Reconsidering a Sternean Attribution: Cambridge University Library’s ‘Sterne Volume’

Cambridge University Library houses an extensive collection of material by and relating to Laurence Sterne (1713–1768). The Oates Collection, mainly of Sterne’s publications and the extensive ‘Sterneana’ it inspired, constitutes a significant part of these holdings; but the Library also owns items possessing a more tangential link with the author, and in particular with his Irish roots. Born in Ireland in 1713, Sterne moved to England as a child, but scholars have entertained a longstanding interest in the extent to which he maintained connections with his Irish heritage. One item held by CUL has played a questionable role within this history. Hib.3.730.1 has come to be called ‘the Sterne volume’ among respected Sternean scholars, old and new; and yet both the origins of this particular label and the conclusions it has led some to make about Sterne’s connection with the volume and its contents deserve a second look.

Hib.3.730.1 comprises 132 items, mostly Irish folio broadsides, pamphlets, and manuscripts printed in Dublin between 1720 and 1736. It forms part of a donation made to CUL by the Librarian, Henry Bradshaw (1831–1886), of his father’s collection of Irish publications, significantly enlarged by his own ‘exertions’.¹ The preface to the printed catalogue of this collection reproduces a letter written by Bradshaw to the Library Syndicate in 1870, in which he identified nearly ‘1000 bound volumes’ and a large number of miscellaneous items, ‘including proclamations, broadsides, and fly-sheets … and a few other manuscripts, [which] amount in all to about 5000 pieces’.² These heterogeneous items were bound in volumes that, to some degree, taxonomize their contents: Hib.3.730.1 is one such volume; it carries a bookplate bearing Bradshaw’s name, dated in the year of his death, 1886, and of his collection’s donation to the Library.

Bradshaw is responsible for this volume’s common description as the ‘Sterne volume’, although he should not bear responsibility for the assumptions it has led some scholars to make. He used the term in an annotation to an entirely separate volume, Richard Robert Madden’s History of Irish Periodical Literature (1867), in which Bradshaw’s hand identifies numerous items to be found in his own extensive collections. He writes of one particular item in the margin at the top of the page in Madden (Fig. 2): ‘I have a folio leaf entitled “Maria or the picture of a certain young Lady” (in rhyming couplets beginning “Rise gratious Muse! . . .”) with the imprint at the foot of the page: “Printed at Temple-Oge Anno Dom. 1730”. N^o 74 in my Sterne vol.’. It was, perhaps, this briefest of mentions that apparently led to a note pencilled on the first page of Hib.3.730.1: ‘Mr. Bradshaw speaks of this as “my Sterne volume”’. The note mentions the Madden source for the claim, to which J. C. T. Oates added a footnote, signed and dated ‘3/2/65’: ‘because the annotation to no. 52 is thought to be by Laurence Sterne [and certainly is by him]’.

Item no. 52 is a manuscript poem entitled ‘The Ballyspallan balad’. This unrhymed verse, which covers just two sides of a single sheet, praises the spa-well in Johnstown, County Kilkenny, visited by Jonathan Swift in 1724. It contains numerous spelling errors, and is written in what might be described as a rough and childish hand. An annotation made at the end of the poem, clearly written in another hand, identifies possible reasons for this, given the proclaimed authorship (Fig. 1): ‘This was made by a Footman’.³ It is these six words which, following Oates’s suggestion, some have assumed were penned by Laurence Sterne. However, what is the basis for this ascription, besides Oates’s affirmation, and Bradshaw’s connection of the name ‘Sterne’ with this volume?

Oates was a widely respected Sternean collector, with an admirable knowledge of Sterne’s oeuvre—including his handwriting—and of items connected with him. His bibliographical expertise is undoubted, extending well beyond his...