Sterne and ‘That Dreary Double Entendre’

Abstract

This article considers Sterne’s habits of double entendre as they are conceived and denounced in WM Thackeray’s lecture on the writer, first published in English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century (1853). Thereafter, the argument follows a (coastal) path through Freud’s experiences in Northern English seaside resorts, memories of which emerge in some of his most famous writings on dreamwork, and anticipate his theories about double meaning in literature, which he sees exemplified by Tristram Shandy. The article proceeds to take in the comic art of Donald McGill, whose double entendres, both textual and visual, echo, if only unconsciously, several passages in Sterne’s novel. Finally, it is shown that, for all Thackeray’s vituperation towards Sterne’s dependence on double entendre, there was, in fact, a deeply shared sensibility between the two writers, a double entente which sustained Thackeray in his late work.