Augustan prose other novelists should be mentioned, for they, like Fielding and Richardson, were in dialog through their works. Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett held a personal dislike for one another, and their works similarly offered up oppositional views of the self in society and the method of the novel. Laurence Sterne was a clergyman, and he consciously set out to imitate Jonathan Swift with his "Tristram Shandy" (1759–1767). "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman" was a stylistic and formal revolution for the novel. Like Swift's satires, it begins with radical skepticism and a willingness to break apart figurative language
USS Tristram Shandy (1864) 1864 at Greenock, Scotland. She was originally owned by Matthew Isaac Wilson, a Liverpool, England, merchant. The ship subsequently sailed for the Bahamas, whence she took part in British efforts to continue trade with Southern states during the American Civil War. On her first attempt to run the Federal blockade, "Tristram Shandy" outdistanced a Union pursuer by dumping cargo overboard to gain a few more knots of speed. After reaching Wilmington, North Carolina, she returned to Nassau, Bahamas, to pick up another cargo earmarked for the Confederate States of America. Successfully slipping through the blockade, she unloaded at Wilmington and