When Yorick Takes His Tea; Or, the Commerce of Consumptive Passions in the Case of Laurence Sterne

How cruelly are our Lots drawn, my dear—both made for happiness—and neither of us made to taste it!

—The Journal to Eliza (1767)

The thirst of this, continued I, as impatient as that which inflames the breast of the connoisseur, has led me from my own home into France—

—A Sentimental Journey (1767–68)

Laurence Sterne died at 4 P.M. on Friday, March 18, 1768, at age fifty-four due to complications arising from the chronic tuberculosis that plagued his entire publishing career and much of his youth. Public records and numerous biographical studies of the author provide reasonable assurance that this much is true.¹ Of Sterne's beloved character Yorick, however—fellow- parson and ironic sentimentalist par excellence—one can say significantly less with such authority. In the first volume of Tristram Shandy (January 1760), Sterne's Parson Yorick dies of consumption only to be resurrected when Sterne publishes his own sermons under the name (also 1760, and again in 1766), and then again when A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy By Mr. Yorick appears on the London scene (February 1768). The mere proliferation of Yoricks is likely more than enough to suggest the character cannot be strictly autobiographical even if he does share a vocation with his author, but nor is Yorick strictly a man of the eighteenth-century moment. While in France, the Yorick of A Sentimental Journey is quick to capitalize on how his name has transnational and transhistorical currency thanks to the court jester from Shakespeare's Hamlet. From within the diegetic frame of one fictional narrative, Sterne's Yorick turns another fiction into biographical credit to regain his passport and save his life, and ludicrous as that maneuver may well seem, Sterne redoubles its ironic force time and again by using his own fiction to the end of fabricating a kind of credit by association. For indeed, Yorick is also the most frequent of several names by which Sterne signs his public and private correspondence (published in 1775 by Sterne's daughter), and is almost exclusively the pseudonym selected for the letters he writes, most devotedly, to one Eliza Draper (circulating in collected form by at least 1773). As well, Yorick is the name under which Sterne begins a semi-autobiographical and highly sentimental journal addressed to an "Eliza" more or less identifiable with, but arguably not reducible to, that India-born lady of his acquaintance (unpublished until its rediscovery in 1851). And the list goes on, with close friends and anonymous readers, eighteenth-century obituary writers and twentieth-century literary critics all partially—but never fully—identifying that great man of ironic letters with the irony of a name that signifies so multiply it barely signifies his authorship—or anything—at all.

Yet while no two of the rhetorical Yoricks are identical and none can be definitively tied back to the empirical, embodied Laurence Sterne, all of them share at least two traits with each other and with him: All of Sterne's Yoricks are exceptionally sensitive, verbally effusive men, and all of them exhibit symptoms of tubercular consumption.² Given this, what proves most ironic, even at times most devastatingly ironic, about how the already-dead Yorick of Tristram Shandy stays alive but unwell in every text Sterne wrote after 1760 is how that fact makes it impossible to distinguish the mortal Sterne from his textual Yoricks merely on the grounds that the one died of tuberculosis on a given afternoon in March of 1768. I begin my investigation here. While Sterne himself participates in efforts to insist on reading the fictive parson as his double, the splitting and spinning off of Yorick narrators exposes just how fraught any process of identifying the embodied Sterne with his rhetorical personae...