“Scholia” to the Florida Tristram Shandy Annotations

Abstract

111 attention is given also to servants, including black servants who, when their service ended, were often resold into slavery. Responding to recent interest in the persistence of Jacobite allegiance in the eighteenth century, Mr. Christie uncovers Stuart allusions. While the intention (never fulfilled) to have medallions of the Stuart pretenders at Callaly Castle is understandable, given the Claverings’ religion, StuartallusionsatHoughton,the country home of Walpole, and at Chiswick , the villa of Lord Burlington, are more surprising, though the extent of crypto-Jacobitism may be doubted. In such a vast subject, lacunae are inevitable . Chatsworth seems underrepresented , for example. Its magnificent collection of books—though the library achieved its present shape only at the end of the period covered—merits mention under the section on country house libraries , as, in relation to science and the country house, does Henry Cavendish, who gave his name to the laboratory at Cambridge. Mr. Christie omits names in his extensive Bibliography: Carole Fabricant , for example, for her work on Swift’s garden in Dublin and for her feminist critique of the country house ethos in a number of articles, Ann Bermingham for her Marxist interpretation, in Landscape and Ideology, of Gainsborough’s Mr. and Mrs. RobertAndrews,andRobert Williams, whose recent interpretationsof the landscape garden in terms of the dependence of design upon material considerations . But my main criticism is that this excellent book lacks a subject index. What does it have to say about chapels in country houses? Not much, as I recall. What about muniments rooms? Or menageries ? A detailed index wouldprovide easy access to the book’s rich variety. Alistair M. Duckworth University of Florida ‘‘SCHOLIA’’ TO THE FLORIDA TRISTRAM SHANDY ANNOTATIONS In TS, II.14, Walter offers his economictheory concerning consumption, and promises, were he a Prince, to ‘‘recompence the scientifick head which brought forth . . . contrivances ’’to increase the circulation oftrade.The editors quote Warburton and Bishop Berkeley to indicate that Walter’s ideas were actually discussed during the century, but there is also in the passage a possible link to Swift that perhaps better contextualizes Sterne’s own attitude . An addition to the present note to 136.26–137.7 is suggested. 136.26–137.7 For that . . . use of them.] [Add at end of present note.] In having Walter imagine himself as ‘‘a Prince’’ who would ‘‘recompence the scientifick head,’’ Sterne seems to be recalling an epigram that was attributed in the period to Swift:‘‘LewistheLiving Learned fed,/And rais’d the scientific Head:/Our frugal Queen to save her Meat,/ Exalts the Heads that cannot eat’’ (‘‘On the Hermitage at Richmond,’’ in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2d edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 663; see also The Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), pp. 862– 63). According to Harold Williams, this unfavorable comparison between the patronage of Queen Caroline (who in 1732 had commissioned busts of Newton, Locke, Boyle, Wollaston, and Clarke for her Richmond grotto ) and that of Louis XIV did not appear in print until 1765. As A. C. Elias, Jr, and James Woolley note in their forthcoming edition of Swift’s poems, however, the epigram first appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine for April 1733 (p. 207), and there were several further printings in the same decade. By 1759–60 it 112 was familiar not only to Sterne, but also to Sarah Fielding, whose The History of Ophelia (published 31 March 1760 in two volumes) notes of one character ‘‘That she the living Genius fed/And rais’d the Scientifick Head’’ (1: 215; see also Peter Sabor’s forthcoming edition of this novel). Thomas Keymer St Anne’s College, Oxford On entering Paris in TS, VII.17, Tristram laughs at a city in which barbers shall rank higher than everyone, ‘‘we shall be above you all—we shall be * Capitouls at least—pardi! we shall all wear swords.’’ The note Sterne adds to ‘‘elucidate’’the passage reads simply: ‘‘*ChiefMagistratein Toulouse,&c.&c.&c.’’ The Florida editors admit their puzzlement: ‘‘Sterne’s joke, if any, eludes us.’’I wouldsuggest that Sterne is not making ajoke, butrather a barbed allusion to one of France’s darkest moments in the decade—at least in...