Tristram Shandy ed. by Judith Hawley (review)

Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), which goes by its short title in the present edition, has exerted an ongoing appeal to general readers and scholars alike. Tristram Shandy has never gone out of print. After its initial appearance in installments, the entire text inevitably found its way into single-volume editions, with the market for paperback fiction providing a new publishing context and, potentially, a new audience. Apart from general readers, most students encountering Sterne properly for the first time will access Tristram Shandy in a trade paperback edition. The responsibility of producing a good edition, therefore, is significant if Sterne's text is to be read, understood, and appreciated as it ought to be. Norton, typically catering for a student market but also making significant texts accessible to a wider readership, presents this new edition of Sterne's work after a near 40-year hiatus: the last Norton Tristram Shandy appeared in 1980, edited by Howard Anderson. The new version is reliably edited by Sterne scholar Judith Hawley.

The text, however, is "notoriously eccentric," as Hawley observes in her "Textual Notes." Its publication history, with new editions during the author's lifetime evidencing emendations and multiple publishers, means that establishing a copy-text or trying to present the "best" version of the work can pose challenges. Following general practice (Anderson's included), Hawley chooses the first London edition of all volumes as her copy-text. Besides, as is usual, regularizing the long "s" and removing running quotation marks and catch-words, she sees her role as curating, rather than cleaning up or correcting, Sterne's text. To do otherwise, she argues, would be to suppose that errors are indeed errors, and not intentional – a dangerous business when dealing with Sterne—and so risk denaturing the text as the author intended it to be. This is largely in line with existing editorial practice, where few would consider "correcting," let alone "regularizing," a text that thrives on and promotes its own peculiarity.

Hawley acknowledges the significant history of Sterne editorship, from James Work's Tristram Shandy onwards. It is undisputed by almost all Sterneans that one of the most significant achievements of scholarship in the field is the nine-volume edition of Sterne's works published by the University Press of Florida, under the overall editorship of Melvyn New. This project was partly underway when the first Norton Tristram Shandy appeared; the first two volumes, the text (edited by Joan and Melvyn New), were published in 1978. The third volume, the Notes (edited by Melvyn New, Richard A. Davis, and W.G. Day) was yet to appear in 1984. The Penguin Classics edition of the work (reprinted 2003) is based on the Florida text, and offers a significantly contracted but nonetheless rich version of the notes. Anderson's edition was therefore pitched between an edited version of the work and the explanatory apparatus that sought to elucidate it for its readers, and, inevitably, to add an interpretive angle that was not without controversy. The Florida edition, in fact, divided scholars as much as it placed them in its debt, with some contending its approach to this day: its aim to annotate Sterne's work was driven by a deep erudition seated in extensive knowledge of and research into Sterne's sources.

Hawley makes a subtle but notable comment on this history in her "Textual Notes"; although "greatly indebted" to the Florida edition, "I have not followed the editors' practice of revising the copy text to bring it into line with Sterne's sources" (414). She quotes from a letter that Sterne wrote to Caesar Ward, the printer of his early pamphlet A Political Romance, demanding that he should not "presume to alter or transpose one Word, nor rectify one false Spelling," as otherwise he would not be able to recognize his own offspring. Hawley claims that "I have tried not to interfere in Sterne's paternity" (414). The Norton Tristram Shandy may...