Tuesday, 14 September 1762. In the small Sussex village of East Hoathly, a shopkeeper and parish officer, Thomas Turner, sat down to write an entry into his journal. He was an assiduous man, and his diary is full of the detailed transactions of daily life, from his household ledgers to the composition of his dinners, a recipe for leftovers, important in a time of scarcity, saved from the monthly magazines. Despite his concern for self-improvement, voiced with a certain shamefaced regularity after each Sunday sermon, he liked a sociable drink. On this particular evening he had been visited by a close friend, Mr Tipper, who in addition to knowing ‘immortal Hudibras by heart’ (as his tombstone records) was also a Newhaven brewer, and excise officer during the hop harvest. Turner's record was to the point. ‘At home all day and pretty busy. In the afternoon employed myself a-writing. In the even Mr Tipper read to me part of a – I know not what to call it but Tristram Shandy.’

Mr Tipper had brought along Laurence Sterne's comic novel a little after its first volumes had made such an impact on the circles of fashionable literary life. And if we put aside for a moment that briefest tremor of typographical consternation in Turner's entry at quite what it was that his guest was reading aloud, we might note that his hesitation was not attributable to ignorance. Sterne's was one of a range of books that Turner records encountering in the pages of his journal.