8/12/2019 L. Sterne

1/2

LAURENCE STERNE

Sterne was of an old Yorkshire family, the great-grandson of an archbishop of York.He was born at Clonmel, Ireland, where the regiment of his father, an ensign, was stationed,and his earliest experiences were of army life and of schooldays in Yorkshire. After attendingJesus College, Cambridge, he took holy orders, held several small livings near York, and wasalso a prebend of the Cathedral. His uncle Jaques involved him in local politics and

journalism on the Whig side, but for the most part he led a leisurely and aimless life in theseearly years, following his own whims and indulging a desultory interest in farming, hunting,

painting, music, and books. His literary pursuits might be described by a word of his own, as"hobbies" rather than serious studies. Under the guidance of his college friend John Hall-Stevenson, whom he often met at "Crazy Castle," his reading turned toward the quaint andeccentric learning to be found in Burton Anatomy of Melancholy and other more obscure

works.In 1759 he published a satirical pamphlet called A Political Romance , later A Good

Warm Watchcoat , in the manner of Swift, and the local success of this piece led him to beginTristram Shandy , a work which occupied the rest of his life and into which he put all hisliterary skill, whimsical genius, and multifarious reading. Shandy was published in a series ofnine volumes over a period of eight years. It was the literary sensation . Sterne came up toLondon and became a literary lion, following up his success with the publication of Sermons of Mr. Yorick. The years of his literary fame were also years of increasingly serious illness,for Sterne was a consumptive; for almost four years he resided and traveled in France andItaly, partly for pleasure and partly in quest of health. His travels yielded material for VolumeVII of Shandy and for the charming Sentimental Journey through France and Italy , publishedin the year of his death, 1768.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy appealed to the eighteenth-century interestin the burlesque and the eccentric by its erratic, unpredictable, whimsical movement, itsflouting of the conventions of orderly narrative and even of decency. At first sight it seems to

be a deliberate attempt to turn all the rules topsy-turvy; Sterne declares that his one rule is to be spontaneous and untrammeled. Thus we never get to an ordered account of the life of thehero; he is begotten but not born in the first volume; the narrative proceeds by "progressivedigressions," and the writer calculates that since it takes him a year to write four volumescovering a day of his life, there is no reason why the book should ever come to an end. But ifwe look more closely, we find that Sterne is not merely breaking down the carefully plannedmodels of Richardson and Fielding, but making ingenious constructive use of current

psychology and ethics. Under the influence of Locke's psychology, he studies the workings ofthe mind and takes an inventory of its contents. To him the actual content of consciousness,what passes through the mind of the character at a given moment, and the accompanyingreactions and gestures, are of primary importance. Thus he changes the scale of his narrativeeven more radically than Richardson had done by his epistolary method, and lays even morestress on "writing to the moment." Yet the fleeting impulses and gestures are often organizedipattern, with counterbalancing moods and skilful repetition of words and gestures to advancethe action ("incremental repetition"). He is didactic in his sentimental emphasis on natural

benevolence and philanthropy, but he does not dwell systematically on principles; he is muchless abstract than Richardson and Fielding, and moralizes in such a light and playful way as

almost to give a delicate caricature of moralizing. The eighteenth century would find his benevolism familiar, and also the group of humorous and grotesque characters who surround

8/12/2019 L. Sterne

2/2