About 10 years before the publication of Tristram Shandy (1759), Henry Fielding published his History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749). Tom Jones has always been the archetype of the "well-made novel," and for many readers and critics Tristram Shandy suffers by comparison with it. Tom Jones presents the "life and adventures" of its hero; everything happens in an orderly, progressive way. The hero appears as an infant in the third chapter, and the major part of the book deals with his adventures as a young man. But there is no such orderliness in Tristram Shandy: Tristram is born a third of the way through the book, and the last forty-five chapters of the book (many of them short) deal with the events that took place five years before his birth.
The stories of Mr. and Mrs. Shandy, of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, of Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman, and the story of Tristram's childhood and young manhood itself, are all picked up, dropped, and picked up again and again. The author unhesitatingly tells the end of a story first, then the beginning, and then the middle; sometimes he tells the beginning and then drops it for a hundred pages. He manipulates the years and the events; he places, displaces, and replaces the people of his family (including himself) as he likes, taking them from the context of their actions and putting them back according to the way they figure in his reflections about them. Their stories give way for his opinions — the opinions of an author at work — and they are picked up according to his will and inserted into the pattern of his history as illustrations of his opinions.
Everything, individuals and events, moves in direct response to the controlling consciousness of the author. He makes them move or he makes them stop in their tracks in mid-sentence; and when he thinks that it is time to go back to them, they start moving and they finish their sentence. The affairs of the lovable Shandy family and the goings-on at Shandy Hall are given to us piecemeal and topsy-turvy: now we see them, now we don't; we see them here, and suddenly we see them there.
