The Columbia History of the British Novel

novel.

G. S. Rousseau

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Selected Bibliography

Beasley J. C. Novels of the 1740s. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982.

Beasley J. C., et al. The Georgia Edition of the Works of Tobias Smollett. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.

Becker G. Documents of Modern Realism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964.

Byrd M. London in the Eighteenth Century. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982.

Carretta Vincent. George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.

Hunter J. P. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: Norton, 1990.

Kernan A. B. The Plot of Satire. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965.

McKeon Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Moore R. E. Hogarth's Literary Relationships. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948.

Paulson Ronald. Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967.

Paulson Ronald. The Fictions of Satire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967.

Richetti John J. Popular Fiction before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–1739. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969.

Rousseau G. S. Tobias Smollett. Essays of Two Decades. Edinburgh and New York: Seabury Press, 1982.

Rousseau G. S., and P. G. Boucè, eds. Tobias Smollett. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Spacks Patricia Meyer. Imagining a Self. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976.

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Sterne: Comedian and Experimental Novelist

WHY read Sterne? Such a question arises not only because of our historical distance from him (he died in 1768) but somehow seems inherent in the very nature of his enterprise as a novelist. From the time he burst onto the public consciousness with the appearance of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy in the winter of 1759-60, there have been voices that have said that, because of its oddity and difficulty, Sterne's work couldn't be read, or that, because of its impropriety, it shouldn't be read. Yet he has never lacked powerful defenders, although the defenses have been even more various than the attacks. Sterne's advocates have loved his jeux d'esprit and his pathos; they have praised his originality and his brilliant use of sources; he has been termed the last of the Augustan satirists and the first prophetic voice of modernism; readers have admired him for creating characters of unsurpassed immediacy and for steadfastly refusing to adhere to any convention of novel writing. Perhaps it is his capacity to inspire such varied-indeed, contradictory-responses even among those who defend him that led Goethe to comment several times that Sterne was a 'free soul.' Certainly, whatever limitations Laurence Sterne the man faced (and he faced many), Sterne the novelist seems remarkably resistant to categorization or description, much less final judgment. It is very hard to pin him down.

Such a variety of response is difficult to map. In the discussion that follows, I have tried to create such a map around three landmarks in the collected commentary on Sterne. These brief remarks, one by Sterne -154- himself and two by his critics, turn up in almost any discussion of him-so regularly, in fact, that they might be called the enduring clichés of Sterne criticism. My intention is not the further circulation of coins rubbed almost smooth by time. Instead, I would like to see if we can, by highlighting these comments, restore their roughness of surface and make them useful again. Between them, they raise virtually all of the central issues we confront in trying to understand Sterne and his career as a novelist.

'I wrote not to be fed, but to be famous.'

So wrote Sterne to a friend in January 1760, with the first installment of Tristram Shandy just published and already creating a stir. The statement can be passed over as a relatively innocuous answer to the question Pope asked himself, 'Why did I write?' or it can serve, as it generally does, as a prelude to brief remarks about Sterne's contemporary popularity. But much of Sterne's life, and (just as interestingly) a great deal of information about what it meant to be a novelist at the nascence of the genre are compressed into or implied by the remark. What does it mean, in the context of mid-eighteenth-centuryEngland, that someone wrote to be famous?

The facts of Sterne's life hardly suggest a candidate for fame, literary or otherwise. When he was born, in Ireland, in November 1713, he entered the world as a gentleman's son, but his hold on the privilege that honorific implied was an uncertain one. Young Laurence might have claimed an Archbishop of York as great-grandfather, and prominent Yorkshire landowners as living relations, but his father was a younger son, mired in an unpromising military career (hence, the Irish birth), and there was little in the future novelist's early childhood to separate him from the kind of life endured by those whose class status was technically much lower. The family was poor, they moved frequently from garrison to garrison, and Sterne's younger siblings died with numbing regularity. But in the matter of class, as in so much else, Sterne is hard to categorize, for if his early years show little gentility, he did ultimately enjoy, with family help, a gentleman's education, and his school years culminated in a Sterne family fellowship to Jesus College, Cambridge. While his parents gave him almost nothing, his more distant family saw to it that this poor relation could enter that almost obligatory path of the shabby but well-educated genteel: the priest- 155- hood. In 1735, Sterne was ordained and took up the first of several vicarages he would hold, all in the neighborhood of York. Tristram Shandy was still a quarter-century away.

Sterne's life between his ordination and his sudden elevation to literary fame cannot, at least in its externals, have been very different from that of many provincial clergy. In these years, he married (not happily) and had one daughter; he intrigued (with no great distinction) in politics, mostly ecclesiastical; he farmed a bit, hunted, and played the violin; he read a lot; he fought to keep an incipient consumption (which eventually killed him) at bay; over time, he gained more lucrative livings and more prominent church positions. Family connections, both his own and his wife's, helped at times, but it is also clear that Sterne felt considerable resentment about the obligations those connections created; eventually, he quarreled with his uncle, Jaques Sterne, an important figure in the clerical world of York. His career as a clergyman was at best moderately successful, and outside of the small world of Yorkshire church affairs, Sterne was totally obscure. The 1750s were an especially difficult decade: he had become alienated from his powerful uncle, his wife, never a source of much happiness, descended into madness, and a persistent public rumor had it that Sterne had mistreated his widowed mother. Yet some reservoir of confidence and ambition survived, for at the very end of that dark decade, in as he says, 'a bye corner of the kingdom, and in a retir'd thatched house,' he wrote the opening volumes of Tristram Shandy, bravely published them at his own expense, and sent half the copies to London, to all appearances serenely assured that, whatever his past, his future would be glorious.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, volumes 1 and 2, appeared on the London market on January 1, 1760. Sterne himself arrived in the capital about three months later. By then, the great city was more than ready to receive its new sensation. One historian of fame has called Sterne 'the first English author who can be called a celebrity,' a judgment that remains safely this side of hyperbole. Sterne was lionized, petted, and feted by the great and the already famous. A new country dance was named the 'Tristram Shandy (as was a racehorse), and