The Job Controversy, Sterne, and the Question of Allegory

THE FIERCE DEBATE about the right way to read the book of Job, which was under way fifteen years before Steme began Tristram Shandy and was briskly pursued all the time he was writing and publishing it, is generally acknowledged to have influenced the way he planned and executed his novel. The hints dropped by himself and the literary gossipmongers point to some sort of allegory linking scenes in the Shandy parlour to the disagreements over Job, and the remains of this plan in Tristram Shandy indicate that Sterne meant to take sides against his patron William Warburton by dramatising the triumph of the principles of the bishop's leading opponents, Richard Grey, Charles Peters, and Leonard Chappelow.J Melvyn New has spelt these hints