Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)

Laurence Sterne, 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 Laurence Sterne took orders, and through this uncle's influence obtained in 1738 the living of Sutton-in-the-Forest, some 8 miles 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 Laurence Sterne's residence for twenty uneventful years. He kept up an intimacy which had begun at Cambridge with John Hall-Stevenson, a witty and accomplished epicurean, owner of Skelton Hall ("Crazy Castle") in the Cleveland district of Yorkshire. Skelton Hall is nearly 40 miles 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 eccentric 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.