Sterne, LAURENCE, one of the greatest of English humorists, was born at Clonnel in Ireland, on the 24th of December 1713. His father, Roger Sterne, at that time an ensign in the 34th or Chudleigh's regiment of foot, was the grandson of an archbishop of York who had played an active part as a Cavalier ecclesiastic in the troubles of the previous century. Of his mother we know only that she was the daughter of a 'noted sutler' of the name of Nuttle, and the widow of a soldier, probably a comrade of her second husband. To Roger Sterne she bore seven children, of whom, however, but three survived the period of infancy. The family, continually recruited by births and reduced by deaths, accompanied their parents in the ceaseless wanderings necessitated by the father's military duties; and it was not till Laurence was eleven years old that it was found possible, or at least convenient, to give him any systematic education. He was then sent to Halifax grammar-school, where he remained for over seven years, and whence he was by the assistance of his kinsman, Simon Sterne of Elvington, sent to Jesus College, Cambridge. Here he obtained a sizarship, and in 1736, after taking his B.A. degree, he quitted Cambridge for York, where his father's brother, Dr Jacques Sterne, held, together with a goodly number of ecclesiastical offices, the archdeaconry of the diocese. Through this uncle's influence Laurence, who had been ordained three months after taking his degree, and who took priest's orders in 1738, was presented to the living of Sutton-on-the-Forest, and then or immediately afterwards appointed a prebendary of York.
Three years later, in 1741, he married Miss Elizabeth Lumley, by whom he had one daughter, Lydia, born in 1745, to whom he was all his life tenderly attached, and who published an edition of his Letters after his death. Of his life in his Yorkshire parish during the next nineteen years little or nothing is known, except that at some time, probably near the end of this period, a quarrel took place between him and his uncle, because (to quote the former's account of it) 'I would not write party-paragraphs in the newspapers; though he was a party man I was not, and detested such dirty work, thinking it beneath me.' In 1759 he wrote the first two volumes of the work which was destined to make him famous, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, and which, after being first published at York in the autumn of that year by a local bookseller, was brought to London by its author in 1760, and there published anew. Its success was immediate and signal, and Sterne at once became a 'lion' of the fashionable world. The first edition of the book was exhausted in three months. In April Dodsley brought out a second, and this was shortly afterwards followed somewhat incongruously by a volume of the Sermons of the 'Rev. Mr Yorick.' By the end of the year vols. iii. and iv. of Tristram Shandy, for which Dodsley had given £380 in advance, were already in the press, and in January 1761 they made their appearance to receive from the town as heartily amused a welcome as their two predecessors.
Meanwhile Sterne, who had in the previous year been presented by one of his new friends of rank, Lord Falconberg, to the living of Coxwold, had transferred his residence to the parsonage of that place, which was thenceforth to be his home; and throughout the greater part of 1761 he was busy there upon the fifth and sixth volumes of his novel. They were published in December, and three weeks later Sterne, whose health, never robust, was already beginning to fail, left England for France, where he was received with high honours by the literary society of the time, and where he prolonged his stay until the summer of 1764. In January 1765 vols. vii. and viii. of Tristram Shandy were given to the world, and met with a more favourable reception than the two preceding volumes, the public interest in which had slightly flagged. They were followed by the publication of a second series of Sermons of a far more unclerical character than their predecessors, and, indeed, abounding in quaint touches of their author's peculiar humour. The autumn and winter of 1765 were spent in a tour through France and Italy, which supplied the material of the work to which, in the former of those countries, he still owes his fame. The summer of the following year saw him at work again at Coxwold on the ninth and last volume of Tristram Shandy, which appeared in January 1767. The rest of that year was occupied in the preparation of the first two volumes of The Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, and in the last days of February 1768 they were published. Their author's health, however, was now completely wrecked; the pulmonary malady from which he had long suffered advanced with rapid strides; and, attacked by pleurisy in the early days of March, he breathed his last in his London lodgings on the 18th of that month. His funeral, which was attended by only two mourners, one of whom was his publisher, took place four days after, at the Bayswater burying-ground of the parish of St George's, Hanover Square. A grim legend later obtained currency to the effect that two days after their interment Sterne's remains were stolen by body-snatchers and disposed of to the professor of Anatomy at Cambridge, by whom, a friend of the deceased, they were actually recognised on the dissecting-table. There seems, however, to be no other warrant for this ghastly story than is to be found in the fact, attested by the records of contemporary journals, that similar desecrations of this particular graveyard had about that time been common. The truth, however, as to the exact spot of Sterne's sepulture cannot now be ascertained. A stone erected many years later with an inscription recording (inaccurately) the date of his death, declares his body to be lying 'near to this place,' but that is all.
His position in English literature is almost in like case; for there is much the same difficulty in assigning their true place to his literary remains. It is, on the one hand, undeniable that there have been few writers of any age or country who have displayed such mastery over every form of humour, from the lowest to the highest, as was exercised from his very first entrance into the field of authorship by this Yorkshire clergyman who never published a line till he was close upon fifty, and who had somehow qualified himself for immediate and enthusiastic reception in the world of letters by a twenty-years' sojourn in a country parsonage. Yet, on the other hand, the imperfections of his art, and that in point not only of execution, but also of artistic conception and spirit, it is impossible to overlook. The wild eccentricity of his manner and arrangement, though it is of course a deliberate and, as a rule, it must be admitted, a highly successful bid for the laughter of the reader, was also to some extent the convenient cloak of a singularly slipshod literary style. His indecencies, if less gross than those of Swift or Rabelais, are by reason of their pruriosity far more offensive. His passages of pathos, sometimes genuine and deeply moving, too often take the form of an artificial and overstrained sentimentalism, and degenerate from the affecting into the affected. His literary conscience had more than the laxity of his time, and, as a later critic of much learning and acumen, Dr Ferriar, showed, he was unscrupulous in his unacknowledged borrowings from the writings of other men. Nevertheless he is, and deserves to be, a classic of English prose fiction. The extravagant Rabelaisian drollery that revels through the pages of Tristram Shandy, the marvellous keenness of eye, the inimitable delicacy of touch to which we owe the exquisite vignettes of the Sentimental Journey, might not of themselves have secured that place for Sterne; but it is for ever secured to him in right of that combination of subjective and personal with objective and dramatic humour in which perhaps he has never been excelled by any one save the creator of Falstaff. In Mr Shandy and his wife, in Corporal Trim, in Yorick, and above all in that masterpiece of truthful, subtle, tenderly humorous portraiture, 'My Uncle Toby,' Sterne has created imperishable types of character, and made their immortality his own.
See J. Ferriar, Illustrations of Sterne (1812); Life, by P. Fitzgerald (1864; rewritten, 1896); the present writer's Sterne, in the 'English Men of Letters' series (1882); Autobiographical Fragment (in Scott's and other memoirs); and The Whitefoord Papers (1898).