Tristram recalls his duty to continue the story of the midwife so that the reader will remember "that there is such a body still in the world," but again he has other things to say first. One of them is to remind the reader that by "world," he means only "about four or five miles": his village and its environs. He has prepared a map of that world, which is in the hands of the engravers; it will be added "to the end of the twentieth volume." The reader is told this "in confidence," and he is asked not to mention it to the Reviewers.
Apropos of looking something up in his mother's marriage settlement, he says again that there are many things that a man, writing a history such as his, must do as he goes along: "For, if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make which he can no ways avoid." He knows that his story isn't making much headway: "I have been at it these six weeks, making all the speed I possibly could, — and am not yet born." He speaks of his digressions as "unforeseen stoppages . . . which . . . will rather increase than diminish," but he intends to keep at it, writing and publishing two volumes of his life every year.
One of the articles in his mother's marriage settlement — quoted in full legal language with Gothic lettering — stipulated that Mrs. Shandy could choose to give birth in London if she desired. A second clause added that if she had some sort of false alarm, she forfeited "the next turn." She had such a false alarm the year before Tristram was born, and Mr. Shandy insisted that she have her child at Shandy Hall when the "next turn" came. He was very angry about the wasted trip, and on the eve of Tristram's conception he told his wife that she was "to lye-in of her next child in the country to balance the last year's journey."
