USS Tristram Shandy (1864) USS Tristram Shandy (1864) USS "Tristram Shandy" (1864) was a 444-ton steamer and blockade runner captured by the Union Navy during the American Civil War. With her Parrott rifle installed, she was used by the Navy as a gunboat to patrol navigable waterways of the Confederate States of America to prevent the South from trading with other countries. "Tristram Shandy" took her name from the hero—and the shortened title—of the novel, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman", which was written by Laurence Sterne between the years 1759 and 1767. She was a schooner-rigged, iron-hulled sidewheel steamer completed in
John Hall-Stevenson the result that in 1760 Hall-Stevenson abused Smollett and his associates in "A Nosegay and a Simile for the Reviewers" and "Two Lyrical Epistles, or Margery the Cook Maid, to the Critical Reviewers". Hall-Stevenson's "A Sentimental Dialogue between two Souls in the palpable Bodies of an English Lady of Quality and an Irish Gentleman" (1768) was seen as a parody of his friend Sterne's "Tristram Shandy". Hall-Stevenson also wrote on politics. He denounced the Earl of Bute and all politicians, whether Whig or Tory, with such works as "A Pastoral Cordial; or an Anodyne Sermon, preached before their Graces Newcastle