Laurence Sterne owned a copy of Kimber's The Juvenile Adventures of David Ranger. It may have spoken to his own keen sense of the pleasures found in playful slippage between performance and person. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) is an example of a version of character we have yet to encounter: where the author is ‘so adeptly grafted’ to the main protagonist or character of his work that the two can hardly be distinguished. Here, character becomes a kind of play-acting, a game of presence and absence performed on the page and in person in ways that promote a sense of a ‘real’ body manifesting a fictional identity through a variety of signature moves – which were nonetheless understood to bring a new form of naturalism and authenticity to the world of fiction.

Character as play is manifest in the comical transference of a set of qualities from one generation to another in Sterne's fiction, presented as a form of family resemblance learned through proximity rather than the effect of genetic inheritance (after all Tristram's biological, as well as his authorial, legitimacy is repeatedly questioned). The play of these characteristics across a variety of characters intra- and extra-diegetic has the curious effect of making eccentricity a shared and levelling mark: a family resemblance in fact. And yet, as we shall see, this is nonetheless serious play, a kind of humorous exchange that promotes ethical exchange between kin and kind despite different temperamental casts of mind. For Sterne, co-presence – an awareness of being with others at the same time and place – is the necessary basis of ethical connection, feeling with and recognising (if not necessarily understanding) the value(s) of others.

Tristram's is a ‘novelty act’ – both a one-off and an original and also an exception that proves a rule: every character in Tristram Shandy and every character it touches becomes (pre)occupied by their own hobby-horsical interpretation of the work. The emergent genre of the novel is profoundly changed after the publication of the first volume of Tristram Shandy in December 1759 as was the stage after Garrick's first appearances in November 1741.