But to call the voice Tristram’s is a simplification. It knows things it shouldn’t, and doesn’t know things it should. Sterne himself comes close to the surface at times, like when he finds space in each new volume to parody the critics who’d said rude things about the last. “Sterne is playing with veracity, voice and identity,” says Patrick Wildgust, curator of Shandy Hall, a museum in the Yorkshire house where Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy. “When you try to get down to the crucial point, the mist rolls in and we just don’t know. And that’s rather good.”

If the tone of the book was whimsical, Sterne was absolutely serious about its physical production. His surviving letters to publishers are exacting in their demands about paper quality, print type and lay out, and he would supervise the printing of each volume. That’s because they involved some very particular visual elements, including three famous disruptions to the text.

A tall tale

The first appears midway through volume one, as Tristram narrates the dying moment of Parson Yorick. As the chapter ends, the facing page is simply black, a slab of ink, as is its reverse side. The second is a marbled page found in the third volume. Originally, these were marbled by hand before being stuck into each book. In modern editions, the marbled page is monochrome and uniform, robbing it of its meaning. The idea was that each reader would have a unique design in hand – that everyone was reading the same book, and yet in fact their copy was singular. And the third is a blank page, at the end of the sixth volume, when Tristram introduces Mrs Wadham, and tells the reader to get a pen and “paint her to your own mind – as like your mistress as you can – as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you – ’tis all one to me – please but your own fancy in it.”