Laurence Sterne (24 November 1713 – 18 March 1768) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican cleric. He is best known for his comic novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767) and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768).
Sterne grew up in a military family, travelling mainly in Ireland but briefly in England. He attended Jesus College, Cambridge, on a , gaining bachelor's and master's degrees, and was ordained as a priest in 1738. While Vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest, Yorkshire, he married Elizabeth Lumley in 1741. He briefly wrote political propaganda for the Whigs, but abandoned politics in 1742. In 1759, he wrote an ecclesiastical satire A Political Romance, which embarrassed the church and was burned. Having discovered his talent for comedy, at age 46 he dedicated himself to humour writing as a vocation. Also in 1759, he published the first volume of Tristram Shandy, which was an enormous success and continued for a total of nine volumes. He was a literary celebrity for the rest of his life. In addition to his novels, he published several volumes of sermons. Sterne died in 1768 and was buried in the yard of St George's, Hanover Square.
The first decade of Laurence Sterne's life was impoverished and unsettled. After his birth, the family spent six months in Clonmel, then ten months at Roger's mother's estate in Elvington, North Yorkshire, while Roger had no army posting. From 1715 to 1723, the Sternes moved repeatedly (about once a year) between poor family lodgings in army barracks in Britain and Ireland, with brief ownership of a townhouse in Dublin during a particularly prosperous stint from 1717 to 1719. These postings included three separate moves to Dublin, at other times living in Plymouth, the Isle of Wight, Wicklow, Annamoe, and Carrickfergus. In 1723, at the age of ten, Sterne was relocated to his uncle's household in Halifax, on the condition that he would repay his uncle for the cost of his upkeep and education. This arrangement reflected both the poor financial resources of Sterne's father, and the strained relationship he had with his wealthier family members. Sterne never saw his father again, as Roger was next ordered to Jamaica where he died of malaria in 1731.
Sterne married Elizabeth Lumley on 30 March 1741, despite both being ill with Tuberculosis. Only one of their several children survived infancy, a daughter named Lydia. Throughout their marriage, Sterne had adulterous affairs, and developed "an unsavoury but deserved reputation as a libertine".
In 1743, he was presented to the neighbouring Benefice of Stillington by Reverend Richard Levett, prebendary of Stillington, who was patron of the living. Subsequently, Sterne did duty both there and at Sutton. Sterne lived in Sutton for 20 years, during which time he continued a close friendship that had begun at Cambridge with John Hall-Stevenson, a witty and accomplished bon vivant, owner of Skelton Hall in the Cleveland district of Yorkshire.;
Sterne's life at this time was closely tied with his uncle, Jaques Sterne, the archdeacon of Cleveland and precentor of York Minster. Sterne's uncle was an ardent Whig, and urged Sterne to begin a career of political journalism. Sterne wrote anonymous propaganda in the York Gazetteer from 1741 to 1742. Sterne's published attacks on the Tory party earned him career favours from the church (including a prebendary of York Minster), but also harsh personal criticism. Sterne abruptly abandoned his political writing, leading to a permanent falling-out with his uncle, and stalling his ecclesiastical career.
In 1744, Sterne purchased several pieces of farmland in Sutton, with the hope that raising crops and dairy cattle would supplement his household's foodstores and finances. However, the farm was not particularly successful. Meanwhile, he sought patronage from John Fountayne, a college acquaintance who became Dean of York in 1747. To earn Fountayne's favor, Sterne wrote the Latin sermon which Fountayne preached in order to earn his doctorate of divinity. In 1751, Fountayne granted Sterne a very minor post, the Commissary of Pocklington and Pickering. In 1758, Sterne gave up directly farming his land, and leased the property out. He relocated to York to assist Fountayne with bureaucratic tasks, in hopes of further preferment.
Despite its lack of success, A Political Romance was a turning point for Sterne. He later wrote that, before finishing it, "he hardly knew he could write at all, much less with humour, so as to make his reader laugh." At the age of 46, Sterne dedicated himself to writing for the rest of his life. He immediately began work on his best-known novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the first volumes of which were published in 1759. Sterne was at work on his celebrated comic novel during the year that his mother died, his wife was seriously ill, and his daughter was also taken ill with a fever."Cross (1908), chap. 8, The Publication of Tristram Shandy: Volumes I and II, p. 197 He wrote as fast as he possibly could, composing the first 18 chapters between January and March 1759.Cross (1908), chap. 8, The Publication of Tristram Shandy: Volumes I and II, p. 178. Sterne borrowed money for the printing of his novel, suggesting that he was confident in the prospective commercial success of his work.
The publication of Tristram Shandy made Sterne famous in London and on the continent. He was delighted by the attention, famously saying, "I wrote not to be fed but to be famous." He spent part of each year in London, being fêted as new volumes appeared. As Sterne assiduously promoted his book, some of the attention he received was scandal: at the time, it was slightly disreputable for any gentleman to write for financial gain; for a clergyman to appear motivated by money, and to use "indecent" humour to pursue it, was doubly questionable. Sterne's bawdiness was criticized in a series of 1760s pamphlets, and he was encouraged to "mend his style" by the Bishop of Gloucester. Even after the publication of volumes three and four of Tristram Shandy, Sterne's love of attention (especially as related to financial success) remained undiminished. In one letter, he wrote, "One half of the town abuse my book as bitterly, as the other half cry it up to the skies — the best is, they abuse it and buy it, and at such a rate, that we are going on with a second edition, as fast as possible."
In 1766, in the early days of British debates about slavery, the composer and former slave Ignatius Sancho wrote to Sterne, encouraging him to use his pen to lobby for the abolition of the slave trade. Sterne wrote back to say that he had just written a scene sympathizing with the oppression of a black servant, which appeared in the next published volume of Tristram Shandy. Sterne's widely publicised response to Sancho's letter became an integral part of 18th-century abolitionist literature.
It was rumoured that Sterne's body was stolen shortly after it was interred and sold to at Cambridge University. Circumstantially, it was said that his body was recognised by Charles Collignon, who knew him
and discreetly reinterred him back in St George's, in an unknown plot. A year later a group of erected a memorial stone with a rhyming epitaph near to his original burial place. A second stone was erected in 1893, correcting some factual errors on the memorial stone. When the churchyard of St. George's was redeveloped in 1969, amongst 11,500 skulls disinterred, several were identified with drastic cuts from anatomising or a post-mortem examination. One was identified to be of a size that matched a bust of Sterne made by Nollekens. The skull was held up to be his, albeit with "a certain area of doubt". Along with nearby skeletal bones, these remains were transferred to Coxwold churchyard in 1969 by the Laurence Sterne Trust. Alas, Poor Yorick, Letters, The Times, 16 June 1969, Kenneth Monkman, Laurence Sterne Trust. "If we have reburied the wrong one, nobody, I feel beyond reasonable doubt, would enjoy the situation more than Sterne" The story of the reinterment of Sterne's skull in Coxwold is alluded to in Malcolm Bradbury's novel To the Hermitage.
Sterne's novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman sold widely in England and throughout Europe. Translations of the work began to appear in all the major European languages almost immediately upon its publication. The novel itself starts with the narration, by Tristram, of his own conception. It proceeds mostly by what Sterne calls "progressive digressions" so that we do not reach Tristram's birth before the third volume. The novel is rich in characters and humour, and the influences of Rabelais and Miguel de Cervantes are present throughout. The novel ends after 9 volumes, published over a decade, but without anything that might be considered a traditional conclusion. Sterne inserts sermons, essays and legal documents into the pages of his novel; and he explores the limits of typography and print design by including marbled pages and an entirely black page within the narrative.
English writer and literary critic Samuel Johnson's verdict in 1776 was that "Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last."James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson…, ed. Malone, vol. II (London: 1824) p. 422. This is strikingly different from the views of continental European critics of the day, who praised Sterne and Tristram Shandy as innovative and superior. Voltaire called it "clearly superior to Rabelais", and later Goethe praised Sterne as "the most beautiful spirit that ever lived". Swedish translator Johan Rundahl described Sterne as an sensibility. Sterne influenced European writers as diverse as Denis Diderot and the Romanticism. His work also had noticeable influence over author Machado de Assis, who made use of the digressive technique in the novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. The Russian Formalist writer Viktor Shklovsky regarded Tristram Shandy as the archetypal, quintessential novel, "the most typical novel of world literature." Many of the innovations that Sterne introduced, adaptations in form that were an exploration of what constitutes the novel, were highly influential to Modernism writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and more recent writers such as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace. Italo Calvino referred to Tristram Shandy as the "undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde novels of our century". More recently, scholarly opinions of Tristram Shandy include those who minimize its significance as an innovation. Since the 1950s, following the lead of D. W. Jefferson, there are those who argue that, whatever its legacy of influence may be, Tristram Shandy in its original context actually represents a resurgence of a much older, Renaissance tradition of "Learned Wit" – owing a debt to such influences as the Scriblerus Club approach.;
Sterne's final novel, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, has many stylistic parallels with Tristram Shandy, and the narrator is one of the minor characters from the earlier novel. At its first publication, A Sentimental Journey was warmly received by readers who saw it as more sentimental and less bawdy than Tristram Shandy. From Sterne's death through the nineteenth century, A Sentimental Journey was considered Sterne's best and most beloved work, and it was more widely reprinted than Tristram Shandy. Today, A Sentimental Journey is often interpreted by critics as part of the same artistic project to which Tristram Shandy belongs. In addition to his fiction, two volumes of Sterne's Sermons were published during his lifetime; more copies of his Sermons were sold in his lifetime than copies of Tristram Shandy. In the years after Sterne's death, his family published additional sermons, as well as letter collections of his correspondence.
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