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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Laurence Sterne
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(1713–68)
One of the most original of British authors. His father was an impoverished army officer and he spent much of his early life in barracks in England and Ireland. Ordained in 1738, he was attached to the cathedral in York until the publication in 1760 of the first part of the wonderfully eccentric *Tristram Shandy. This brought him instant fame and a lifetime curacy at Coxwold, in North Yorkshire, where he moved into a medieval house and named it Shandy Hall – it survives much as he left it, open now to the public.
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His new reputation even enabled Sterne to publish the sermons he had preached in York Minster; they appeared with great success as The Sermons of William Yorick (7 vols, 1760–9). Yorick, the parson in Tristram Shandy, thus became Sterne's alter ego and pseudonym. He is the narrator of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), a book based on Sterne's experiences on the Continent, where he spent 1762–4 with his wife and daughter for the sake of his health (he had tuberculosis).
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As a travel book, A Sentimental Journey is again unconventional. It begins in the middle of a conversation, ends in the middle of a sentence, and is not so much about the places visited as the effect of the journey on Yorick's sensibilities – particularly the effect of various young ladies. Sterne's greatest sentimental attachment came at the end of his life. In 1767 he fell in love with Elizabeth Draper, the wife of an official in the *East India Company. Letters from Yorick to Eliza, based on a journal which he kept for her after her return to India, were published in 1775.
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