English novel Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), author of the epistolary novels "Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded" (1740) and "Clarissa" (1747–48); Henry Fielding (1707–1754), who wrote "Joseph Andrews" (1742) and "The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling" (1749); Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), who published "Tristram Shandy" in parts between 1759 and 1767; Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774), author of "The Vicar of Wakefield" (1766); Tobias Smollett (1721–1771), a Scottish novelist best known for his comic picaresque novels, such as "The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle" (1751) and "The Expedition of Humphry Clinker" (1771), who influenced Charles Dickens; and Fanny Burney (1752–1840), whose novels "were enjoyed and admired by Jane
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman crushed by Dr. Slop's forceps. Thirdly, another of his father's theories was that a person's name exerted enormous influence over that person's nature and fortunes, with the worst possible name being Tristram. In view of the previous accidents, Tristram's father decreed that the boy would receive an especially auspicious name, Trismegistus. Susannah mangled the name in conveying it to the curate, and the child was christened Tristram. According to his father's theory, his name, being a conflation of "Trismegistus" (after the esoteric mystic Hermes Trismegistus) and "Tristan" (whose connotation bore the influence through folk etymology of Latin "tristis", "sorrowful"), doomed