ABSTRACT
In his book on The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 Lawrence Stone offers four different views on the nature of the newborn child that were influential in the eighteenth century. This chapter examines that in Tristram Shandy, a concept by which Sterne takes up a variety of different aspects and transforms them into his own satiric image of the child. In Tristram Shandy we can observe the futile attempt to come to terms with the ever widening cone of all the facts of the past that played a role in the narrator’s creation and his development during his early infancy and childhood. The chain of cause and effect can, in principle, be traced backwards and forwards indefinitely since the beginning of time. Tristram Shandy is a small but intricate clock in a mechanistic universe and he is so ah ovo. There are other instances of self-similarity in connection with the conceptualization of childhood in the eighteenth century.
