Complete and unabridged, with 46 full-page plates by Thomas Gainsborough, Richard Wilson and William Hogarth. A man sets out to write his life and gets stuck before his own birth, digressing through his uncle's model fortifications, a black page, a marbled page and a blank one left for the reader. Sterne published it in instalments over eight years and was famous by the second. It broke every rule of narration before most of them had been made. Forty-six plates spanning 1673 to 1812, from Hogarth and Rowlandson to scenes of battle, ghosts and a seaman's wife, mirror the digressive, unruly spirit of Sterne's narrative.