Sermons and Novels: Personifying Conscience in Sterne's Tristram Shandy

Abstract: Scholars have criticized the sermon in Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy as lackluster, forgettable, and offensive to initial readers. Yet Sterne's sermon, spiced by vivid personifications of Conscience, is central to the novel's success and influence. The novel's initial reception, especially the early reviews, reveals that the sermon was a highlight, crucial to its early approbation. Sterne's combination of genres also influenced other sermons-in-novels across the eighteenth century and later. His generic mixing is not inherently problematic but instead a clever way at once of marketing morality and affirming the moral responsiveness of novels.