Yorick’s Congregation: The Church of England in the Time of Laurence Sterne (review)

This book belongs to a mode of scholarship that was once much more common than it is today, for better or worse. Written from a position of Anglican devotion, it aims to provide Laurence Sterne’s readers with a general, if miscellaneous, understanding of eighteenth-century Anglicanism. That understanding is indeed, as Martha Bowden makes clear, more relevant to Sterne’s fiction than is apparent from much secular scholarship. This, then, is more a work of loving contextualization than of argument or reinterpretation, which is not to say that it fails to make any gestures towards interpretation that fall under two not especially compatible heads.

On the one hand, it calls upon Jonathan Lamb’s “double principle” to defend Sterne as a man involved in a dangerous balancing act between his orthodox and heterodox impulses; and it cites the interest and danger of that performance as key to his appeal. In making this move, Bowden also argues that Sterne, as person and as writer, was “genuinely” sentimental and that incidents such as the Maria incident in A Sentimental Journey are (against Thomas Keymer) not to be read as parody. For my own money, a better understanding of Sterne’s sentimentalism is that it exists in an indeterminate space between sincerity and parody, one that is ultimately independent of authorial intention and is probably constitutive of the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility more generally. On the other hand, Bowden suggests that Tristram Shandy presents a “Shandean Liturgy,” with the implication that the text’s formal innovations, along with its description of the Shandy family, belong to the culture of eighteenth-century Anglican practice and ritualism. This is an arresting and original insight, although further efforts of theorization and exposition than those available here are required to see how far it can take us into Sterne’s writing.

The book also aims to take advantage of recent developments in eighteenth-century Anglican historiography, namely the new consensus that the Church of England had more vitality and impact in the period than older Whiggish histories conceded. And largely on the basis of that scholarship (as well as Melvyn New’s prodigious research in his edition of Sterne’s sermons), Yorick’s Congregation offers chapters on Sterne’s parish duties; the publication of his sermons; the relationship between the Church and medicine in reference to Tristram Shandy’s midwife episode; the Sterne family’s cross-generational connection to the Church (Sterne’s grandfather was a famous, hardline Tory archbishop, his uncle a zealous Whig archdeacon); English anti-Catholicism in the period; and Sterne’s descriptions of liturgy.

Of the many puzzles that Sterne’s life and work present, few are more intriguing than the relationships among 1) his professional position as a rural Anglican parson; 2) his innovative, subversive, and louche texts; and 3) his embrace of metropolitan/cosmopolitan market culture and celebrity on the back of his success as an author. Put most simply, how can we make sense of the fact that the author of Tristram Shandy was an Anglican priest? Bowden’s book gives some of the information useful to help us to figure this out; but, in part because it is just too inside Anglicanism and too immersed in detail, it does not begin the task itself in any sustained way.

In particular, it does not address the theopolitical structures and transformations that are so important to understanding both the Church and the literary field in the long eighteenth century. Indeed, it treats the period as a single, invariant moment. Let me end this review, then, by listing some relevant features of eighteenth-century religion in England that might allow us to take Bowden’s contribution further (and which also resist some of the implications of recent Anglican church history):

1. 1. The autonomy (bar patronage dependencies) of parish governance and income streams, which positioned the beneficed parson...