5 - The Sermons of Mr. Yorick: the commonplace and the rhetoric of the heart

Summary

Celebrating the remarkable metamorphosis of an obscure country cleric into a metropolitan literary lion, the young James Boswell's 'A Poetical Epistle to Doctor Sterne, Parson Yorick, and Tristram Shandy' fetes Sterne not only as the creator of Tristram Shandy, but also as the author of modish sermons: “Next from the press there issues forth / A sage divine fresh from the north; / On Sterne's discourses we grew mad, / Sermons! where are they to be had? / Then with the fashionable Guards / The Psalms supply the place of Cards / A Strange enthusiastic rage / For sacred text now seis'd the age” (CH 83) / That Sterne had talent as a sermonist is clear from his reputation as a popular and moving preacher in his own parishes, the frequency with which he preached from the pulpit of York minster, and the fact that he was called upon to do so at prestigious occasions such as the enthronement of Archbishop Herring in 1743. It was literary celebrity, however, that gave his sermons the kind of cachet they needed to succeed in a notoriously overstocked market. Outstripping the bestselling Tristram Shandy in terms of lifetime editions, the first two volumes of The Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1760) were carefully marketed to make the most of the fashionable buzz generated by the novel. Two further volumes followed in 1766; three more were posthumously published in 1769.