Sterne stuff (part 1)
The journal The Indexer features (in Vol. 25 No. 2, October 2006) an analysis called “Sterne Stuff” by Christopher Phipps, librarian and freelance indexer, about the novel The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, London: Hutchinson & Co., 1906. v, 640 pp (out of print). [Image at right: Sterne's head, excerpted from a portrait in the National Gallery]. “Sterne Stuff” says, in part:
[The] 1906 edition of Sterne’s 18th-century innovative masterpiece, complete with wonderfully grotesque Cruikshank illustrations, does indeed include a nine-and-a-half page ‘Index of Persons and Words’. Shandeans engaged in high-level linguistic analysis of the text, or A-level students hoping to use the index Brodie’s Notes-style to avoid actually having to read the novel, should not, though, get too excited. The indexer’s introductory note gives a clue to the scope: ‘The names of constantly recurring characters are not included’ (wouldn’t that make life easier?). So among the Ts you will, I’m afraid, find neither ‘Toby’ nor ‘Trim’, and under S, no ‘Slop’, let alone any ‘Shandy’. Nor do the novel’s most memorable scenes fall within the indexer’s remit, so the Cs are regrettably free of entries for ‘conception (of TS)’ or ‘clock, winding of’. The selection of non-constantly recurring names is not applied consistently: the dedicatee of volumes 5 and 6 of the novel, ‘Spencer, John, Lord Viscount’ warrants an entry (even if it is titularly confused), while ‘Pitt, William (the Elder)’, the dedicatee of volume 1, seemingly does not.