ABSTRACT
Laurence Sterne was already middle-aged, and was to die within a decade. He had written virtually nothing; and even by eighteenth-century standards he had not seen much of the world. With Sterne, we have a single consciousness paraded before us, and from this derive everything in the novel - narrative, diction, syntax, comic effect. Sterne writes a deeply expressive English of his own - he has as decisively as anyone in our history what the linguists call an 'idiolect'. Sterne had exploited Tristram for fictional ends; in a way Yorick exploits Sterne. A more representative novelist of the mid-century is Tobias Smollett. He was the first writer to start out his career on the novel - that is, to see fiction as a natural literary choice. Smollett's difficulties continued to grow, for all his industry. He spent some time in gaol, as a result of a libel suit determined against him, and his illness became worse.
