Tristram Shandy is a brick of a book nowadays, even if its original components, the nine volumes in five instalments, were quite slim, as slim as the two volumes of A Sentimental Journey to follow it. Sterne expressly proposed to Robert Dodsley, his first London publisher, ‘a lean edition, in two small volumes, of the size of Rasselas’ (L 80; my italics), i.e. Johnson's moral tale of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, which had appeared the year before Tristram Shandy I/II in two octavo volumes under the Dodsley imprint. Considered as a material object, there is thus an inbuilt tension in Tristram Shandy between bulk and elegant slimness, between lightness and weighty gravitas. In its bulky entirety it is like one of those mighty tomes in which Early Modern learning shored up its encyclopaedic knowledge for posterity; in the lightweight leanness of its instalments it suggests the fleeting ephemerality of the products of a rapidly expanding market for printed matter, of theatrical improvisation, even of conversation. Its figure then is the flourish that Corporal Trim makes with his stick, asserting man's freedom, and that Tristram draws for us as an elegant arabesque (IX.iv.506).

This tension between bulk and lightness, between the learned tome and the slim volumes, can be seen as related to a tension that holds Sterne's writing in suspension throughout – the tension between scripturality and orality. His writing foregrounds and dramatizes both its own written, printed textuality and, as we have seen, its aspirations towards the spoken speech of dialogue and conversation. We listen to a voice and we read a book at one and the same time. The games Sterne constantly plays with the division in volumes and chapters, with chapterization and pagination and with the whole gamut of typographical markers, with diagrams, tabulations, citations and documentations, keep us constantly alert for the bookishness of the book we are reading.