10 - Sterne and Romantic autobiography

Summary

Recoiling from the term 'self-biography' as coined in Isaac D'Israeli's Miscellanies (1796), William Taylor of the Monthly Review was at a loss for more felicitous options: 'it is not very usual in English to employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet autobiography would have seemed pedantic.' Given the rash of autobiographical writing in various modes that had begun to appear by 1800, however (and more, from William Wordsworth's Prelude to his sister Dorothy's journals, was being privately produced), the need for some such term was becoming pressing. 'Autobiography' and its cognates quickly gained currency in the years that followed, notably in the hands of reviewers who otherwise lacked a taxonomy answerable to what Thomas Carlyle was to call, in 1831, 'these Autobiographical times of ours'.

In early usage the connotation of ‘autobiography’ was often pejorative, as though the genre, though newly named, was not at all new in substance, and simply perpetuated a tradition of more or less mercenary, self-promotional, often ghostwritten ‘memoirs’ and ‘apologies’ that included such notorious works as An Apology for the Conduct of Mrs. Teresia Constantia Phillips (1748–9) and The Memoirs of Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington (1748–54). This was the implication when Robert Montgomery inveighed against ‘the memoir-scribblers, reminiscent-furbishers, &c. – The impudence of these auto-biographists’, or again when Robert Southey deplored (with a witty sting in the tail of his list) a culture in which ‘booksellers, public lecturers, pickpockets, and poets, become autobiographers’.