The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Characters

What do you call a main character who takes a backseat role in almost every scene? Tristram Shandy is all too happy dig up the dirt of other people's lives, all the while hovering around in the bac...

More Than a Funny NameYorick is the pastor of the village near Shandy Hall. He baptizes Tristram, and he's a friend and confidant of both Mr. Shandy and Tristram. Like Toby Shandy, Yorick has a goo...

Walter Shandy is Tristram's dad, and, more than anyone except Toby, Walter Shandy gets Tristram's attention. Tristram spends a lot of time and ink detailing his father's character. Here's what we k...

Toby is Tristram's uncle, Walter Shandy's brother, and a loveable doofus who loves his war toys.In the early eighteenth century, and for quite a while before that, men—especially the rich ones—...

Corporal Trim (or James Butler, which is his real name) is Toby's servant and a regular at Shandy Hall. He's irritating, loyal, funny, obtuse, acute, brave, sentimental, and all together a way more...

Mrs. Shandy is Tristram's mother, and she's kind of out of this world. Really—she's part of the novel's secret world of women. Men and women have so little to do with each other that Mrs. Shandy...

Dr. Slop is the village doc who's way into his hobby-horse: obstetrics. All righty, then. He possesses the latest and greatest medical equipment, and he's so eager to try it out that he scrapes the...

Who's more into sex, men or women? If you were forced to answer, you'd probably have to say men. Not so in the eighteenth century, or for centuries before that. In fact, men were cautioned against...

Susannah is Mrs. Shandy's maid and a walking Calamity Jane. We don't get a ton about Susannah's personality, but we do learn three things about her function in the story: she supports Mrs. Shandy's...

Obadiah is Mr. Shandy's go-to guy. Like Susannah, he's got the Shandy family's secrets on lockdown. He tells Mr. Shandy what's going on up upstairs with Mrs. Shandy; he runs to get the doctor; he r...