Tristram Shandy and Making Toll Roads Worthwhile

As Tristram’s fear of death compels him to outrun it by taking to the road in Book 7 of his Life and Opinions, Laurence Sterne seems driven to explore the possibilities of travel writing and narrative. Tristram explains, “so much of motion, is so much of life, and so much of joy – and that to stand still, or get on by slowly, is death and the devil,” (345). Yet in contrast to the eighteenth-century tradition of travel writing, Tristram cares little for the geography, architecture, or climate of a place and entirely for the people encountered there. Upon entering Calais, he half-heartedly attempts a rigorous survey of the town, but with each new feature, he digresses into conjecture and anecdote. Regarding the town’s only parochial church, Tristram admits that he “had not an opportunity of taking its exact dimensions.” He reasons that since the town has 14,000 inhabitants, then the church must be “considerably large” to hold them all, but if it does not then it is a “very great pity they have not another,” (338).

By the time he reaches Montreuil he has given up describing the town and focuses on the “one thing…in it at present very handsome:” the innkeeper’s daughter. Addressing the audience of his account, he complains that they would “rather that I give you the length, breadth, and perpendicular height of the great parish-church, or drawing of the façade of the abby of Saint Austreberte,” (343) but the abbey will stay in its place for another fifty years in nearly the same condition. The beauty of the innkeeper’s daughter will diminish before one of his readers has the opportunity to see her. The transience of beauty, wit, and conversation make them more appropriate subjects of writing because their instances are unique to the writer who experiences them.

When a French commissary charges Tristram a toll for his passage on the royal road, he determines that the only way to get equal value for his money is “to say some smart thing upon the occasion, worth the money,” (369). His obligation to pay the toll pressures him to verbalize what he earlier had gestured toward; that the value a travel-writer offers is a record of brief and unique exchanges with the people he encounters. Consequently, it is not enough for Tristram to get off a handful of witty remarks at the commissary’s expense (or Tristram’s, in terms of money). Tristram must document his exchange for it to matter. He explains, “Though I was sensible I had said as many clever things to the commissary as came to six livres four sous, yet I was determined to note down the imposition amongst my remarks before I retired from the place,” (370). His urgency to record the transaction highlights its brevity and the likelihood of something being lost in the transcription.

Travel writing focused on interactions with people, in Tristram’s opinion, removes the writer’s dependence on a place’s geographical and architectural features. A travel-writer journeying across a large plain can tell you “that the soil was grateful, and that nature pours out all her abundance,” but after that they “have a large plain upon their hands, which they know not what to do with.” Tristram entreats the reader to “judge if I don’t manage my plains better,” (374). By taking every opportunity for making conversation and acquaintances, he “turns [his] plain into a city. He exclaims that we “could have passed through Pall-Mall, or St. Jame’s Street for a month together, with fewer adventures – and seen less of human nature,” (376). Each encounter marks “a transient spark of amity shot across the space between us,” and in new place he is “changing only partners and tunes,” (377). Recording a place’s physical features may have been fine for explorers and merchants commissioned by the Royal Society, but once those features were recorded, travelers must find new and more compelling subjects. Book 7 focuses its descriptive lens on personal interactions and society, and in doing do, it turns the eighteenth-century novel away from the mathematical detail of Defoe and toward the sensibility and subjectivity of the genre’s future.