The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman of the slave trade. "That subject, handled in your striking manner, would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many — but if only one — Gracious God! — what a feast to a benevolent heart!" he wrote. In July 1766 Sancho's letter was received by Reverend Laurence Sterne shortly after he had just finished writing a conversation between his fictional characters Corporal Trim and his brother Tom in "Tristram Shandy", wherein Tom described the oppression of a black servant in a sausage shop in Lisbon, which he had visited. Laurence Sterne's widely publicised 27 July 1766 response to Sancho's letter became
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