The 'conflict' is an incident in Sterne's novel.

'Obadiah Slope,' Trollope tells us, purportedly combines the names of Obadiah, a servant in the Shandy household, and Mr Slop, the 'man mid-wife,' a ridiculous figure who serves the Shandy family (and rather poorly). Eighteenth-century fiction is not my speciality, but I can't imagine that many other novels from Sterne's day exploited typography and printing conventions to anything like the same degree, and it's all done for narrative and dramatic purposes (both comic and tragic). Not only is it funny (I may never have laughed harder in reading a work fiction than I did at the chestnut scene), but it is exceedingly strange. The book seems an impossible creature for its time. Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is one of the great English novels. I find this sort of thing - 'intertextuality' is the term in literary critical jargon - enormously fun. All my researches on the subject have, however, failed in enabling me to fix the date on which the family changed its religion. If this be so, I presume he was christened Obadiah, for that is his name, in commemoration of the conflict in which his ancestor so distinguished himself. Shandy, and that in early years he added an 'e' to his name, for the sake of euphony, as other great men have done before him. I have heard it asserted that he is lineally descended from that eminent physician who assisted at the birth of Mr T. Mr Slope's parentage I am not able to say much. An early instance is the opening of Chapter 4: Trollope builds out various characters with allusions to famous English novels. So I'll organize my remarks (perhaps in several installments) around one peculiarity of the novel: literary allusions. Barchester Towers (1857), the second volume in the 'Chronicles of Barsetshire,' is almost three times the length of The Warden (1855). One blog post is not suited to the full discussion of a novel, especially a long one.

The warden barchester towers