# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Sterne, Laurence

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​STERNE, LAURENCE (1713–1768), English humorist, was the son of Roger Sterne, an English officer, and great-grandson of an archbishop of York. Nearly all our information about the first forty-six years of his life before he became famous as the author of Tristram Shandy is derived from a short memoir ​ jotted down by himself for the use of his daughter. It gives nothing but the barest facts, excepting three anecdotes about his infancy, his school days and his marriage. He was born at Clonmel, Ireland, on the 24th of November 1713, a few days after the arrival of his father’s regiment from Dunkirk. The regiment was then disbanded, but very soon after re-established, and for ten years the boy and his mother moved from place to place after the regiment, from England to Ireland, and from one part of Ireland to another. The familiarity thus acquired with military life and character stood Sterne in good stead when he drew the portraits of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. After ten years of wandering, he was fixed for eight or nine years at a school at Halifax in Yorkshire. His father died when he was in his eighteenth year, and he was indebted for his university education to one of the members of his father’s family. His great-grandfather the archbishop had been master of Jesus College, Cambridge, and to Jesus College he was sent. He was admitted to a sizarship in July 1733, took his B.A. degree in 1736 and proceeded M.A. in 1740. One of his uncles was precentor and canon of York. Young Sterne took orders, and through this uncle’s influence obtained in 1738 the living of Sutton-in-the-Forest, some 8 m. north of York. Two years after his marriage in 1741 to a lady named Elizabeth Lumley he was presented to the neighbouring living of Stillington, and did duty at both places. He was also a prebendary of York Cathedral.
Sutton was Sterne’s residence for twenty uneventful years. He kept up an intimacy which had begun at Cambridge with John Hall-Stevenson (1718–1785), a witty and accomplished epicurean, owner of Skelton Hall (“Crazy Castle”) in the Cleveland district of Yorkshire. Skelton Hall is nearly 40 m. from Sutton, but Sterne, in spite of his double duties, seems to have been a frequent visitor there, and to have found in his not too strait-laced friend a highly congenial companion. Sterne is said to have never formally become a member of the circle of gay squires and clerics at Skelton known as the “Demoniacks”; but no doubt he shared their festivities. Stevenson’s various occasional sallies in verse and prose—his Fables for Grown Gentlemen (1761–1770), his Crazy Tales (1762), and his numerous skits at the political opponents of Wilkes, among whose “macaronies” he numbered himself—were collected after his death, and it is impossible to read them without being struck with their close family resemblance in spirit and turn of thought to Sterne’s work, inferior as they are in literary genius. Without Stevenson, Sterne would probably have been a more decorous parish priest, but he would probably never have written Tristram Shandy or left any other memorial of his singular genius. In 1747 Sterne published a sermon preached in York under the title of The Case of Elijah. This was followed in 1750 by The Abuses of Conscience, afterwards inserted in vol. ii. of Tristram Shandy. In 1759 he wrote a skit on a quarrel between Dean Fountayne and Dr Topham, a York lawyer, over the bestowal of an office in the gift of the archbishop. This sketch, in which Topham figures as Trim the sexton, and the author as Lorry Slim, gives an earnest of Sterne’s powers as a humorist. It was not published until after his death, when it appeared in 1769 under the title of A Political Romance, and afterwards the History of a Warm Watch-Coat. The first two volumes of Tristram Shandy were issued at York in 1759 and advertised in London on the 1st of January 1760, and at once made a sensation. York was scandalized at its clergyman’s indecency, and indignant at his caricature as “Slop” of a local physician (Dr John Burton); London was charmed with his audacity, wit and graphic unconventional power. He went to London early in the year to enjoy his triumph, and found himself at once a personage in society—was called upon and invited out by lion-hunters, was taken to Windsor by Lord Rockingham, and had the honour of supping with the duke of York.
For the last eight years of his life after this sudden leap out of obscurity we have a faithful record of Sterne’s feelings and movements in letters to various persons, published in 1775 by his sole child and daughter, Lydia Sterne de Medalle, and in the Letters from Yorick to Eliza (1766–1767), also published in 1775. At the end of the sermon in Tristram he had intimated that, if this sample of Yorick’s pulpit eloquence was liked, “there are now in the possession of the Shandy family as many as will make a handsome volume, at the world’s service, and much good may they do it.” Accordingly, when a second edition of the first instalment of Tristram was called for in three months, two volumes of Sermons by Yorick were announced. Although they had little or none of the eccentricity of the history, they proved almost as popular. Sterne’s clerical character was far from being universally injured by his indecorous freaks as a humorist: Lord Fauconberg presented the author of Tristram Shandy with the perpetual curacy of Coxwold. To this new residence he went in high spirits with his success, “fully determined to write as hard as could be,” seeing no reason why he should not give the public two volumes of Shandyism every year and why this should not go on for forty years. By the beginning of August 1760 he had another volume written, and was so “delighted with Uncle Toby’s imaginary character that he was become an enthusiast.” The author’s delight in this wonderful creation was not misleading; it has been fully shared by every generation of readers since. For two years in succession Sterne kept his bargain with himself to provide two volumes a year. Vols. iii. and iv. appeared in 1761; vols. v. and vi. in January 1762. But his sanguine hopes of continuing at this rate were frustrated by ill-health. He was ordered to the south of France; it was two years and a half before he returned; and he came back with very little accession of strength. His reception by literary circles in France was very flattering. He was overjoyed with it. “ ’Tis comme à Londres,” he wrote to Garrick from Paris; “I have just now a fortnight’s dinners and suppers upon my hands.” Through all his pleasant experiences of French society, and through the fits of dangerous illness by which they were diversified, he continued to build up his history of the Shandy family, but the work did not progress as rapidly as it had done. Not till January 1765 was he ready with the fourth instalment of two volumes; and one of them, vol. vii., leaving the Shandy family for a time, gave a lively sketch of the writer’s own travels to the south of France in search of health. This was a digression of a new kind, if anything can be called a digression in a work the plan of which is to fly off at a tangent whenever and wherever the writer’s whim tempts him. In the first volume, anticipating an obvious complaint, he had protested against digressions that left the main work to stand still, and had boasted—not without justice in a Shandean sense—that he had reconciled digressive motion with progressive. But in vol. vii. the work is allowed to stand still while the writer is being transported from Shandy Hall to Languedoc. The only progress we make is in the illustration of the buoyant and joyous temper of Tristram himself, who, after all, is a member of the Shandy family, and was due a volume for the elucidation of his character. Vol. viii. begins the long-promised story of Uncle Toby’s amours with the Widow Wadman. After seeing to the publication of this instalment of Tristram and of another set of sermons—more pronouncedly Shandean in their eccentricity—he quitted England again in the summer of 1765, and travelled in Italy as far as Naples. The ninth and last and shortest volume of Tristram, concluding the episode of Toby Shandy’s amours, appeared in 1767. This despatched, Sterne turned to a new project, which had probably been suggested by the ease and freedom with which he had moved through the travelling volume in Tristram. The Sentimental Journey through France and Italy was intended to be a long work: the plan admitted of any length that the author chose, but, after seeing the first two volumes through the press in the early months of 1768, Sterne’s strength failed him, and he died in his lodgings at 41 Old Bond Street on the 18th of March, three weeks after the publication. The loneliness of his end has often been commented on; it was probably due to its unexpectedness. He had pulled through so many sharp attacks of his “vile influenza” and other lung disorders that he began to be seriously alarmed only three days before his death.
​Sterne's character defies analysis in brief space. It is too subtle and individual to be conveyed in general terms. For comments upon him from points of view more or less diverse the reader may be referred to Thackeray's Humourists, Professor Masson's British Novelists (1859), and H. D. Traill's sketch in the " English Men of Letters " Series. The fullest biography is Mr Percy Fitzgerald's (1864). But the reader who cares to have an opinion about Sterne should hesitate till he has read and re-read in various moods considerable portions of Sterne's own writing. This writing is so singularly frank and unconventional that its drift is not at once apparent to the literary student. The indefensible indecency and overstrained sentimentality are on the surface; but after a time every repellent defect is forgotten in the enjoyment of the exquisite literary art. In the delineation of character by graphically significant speech and action, introduced at unexpected turns, left with happy audacity to point their own meaning, and pointing it with a force that the dullest cannot but understand, he takes rank with the very greatest masters. In Toby Shandy he has drawn a character universally lovable and admirable; but Walter Shandy is almost greater as an artistic triumph, considering the difficulty of the achievement. Dr Ferriar, in his Illustrations of Sterne (published in 1798), pointed out several unacknowledged plagiarisms from Rabelais, Burton and others; but it is only fair to the critic to say that he was fully aware that they were only plagiarisms of material, and do not detract in the slightest from Sterne's reputation as one of the greatest of literary artists.
A revised edition of Mr Percy Fitzgerald's Life of Sterne, containing much new information, appeared in 1896. There is also a valuable study of Sterne by M. Paul Stapfer (1870, 2nd ed., 1882) ; and many fresh particulars as to Sterne's relations with his wife and daughter, and also with the lady known as " Eliza " (Mrs Elizabeth Draper), are collected in Mr Sidney Lee's article in the Dict. Nat. Biog. Sterne's original journal to Mrs Draper (" The Bramine's Journal "), after she had gone back to India, and extending from the 13th of April to the 4th of August 1767, is now in the department of MSS., British Museum (addit. MS. 34,527). A convenient edition of Sterne's works, edited by Professor George Saintsbury, was issued in six volumes in 1894. See also Wilbur L. Cross, The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne (New York, 1909) ; and Walter Sichel, Sterne: a Study (1910). (W. M.; A. D.)