Late in 1759, the first two volumes of a very curious novel were published in York. An early draft had been rejected by a London publisher, so the author, a middle-aged English clergyman with little money and no literary connections, decided to print a short run of the book at his own expense. Before the appearance of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne was unknown outside Yorkshire, and not much regarded even there. His only previous literary work had so offended local dignitaries that it had been quickly withdrawn from sale and the copies burned.
Yet all this was to change in a manner seemingly miraculous. An early review of Tristram Shandy compared it to the works of Cervantes and Rabelais, and soon everyone was talking about the book. Sterne travelled down to London, and on his first morning in town called into a bookshop before breakfast to enquire about its progress. He was "highly flattered, when the shopman told him, that there was not such a book to be had in London neither for love or money". It was so entertaining, so irreverent, so droll; James Boswell summed up the general opinion when he referred to "that damn'd clever book". Sterne found himself one of the most celebrated authors in the land: so famous that a letter addressed simply to "Tristram Shandy, Esq, Europe" reached him. He was lionised in fashionable London society, presented at Court, and pestered with invitations. Flirtatious letters from aristocratic beauties arrived at his lodgings.
He sat for a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Earnings from the book made him rich. He was able to ride back to Yorkshire in a smart new chaise pulled by a handsome pair of horses, a very different transport from the "lean, sorry, jack-ass" on which he had arrived. Yet this acclaim was not universal. Goldsmith found Tristram Shandy "pert" and "obscene"; Johnson thought it "odd" and opined that it would not last; Horace Walpole dismissed it as "the dregs of nonsense ". Some readers disliked Sterne's facetious, irreverent style, and thought the book's indecency particularly unbecoming in a clergyman. Even John Cleland, author of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (better known as Fanny Hill) disapproved of Tristram Shandy, declaring to Boswell that its author should be horsewhipped.
He had promoted Tristram Shandy skilfully, ghosting a letter laudatory about his book for a young singer visiting York with whom he had become romantically involved to send to her friend back in London, the great actor-manager David Garrick. Sterne was a shameless self-publicist; both the content and the form of his book were calculated to appeal to an emerging market of sophisticated readers, who delighted in a work that both entertained and stimulated without preaching at them. Sterne's success in middle age contrasted with the obscurity of his early life. He was born in Clonmel, Co Tipperary, the second child of an impoverished ensign, and spent his first 10 years trailing around Ireland, a camp-follower in a succession of dismal billets. Sterne's father was himself the second son of a third son of an archbishop of York, but the family fortunes had declined through the generations, so much so that Laurence was able to attend university only because of the patronage of a wealthier cousin.
There he contracted tuberculosis, a blight from which he was never to recover and which was to bring about his premature death in 1768, at the age of only 54. In 1741, he married Elizabeth Lumley, a homely woman who bore him a succession of stillborn children; only one survived into adulthood. Soon Sterne was seeking comfort elsewhere; marital relations deteriorated, particularly when Elizabeth found him in bed with the maid. Some time after this she "went out of her sense, when she fancied herself the Queen of Bohemia". She recovered; but the marriage was beyond cure.
Perhaps the shadow of imminent death encouraged the freedom of spirit later admired by Goethe. Nietzsche went still further, honouring Sterne as "the most liberated spirit of all time". Subsequent critics expressed distaste. Writing nearly a century after Sterne's death, William Makepeace Thackeray expressed his disgust at those "foul satyr's eyes" leering out constantly from the pages of Sterne's works. He deplored Sterne's reported unfaithfulness to his wife, and deplored too his "taking his personal griefs and joys, his private thoughts and feeling to market, to write them on paper, and sell them for money".
As Thackeray's criticism suggests, critics tended to identify the author with the characters in his book, not least because Sterne had cast it in the form of a fictionalised autobiography. He did nothing to discourage this ambiguity. He published a book under the title The Sermons of Mr Yorick (one of his principal characters), and referred to his wife and daughter as "the Shandean family". He described his own behaviour as "Shandeism". His final home became known as "Shandy Hall" and is now open to the public as such.
Laurence Sterne has gone down in history as an old goat. It is true that he was estranged from his wife, and had a succession of sentimental friendships with women. He wrote that he had been "in love with one princess or another, almost all my life ". Perhaps the licentiousness that surfaces in his work was an outlet for sexual frustration; he told one of his doctors that he had no sexual relations a woman for 15 years. Ian Campbell Ross, a fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, knows his Sterne. His biography is built on a solid foundation of erudition. Yet whether it will supercede the two-volume life by Arthur H. Cash, the most recent volume of which appeared as recently as 1986, remains open to question.
I doubt that many readers will share Ross's willingness to explore the labryrinths century ecclesiastical politics, for example. In straining to provide new material, he is forced to speculate: on plays that Sterne might have seen, books that he could have read, and so on. The lack of adequate sources forces him to use expressions such as "it is likely that . . . ", "would certainly have . . . ", "it is possible that . . . ", "powerfully suggests . . . ", one after another: all these are taken from a short paragraph of four successive sentences. In search of material, Dr Ross wanders in to side-alleys: there are passages of several pages without any mention of Sterne himself. When he has some hard information, Ross sometimes overplays his hand. He quotes Boswell's remark that Sterne was the "best companion I ever knew " as evidence of Sterne's conviviality: but the value of Boswell's testimonial must be judged by the fact that he made this comment while still an impressionable 19-year-old, after meeting the famous author just once.
Adam Sisman's book about the writing of the life of Johnson, Boswell's Presumptuous Task, was published last year