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LXVII. Forged Letters of Laurence Sterne

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Lewis P. Curtis
Lewis P. Curtis*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

As many have learned to their dismay, the materials upon which Sterne's biography is at present based offer problems of unusual complexity, problems that are due in part to the man's intricate and elusive nature and in part to his daughter and to his swarm of imitators. Sterne, it is evident, was too great a humorist ever to be quite honest either with his own or with future generations. He amused himself in his letters by deceiving his contemporaries and mystifying posterity. For many years now his devices have been familiar matter: he rewrote his letters with his eye upon the press; sometimes he made portions of a letter serve more than one correspondent; and, though lately we have known it, he readdressed a letter much after the manner of Pope in the expectation that the substituted name of Eliza Draper would make a better impression than that of an unidentified countess.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , December 1935 , pp. 1076 - 1106
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1935

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References

1 Harvey W. Thayer, Laurence Sterne in Germany (New York, 1905), pp. 74, 103–108.

2 Joseph Farington, The Farington Diary (London, 1922–28), i, 114.

3 R. A. Austen-Leigh, The Eton College Register 1753–1790 (Eton, 1921), p. 118.

4 Ackermann's Repository of Arts, Aug. 1823, p. 87.

5 J. C. Hotten, ed., Dr. Syntax's Three Tours, by William Combe (London [1868]), p. viii.

6 Information from H. A. C. Sturgess, Librarian and Keeper of the Records, Middle Temple Library.

7 Repository of Arts (London, 1823), 3rd Ser., ii, 87.

8 Letters of Horace Walpole, Supplement, ii, 153.

9 The Farington Diary, i, 114.

10 Ox., pp. 281, 282, n. 9.

11 Ox., p. 288.

12 Ox., pp. 293–294.

13 Henry Crabbe Robinson, Diary (London, 1869), i, 294. Robinson understood Combe to have been a man of fortune when young, to have travelled in Europe and even to have made a journey with Sterne (i, 293).

14 The Farington Diary, i, 169.

15 Ibid., viii, 239 n.

16 London Chronicle, 11–13 July, 1775.

17 B, pp. 161–162; Letters supposed, etc., i, ii–iii.

18 A, p. ii.

19 Cf. A 5, 19–25; Med., ii, 216–231.

20 Cf. A 9. 44–48; Let. Bk. Ox., 137–138.

21 B, v, xx.

22 Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, ed. Dyce (New Southgate, 1887), p. 116.

23 See chart, p. 1093.

24 Gent. Mag., May, 1852, p. 467.

25 B, xix.

26 B, xvi.

27 B, xv.

28 B, xxvii.

29 In a review of B (Saturday Review of Literature, vi, 586), Governor Cross observed that the letters reveal “an intimate acquaintance with Sterne's works, with 'Tristram Shandy,' 'A Sentimental Journey,' his sermons, and his letters, which are frequently drawn upon for paraphrase and dilution. With the exception of the last letter, which purports to have been written while death is impending, all the rest, except for some anachronisms, keep close to the period covered by the ten letters from Yorick to Eliza.” Cf. Henri Fluchère. “Laurence Sterne et William Combe,” Revue Anglo-Americaine (av., 1931), pp. 313–328.

30 B, xxxv.

31 B, xxxix.

32 B, xxxviii.

33 This advertisement, which seems to be the source for the corresponding passage in B, appeared in the Public Advertiser, it will be observed, three years after Sterne's death.

34 These parallel passages are supposedly written in the early spring of 1767. But SJ, to which both allude, was at this moment little more than a few notes and was not published until Feb., 1768. Miss Shaw justifies the anachronism on the grounds that “Sterne, it is well known, was in the habit of making modifications of this kind” (B, xxvii). It is difficult to reconcile this explanation with the appearance of the same “modification” in the forged Letters from Eliza to Yorick which was published four years before B.

35 This reference to the landscape gardener Lancelot Brown (1715–1783) is not especially characteristic of Sterne.

36 Ox, 126, 144, 147.

37 June, 1788, pp. 439–440.

38 July, 1788, p. 335.

39 D.N.B., v.s. Sterne, liv, 218a.

40 Works of Laurence Sterne (New York, 1904), Letters and Miscellanies, i, xxviii.

41 Life (New Haven, 1925), ii, 278. In the last edition of Life (p. 611) he suggests that “several of them are in substance genuine.”

42 Three lists of Combe's acknowledged writings were printed by Robert Cole in Gent. Mag., May, 1852, pp. 467–469. A fourth list Hotten compiled for his edition of Combe's Doctor Syntax's Three Tours (London, 1868), xxv, n. 3, xl–xlviii.

43 London Chronicle, 22–4 Apr., 1784, p. 397. Cf. C. H. Timperley, Encyclopædia of Literary and Typographical Anecdote (London, 1842), p. 749; Macmillan's Magazine, Nov., 1878, 17–22; D.N.B., v.s. Walter, lix, 248; History of the Times, i, 1785–1841 (London, 1935), pp. 3 ff.

44 History of the Times, i, 13.

45 Ibid., i, 32.

46 Ibid., i, 133, 135.

47 A William Bland and a George Crow were holding land at Sutton in 1755 (Fauconberg Rentual). A Robert Bland of Stillington appears in the Parish Register in 1749 and subsequently. The implications of this psalm would have delighted A. W. N. Pugin.

48 The Pic Nic, i, i–xvii, 1–6.

49 The Farington Diary, ii, 83.

50 Horace Smith, Memoirs, Leiters, and Comic Miscellanies in Prose and Verse of the late James Smith (London, 1840), i, 20 n.