Chapter Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-one (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-three (#litres_trial_promo)
Classic Literature: Words and Phrases adapted from the Collins English Dictionary (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
History of Collins
In 1819, millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.
Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.
Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.
In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.
HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.
Life & Times
Publication and Readership
Tristram Shandy is one of a group of books that could be described as part of the infancy of the novel. It dates from 1759, 40 years after Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and 10 years after Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. All three have eponymous male heroes, as was the trend at that time.
Tristram Shandy was originally published in nine volumes under the title The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Those nine installments spanned an eight-year period, from 1759–67. The author was Laurence Sterne (1713–68), an Irish-born clergyman who was an admirer of the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais, whom he wished to emulate in his comic prose. Rabelais’ work found humour in the reality of human nature – sex, vulgarity, swearing, violence, insults, stupidity and so on. Sterne made this style his genre, but his subject matter was quite different.
Sterne was well into middle age when the first volume of Tristram Shandy was published and he died just a couple of years after the last volume. It seems that his primary motivation was to make the most of his writing ability before it was too late, as he saw himself as Rabelais’ literary successor.
In England, Sterne’s work was not considered in a serious light in literary terms, because it was bawdy and crude. The English author Samuel Johnson thought of Tristram Shandy as rather too odd to have any lasting status. When one considers that it was published in the considerable shadow of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), by fellow Irishman Jonathan Swift, it is perhaps understandable that Sterne’s work was seen as eccentric and unambitious. It was certainly not a romantic adventure story, which is what people had come to expect of the novel.
Interestingly, book publishing was already subject to piracy in the late 1700s, so Sterne addressed the matter by signing the title pages of his books in order to authenticate them. He had to do this in excess of 12,000 times in an attempt to ensure that he received his royalty earnings. Although Sterne had his detractors in high literary circles, Tristram Shandy became popular very quickly across Europe, making him famous for the few remaining years of his life.
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
The running joke in Tristram Shandy is the verbosity of the narrator, who finds it difficult to get to the point, always digressing and embellishing the story. This comic intention had a polarizing effect on Sterne’s 19th-century readership. After all, a personality trait that is amusing to one person might very easily be extremely irritating to another.
