The toughest job

摘要

Pity Walter, the father of Tristram Shandy in Laurence Sterne's celebrated comic novel of that name. He only wants the best for his boy, and has spent long hours studying the parenting theories of his day, enumerating all the dos and don'ts. But the world - in all its variety and incident - is out to fox him at every turn. His wife, noticing a clock has gone unwound, throws his son's humours out of whack at the moment of conception. At birth, Dr Slop's forceps crush Tristram's nose, ruining - so his father fears -an organ vital to a young man's social chances.