Tristram Shandy is a comic fiction but there was little humorous about Sterne’s own relationship to death. As a boy, he experienced the death of four of his young siblings before he was himself eight. Having left Ireland for school in Yorkshire at the age of nine, he never again saw his much-loved soldier father, who died when Sterne was seventeen. Within a couple of years, when he was a student at Jesus College, Cambridge, Sterne experienced the first symptoms of the consumption — pulmonary tuberculosis — that would haunt him for the remainder of his life. Much later, when travelling abroad for his health, he vividly recalled the very moment: “I had the same accident I had at Cambridge, of breaking a vessel in my lungs. It happen’d in the night, and I bled the bed full”. Small wonder, perhaps, that Sterne’s comic masterpiece is punctuated by the deaths of the fiction’s most loved characters. By the end of Volume IX, not only Yorick but Tristram’s brother Bobby, his mother Elizabeth, and even that favourite of Victorian readers, uncle Toby, have all died, along with the courageous soldier, Le Fever, the account of whose death, excerpted from the novel’s sixth volume, was for long regarded as one of Sterne’s most sublimely touching achievements.