# Talk:Laurence Sterne

The Wikipedia article "Lawrence Sterne" must be removed or redirected (linked) to the "Laurence Sterne" article. I don't know how to remove pages completely or make aliases. Whoever knows how to do it, please do it. The spelling of the author's first name as "Lawrence" is wrong or at least not commonly accepted.
Is he spelled "Laurence" or "Lawrence"? Stern 23:59, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

According to the Times Literary Supplement for July 7th 2006 (review of Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Nations) "The entry for Laurence Sterne ... contains passages lifted without acknowledgement from the 1828 periodical The Mirror for Nature and from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, not because either passage is insightful (neither is), but presumably because both texts are online. The use of the Brtitannica leads this up-to-the-minute internet encyclopedia to list only one book published after 1912 among the dozen books suggested for further reading on Sterne." I note that one reference has been added since this article was published. But does it make sense to retain antique references to books that are probably no longer available? --RichardVeryard 08:29, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Sterne was not Anglo-Irish, he was just born in Ireland, where his father was stationed.  Anglo-Irish implies something quite different.  Sterne was, so far as one can tell from this article, an Englishman. john k 16:49, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, he was far less Irish than Swift was. Laurence never wished to be identified as Irish, but there is a small connection, if only to list him as one of many English writers who visited Ireland/experienced Ireland and were bitter from it (Trollope seems to be the exception, except that Thackery makes some nice comments in regard to Ireland). Ottava Rima (talk) 05:33, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
It is misleading to say that Sterne merely visited or experienced Ireland: He spent most of his first eleven years living in the place, full-time; in other words, almost his entire childhood. He was finally moved to England by his father to begin his secondary education. In modern times, one such as Sterne would be defined as having both Irish and British citizenship.  --O'Dea (talk) 04:01, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

Sterne's literature is taught in Irish universities as both Irish and English writing, and he is registered as an Irish writer (but not exclusively so) at the Princess Grace Irish Library (PGIL), an extensive and reputable scholarly database of Irish writers.
Remarks about Sterne at the latter facility record that he is included in Richard Ryan's Biographia Hibernica: Irish Worthies (1821), Vol. II, pp.576-78; also in Charles A. Read's The Cabinet of Irish Literature (London, Glasgow, Dublin, Belfast & Edinburgh: Blackie & Son (1876-78); and in Justin McCarthy's Irish Literature (Washington: University of America) (1904).
According to the PGIL writers database entry for Sterne, with the notable exception of A. N. Jeffares Anglo-Irish Literature (Macmillan 1982), Irish literary histories generally do not mention Sterne (viz., Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature, 1986), though dictionaries of biography do (viz., Harry Boylan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, 1988.)
So much for Sterne's Irish credentials. It would be incomplete to fix Sterne as only Irish or only English, because he was both, with most of his childhood lived in Ireland, and the remainder of his life in England, with the exception of some late travelling on the Continent. --O'Dea (talk) 05:10, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

There's a good article in First Monday, which mentions this page and some issues with it. It would probably be worth taking a look. Cheers. Cormaggio is learning 11:05, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

That hardly seems to fully be the case after reading numerous printed biographical records. At the most ungenerous, it seems the two simply had a "tumultuous" marriage. In any case, those lines absolutely do not belong under the subject heading "Works;" they belong under "Biography," and they are completely a propos of nothing before or after excepting the lame joke. I have removed them for the time ("Citation Needed" or no, it is neither the appropriate place in the article nor the type of thing that should be said without citation); please discuss.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.57.129.139 (talk) 06:55, 20 October 2007 (UTC) 

As a result of the Yorkshire Network GLAMwiki Project there are now the first (of hopefully many) donated images from the Laurence Sterne Trust available on Commons: Category:Images from the Laurence Sterne Trust. I hope that they will be useful for illustrating articles related to Sterne and his works. If there are particular topics that you would like to see more of you may want to search the trust's online collections and contact me with requests. You may also find useful resources on the trust's Sterneana pages. Thanks! PatHadley (talk) 14:31, 12 November 2014 (UTC)

Changed the line "A year later some fellow Freemasons erected a memorial stone with a rhyming epitaph near to his original burial place." to "A year later a group Freemasons erected a memorial stone with a rhyming epitaph near to his original burial place." to avoid confusion.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Oneksons (talk • contribs) 04:08, 4 January 2015 (UTC) 

If you run Earwig's Copyvio Detector on this page, it will appear that this page is full of copyright violations from Jane Austen Centre website; however, this web article was posted on December 15, 2015 and if you look at Laurence Sterne's article history, you will see that it contained the same information pre-dating December 15, 2015. From this, I feel confident in stating that the Jane Austen webpage copied information from Wikipedia and that this page does not contain copyright violations. Since this is not an obvious Wikipedia mirror, I just wanted to clarify this for concerned readers and editors. Skyes(BYU) (talk) 20:21, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Hello. I've noticed that Laurence Sterne's nationality (or ethnicity) has been changed once again to Irish. This is a contentious subject. I have studied a small amount of literature from Ireland and I must say that although I once categorized Sterne as an Irish writer, the more I learned about his life led me to have doubts about classifying him this way. Much has been cited about Sterne's upbringing in Ireland, his mother being a part of the Anglo-Irish class, and the various references in his work to the land he was born in. This information is good to know, and is no doubt essential to understanding an aspect of this unusual man. But from what I've read about him, his youth is remarkably akin to what we now call a military brat. Sterne spent the vast majority of his life in Yorkshire, and didn't start writing anything until his mid-40's. If I remember correctly, he was advised to tone down the Yorkshire elements in Tristram Shandy very early on in the writing process. I do not mean to suggest that we should dismiss his upbringing. Rather, his ethnic identity is very dubious.
In the past, I have noted that his identity has been made Anglo-Irish. I'm not necessarily convinced that label fits him either. He does not really fall into the class that Swift, Berkeley, Goldsmith etc. fall into. By comparison, Congreve spent more of his upbringing in Ireland than Sterne did, but I don't believe anybody sees Congreve as possessing that identity anymore. Perhaps other's could share their thoughts on this matter WoodRose79 (talk) 23:52, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

In the lead we have

He attended Jesus College, Cambridge on a sizarship,
In the infobox

Alma mater Jesus College, Cambridge
While in the body

he was admitted to Jesus College, Oxford with a sizarship
He returned to Oxford in the summer of 1740 to be awarded his Master of Arts.
he continued a close friendship that had begun at Cambridge with John Hall-Stevenson
Cavrdg (talk) 05:59, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

Good catch, how embarrassing! It’s all Cambridge! (Confirmed here) I can’t imagine how that mix-up happened. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 06:16, 2 April 2025 (UTC)