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1882
The materials for a biography of Sterne are by no means abundant.Of the earlier years of his life the only existing record is thatpreserved in the brief autobiographical memoir which, a few monthsbefore his death, he composed, in the usual quaint staccato style ofhis familiar correspondence, for the benefit of his daughter. Of hischildhood; of his school-days; of his life at Cambridge, and in hisYorkshire vicarage; of his whole history, in fact, up to the age offorty-six, we know nothing more than he has there jotted down. Heattained that age in the year 1759; and at this date begins thatseries of his Letters, from which, for those who have the patienceto sort them out of the chronological confusion in which his daughterand editress involved them, there is, no doubt, a good deal to belearnt. These letters, however, which extend down to 1768, the yearof the writer's death, contain pretty nearly all the contemporarymaterial that we have to depend on. Freely as Sterne mixed in the bestliterary society, there is singularly little to be gathered about him,even in the way of chance allusion and anecdote, from the memoirs andana of his time. Of the many friends who would have been competentto write his biography while the facts were yet fresh, but one, JohnWilkes, ever entertained—if he did seriously entertain—the ideaof performing this pious work; and he, in spite of the entreaties ofSterne's widow and daughter, then in straitened circumstances, leftunredeemed his promise to do so. The brief memoir by Sir Walter Scott,which is prefixed to many popular editions of Tristram Shandy andthe Sentimental Journey, sets out the so-called autobiography infull, but for the rest is mainly critical; Thackeray's well-knownlecture essay is almost wholly so; and nothing, worthy to be dignifiedby the name of a Life of Sterne, seems ever to have been published,until the appearance of Mr. Percy Fitzgerald's two stout volumes,under this title, some eighteen years ago. Of this work it is hardlytoo much to say that it contains (no doubt with the admixture of agood deal of superfluous matter) nearly all the information as to thefacts of Sterne's life that is now ever likely to be recovered. Theevidence for certain of its statements of fact is not as thoroughlysifted as it might have been; and with some of its criticism I, atleast, am unable to agree. But no one interested in the subject ofthis memoir can be insensible of his obligations to Mr. Fitzgeraldfor the fruitful diligence with which he has laboured in a too longneglected field.
(1713-1724.)
(1724-1733.)
(1738-1759.)
(1759-1760.)
(1760-1762.)