This chapter, the second of two chapters on the eighteenth-century novel, focuses on the contractive urge in the novel of the period, and the attempt to picture organically whole bodies in the novel form as it develops from Fielding, Sterne and Richardson to Burney and Goethe. It suggests that this strand in the eighteenth-century novel, in opposition to the expansive drive explored in the previous chapter, is shaped by a desire for what Coleridge theorises as an organic aesthetic, but it argues too that even as the novel of the period is invested in such pictures of organic completion, it opens up forms of distance between mind and body which are the province of the prosthetic imagination.

The ‘ziggy shape’ comes from Stephen Dunn’s poem ‘History’, which is explored throughout the chapter. It engages with Penelope Corfield’s Time and the Shape of History. It sets out the troubles that historians have had in writing about law experience in the past. Using Laurence Sterne’s account of writing history in Tristram Shandy, Chapter 2 explores the narrative shape of history and of the law. The chapter also explores Sterne’s own experience of the law in eighteenth-century Yorkshire.