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 attending
Jesus College, Cambridge, he took holy orders, held several small livings near York, and was
also 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 these
early 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 and
eccentric 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 begin
Tristram Shandy, a work which occupied the rest of his life and into which he put all his
literary skill, whimsical genius, and multifarious reading. Shandy was published in a series of
nine volumes over a period of eight years. It was the literary sensation . Sterne came up to
London 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 and
Italy, partly for pleasure and partly in quest of health. His travels yielded material for Volume
VII of Shandy and for the charming Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, published
in the year of his death, 1768.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy appealed to the eighteenth-century interest
in the burlesque and the eccentric by its erratic, unpredictable, whimsical movement, its
flouting 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 the
hero; he is begotten but not born in the first volume; the narrative proceeds by "progressive
digressions," and the writer calculates that since it takes him a year to write four volumes
covering a day of his life, there is no reason why the book should ever come to an end. But if
we look more closely, we find that Sterne is not merely breaking down the carefully planned
models 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 of
the 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 accompanying
reactions and gestures, are of primary importance. Thus he changes the scale of his narrative
even more radically than Richardson had done by his epistolary method, and lays even more
stress on "writing to the moment." Yet the fleeting impulses and gestures are often organized
ipattern, with counterbalancing moods and skilful repetition of words and gestures to advance
the 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 much
less 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


Tristram-Walter Shandy his Father, with his pedantic ideas and systems, Uncle Toby, the old
soldier who plays at military engineering and is full of nave and quixotic benevolence,
seconded by his faithful Corporal Trim. But the humor is irradiated with sympathy; the
humorous character is regarded not as a ridiculous creature who departs from the standard of
right reason but as a quaint exponent of natural goodness who moves us to sympathetic smiles
and tears. Sterne carries farther than any writer before him the idea of mixed feelings. The
whole paradox of man as a rational animal, which had aroused Swift's indignation and
disgust, produces in Sterne various modes of mixed feeling, notably a vein of playful
obscenity. There is some affectation, but great subtlety also, in his discovery of the proximity
of the comic to the tearful, and the grotesque to the pathetic.
These complex feelings fill his characteristic episodes, the famous sketches which are the best
known parts of Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey. No one, except prehaps
Dickens, has succeeded fully in recapturing his special effects, but he has had a surprising
great influence on later English novelists.