1718

The year 1718 serves as a small but consequential hinge in Tristram Shandy: it dates a dispute over childbirth and authority within the Shandy household, evokes Uncle Toby’s wound at the Gate of St. Nicolas, and marks the end of a five-year stretch in which his military hobby and Trim’s courtship run alongside one another. Sterne’s narrator does not treat the date as a neutral label; it becomes a point at which domestic time, remembered war, and the book’s digressive chronology meet.

A Date in the Shandy Household

In describing the disagreement over the arrangements for his birth, Tristram dates the events to 1718. His mother has resolved to rely on the experienced village midwife, while his father argues for a man-midwife. The dispute is not simply practical: the father’s public and private arguments about childbirth become a contest over who has authority to decide. The outcome grants the mother her choice of midwife; the operator is permitted to drink wine with the father and Uncle Toby in the back parlour, for which he is to be paid five guineas.

The year also supplies the setting for Walter’s theory about childbirth. Having read a medical account of difficult labour, he worries that the pressure on a child’s pliable head could damage its intellectual capacities. The book’s exaggerated calculation gives the force as an average of 470 pounds, and claims that in 49 cases out of 50 the head is compressed into an elongated shape. Walter then takes the account of delivery by the feet as support for his fear that ordinary obstetric practice threatens a child’s understanding. The episode connects the date’s family conflict to the novel’s comic treatment of medical authority and speculative learning.

War Recalled in Domestic Conversation

A separate 1718 scene turns an everyday gesture into a recollection of Uncle Toby’s military past. As Walter reaches diagonally across his body toward a low coat pocket, Toby sees the movement as resembling the traverses at the Gate of St. Nicolas. His attention leaves the debate at hand: he reaches for the bell to summon Trim and asks for the map of Namur, compasses, and sector, intending to measure the returning angles of the attack, especially the place where he received his wound in the groin. The date anchors this sudden passage from household conversation into military memory.

The narration adds a comic correction when the narrator says that Toby “dismounted,” then observes that he had not understood Toby to be on horseback. That turn makes the recalled campaign less a detached historical account than an imaginative movement occurring in the middle of a domestic exchange. The date thus helps organize a characteristic shift: a small present action calls up the old siege, and Toby’s military imagination briefly displaces the conversation around him.

Five Years on the Bowling-Green

The year 1718 also closes a five-year interval in the account of Toby’s siege hobby and Trim’s attentions to Bridget. The narrator dates that stretch from the demolition of Dunkirk in 1713 to the latter part of Toby’s campaign in 1718, six or seven weeks before the moment being narrated. During those years, Toby has raised the siege of Bridget’s house, while Trim, unwilling to abandon his master’s former siege, maintains a figurative blockade through courteous greetings and small tokens of attention.

One moonlit night, after putting Toby to bed, Trim goes to inspect the fortifications in the lane by the bowling-green and encounters Bridget. Believing the works worth showing, he takes her by the hand and leads her in. News of the meeting reaches Walter, accompanied by the report that Toby’s Dutch-style drawbridge, spanning the ditch, has been broken and crushed. The comic damage gives the five-year period a concrete ending: courtship and military play converge on the miniature bridge, while Walter finds the mishap an inexhaustible source of amusement. In this chronology, 1718 is not merely a date at which events occur; it is a marker for the recurrence of remembered war, household disagreement, and the improvised campaigns of Toby and Trim.