations when he suggests a correspondence between his published characters and his private life, and because the celebrity culture emerging in Sterne’s day and still thriving in our own depended, as Sterne knew, on spectators who “find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of everything which concerns” their celebrated authors.⁴ But we must be cautious about expecting too many self-revelations from a writer known for his slipperiness. For, upon closer examination, Sterne’s apparent confession seems less a revelation of the author’s inner self than a sly allusion to his exterior features— and specifically those features by which Sterne was often caricatured in the periodical press. Anyone who had read about Sterne in the mid-eighteenth century would be able to pick him out of a crowd by virtue of his long, thin face and his famously emaciated frame—by virtue of a body, in other words, that seemed for far too long to have sought after “fame” at the expense of “good feeding.”⁵ A caricature of Sterne painted in 1765 shows him bowing congenially to a skeleton representing Death, his black-clad profile only marginally meatier than his companion’s; everyone could appreciate the humor when, in a popular mock-lecture series analyzing the oddities of London’s celebrities in 1765, the performer George Alexander Stevens joked that Sterne had “died, at length, of mere hunger.”⁶ By embedding in his supposed self-description such references to the exterior features that his public had deemed his trademarks, in other words, Sterne feigns self-revelation while revealing only that which his public already knows; he achieves the illusion of depth while mooring his readers forever at his surface. The reader who looks to Sterne’s language to discover the interior self it promises finds himself staring at the superficial celebrity of his own creation—a celebrity who may or may not be hungry for fame but who is famous for appearing hungry.

Examples of this sort of complex self-referentiality abound in Tristram Shandy and constitute what I will suggest was an increasingly common response to a new socio-cultural problem: that is, the problem of how the modern celebrity might peddle the interiority that eighteenth-century audiences were so eager to buy without actually giving him- or herself away.⁷ Sterne’s lifetime coincides with the era to which several recent critics have traced the emergence of modern celebrity—a particular sort of fame based not on a person’s status or achievements but on a personality made “abnormally interesting” by the public’s efforts to mine its most intimate secrets and explain its interior motives.⁸ Though the eighteenth-century celebrity enjoyed power and profit previously unavailable to all but the nobility, the celebrity lifestyle also came with its share of...