Lives and Opinions: Writing the Life of Laurence Sterne

Ian Campbell Ross. Laurence Sterne: A Life Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001. xiii, 498. $56.00

Few writers have intertwined their lives so thoroughly in their works as Laurence Sterne. From the time the first volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy were published, his identity was conflated with two of his characters, he being known in London as Tristram Shandy ('Tristram Shandy is still a greater object of admiration, the Man as well as the Book,' wrote Thomas Gray to Thomas Warton [Ross, 247]) and publishing his sermons as Yorick. This act of self-advertisement caused widespread scandal despite his attempt to diffuse criticism by inserting a second title page with his own name on it. Clearly Yorick, the lanky cleric with a gift for preaching and a propensity for misplaced wit who presides over a country parish in the north of England, bears the mark of his maker, and equally clearly Tristram's opinions are Sterne's. The great question remains, however, to what extent the life can be linked to the scattered evidence in the novel.

Over the years, readers have assumed that to a greater or lesser extent the two (or three) lives bear the same relationship as the jerkin and its lining. Nonetheless, Sterne qualifies the relationship at every step. He makes direct and specific references to his parsonage – but he romanticizes it by adding a thatched roof. He called his Coxwold home 'Shandy Hall,' as does the Laurence Sterne Trust – but the parish he served when the first volumes were written was in Sutton-on-the-Forest, and he himself was living in a house in York. Neither house was a 'hall,' and contrary to his dedication to Pitt, the book was not at any point written in a thatched cottage. He and Tristram were both born in November – but for the purposes of allusion, he has his hero born on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot (whose most famous conspirator was York-born Guy Fawkes) while he himself was born on the 27th; and, probably for more personal reasons, he makes Tristram five years younger. Sterne was born in 1713, Tristram in 1718. Since he later takes the same number of years off his own age when writing to a lady,¹ we can assume that Sterne was as concerned as any modern celebrity that he be thought younger than he was. It is also significant that while he pays tribute to his father's profession in the good and gentle Uncle Toby, he sees to it that his own hero does not suffer the vagabond, camp-following life of his own earliest years, but is instead born into the manor house, a more propitious beginning, however the hinges may squeak and the weightless sash-windows may rattle, and despite the miasma rising from the oxmoor.

Because of the author's own insistence, however, and his intensification of the identification through his giving the first-person narrator of A Sentimental Journey the name Yorick (a device that allows him to meet traces of himself in the course of the journey), biographers continue to mine the works to find the author. Few go as far as Willard Connely, whose Laurence Sterne as Yorick (1958) proclaims in his title the close connection he will make between author and character, and whose particular method results in his skipping most of Sterne's life (that is, the forty-six years of it before the writing of Tristram Shandy), condensing those years into about twenty-one pages at the beginning of the first chapter, despite the fact that those are the true Parson Yorick years. Connely's is an extreme case, but most biographers cannot refrain from quoting the passage that describes the villagers' reactions to Yorick's cervantic appearance as he rides through their towns.

Ian Campbell Ross's new biography of Sterne, the first of...