4 - Laurence Sterne

Summary

“So Hills amid the Air encounter'd Hills Hurl'd to and fro with jaculation dire . . .” Paradise Lost, VI, 664-5 / Laurence Sterne (1713-68) spent the first twenty-five years of his adult life in obscurity as the functioning clergyman of a Yorkshire village. The closest contacts he had with fame were the opportunities to participate in the ecclesiastical pursuits of the York Minster establishment, second only to Canterbury in the Anglican hierarchy, and the local publication of two of his sermons (1747, 1750). Neither brought advancement. If anything else distinguishes Sterne's life prior to 1758, it would be his long bout with ill-health, a lingering consumption that seems to have first appeared during his time at Jesus College, Cambridge; it would eventually kill him. In 1758, a squabble within the York church concerning preferments triggered in Sterne a short satiric pamphlet reducing the arguments from the minster to the parish; A Political Romance was published in December 1758, and immediately suppressed by Sterne's superiors - only six copies are known to have survived. Immediately thereafter, Sterne started a satiric account of sermon-writing, apparently modelled on Pope's satire targeting bad poetry, Peri Bathous (i.e. On the Bathetic, a play on Longinus's famous first-century work of literary criticism, Peri Hupsous, i.e. On the Sublime). Thus the narrator's name, Longinus Rabelaicus, ties the work to both Pope and Rabelais; only two chapters survive of this so-called 'Rabelaisian Fragment'. Despite abandoning the project, Sterne worked passages from it into the first four volumes of his new work, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in instalments over the next eight years (vols. I-II, December, 1759; vols. III-IV, 1761; vols.V-VI, 1762; vols. VII-VIII, 1765; vol. IX, 1767).