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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In a volume of miscellaneous manuscripts at the British Museum, placed at random and inconspicuously among larger folio leaves, is a set of notes headed “Sterne.” The notes were written by Joseph Hunter, the nineteenth-century antiquary and literary historian, and they came to the British Museum with Hunter's other papers shortly after his death in 1861. In view of the abundant information about Sterne's private life which the notes contain, it is surprising that this item has remained unindexed and that it is not mentioned in the catalogue description of the volume. In the absence of such references, very likely only an occasional reader who has happened upon them has seen these notes, and, since the major biographies of Laurence Sterne make no use of distinct details which Hunter provides, it is quite possible that none of Sterne's biographers have encountered Hunter's information during the past century. At present, our familiarity with the early years of Sterne's marriage and his residence at Sutton-on-the-Forest is rather limited, based as it is upon isolated public records, some letters, fugitive anecdotes, and the unflattering and sometimes vicious account written by John Croft. No impartial memoirs with any claim to authenticity or wealth of details have until now seemed available. Thus, the intimate account of Sterne which Hunter has given presents to modern scholars an unexpected and promising opportunity to gain new insight into the life and, perhaps, into the work of one of England's most unusual writers. A transcript of Hunter's notes appears below, followed by a brief evaluation of them according to our present knowledge of Laurence Sterne.
1 Additional MS. 24446, ff. 26–27. I wish to thank Duke University for the grant which enabled me to study at the British Museum in 1963.
2 “Anecdotes of Sterne vulgarly Tristram Shandy,” The Whitefoord Papers, ed. W. A. S. Hewins (Oxford, 1898), pp. 225–232.
3 I have enclosed in brackets my conjectural readings for illegible words, dates, or punctuating marks. The last digit of this date might be either “7” or “4.” Hunter was studying in York between 1806 and 1809, so that his access to Greenwood would have been more direct in 1807 than at an earlier date. However, since Hunter grew up in Sheffield, which is only about fifty miles from Sutton, he might easily have met Greenwood earlier during a ramble through Yorkshire.
4 This word is nearly illegible in the MS. It seems to be “Martive” or “Mastive” or “Martion” or “Mastion.” If the word is the name of a holiday later in the year, and not merely another name for Michaelmas, Greenwood would have been present at the vicarage for the birth of the first Lydia.
5 Although the name of the town appears to begin with the letter “F,” possibly Stillington is meant here, rather than Farlington. Hunter's phrase “engaged to preach,” which suggests a special occasion, would be inappropriate for Stillington after the spring of 1743/4, when Sterne received the living there. It was his custom to preach at Stillington at Sunday afternoon services after that time. The two villages were at about the same distance from Sutton and were roughly the same size. See Thomas Langdale's Topographical Dictionary of Yorkshire (Northallerton, 1809), pp. 23 and 70, for descriptions of the two towns sixty years after this time.
6 Beneath the last line of notes on f. 27 is the following comment: “See Notes & Queries v. 409 fr. Notice of him.” This notation is written in a slightly different hand and with darker ink than the preceding notes. The two exclamation marks after “Yorick” are similar in stroke and ink color to the added line. The reference is to the First Series of Notes and Queries, v (1852), 409–410. The “notice” is of Sterne but does not draw upon the information in these notes and does not mention them. The later handwriting is not so different from the earlier that Hunter himself could not have written both the original and the later notes.
7 See a survey of these rumors in Wilbur L. Cross, The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne, new ed. (New Haven, 1925), ii, 168–169.
8 A dissenting opinion is that of S. L. Ollard, “Sterne as Parish Priest,” TLS, 25 May 1933, p. 364, and 1 June 1933, p. 380. See also TLS, 18 March 1926, p. 217. Ollard compares Sterne's own accounts of his pastoral activity with those of his clerical contemporaries.
9 Whitefoord Papers, p. 231.
10 i, 225. Cross's quotation marks suggest that he had a source for this opinion, but he does not cite any.
11 Her letter is quoted in Cross, i, 48.
12 ii, 223. Cross seems to have been reluctant, on the basis of the information then at his disposal, to draw explicit conclusions about Sterne's extra-marital affairs.
13 One such rumor of the mid-1740's is reported by Willard Connely, Laurence Sterne as Yorick (London, 1958), p. 20.
14 Connely, who notes that this baptismal entry is at Stillington rather than at Sutton, where the Sternes lived, reasons (p. 20) that either Mrs. Sterne was delivered of the baby for some reason at the Stillington vicarage-house or else Sterne transported the just-born baby three miles (round-trip) through winter air for baptism; such an action would have been so dangerous for the child that only a father obsessed with the need for immediate baptism (at a particular place) would seem able to justify it to himself. If the latter was the case, did Sterne's compulsion grow from the death of a son as well as from that of the first Lydia?
15 Letter of Mrs. N. K. M. Gurney, Archivist, The Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, University of York, 17 June 1964. Mrs. Gurney kindly made this search at my request. The Reverend Francis J. Wilson, of Sutton-on-the-Forest, reports that there is a gap in the records at the vicarage for the years of Sterne's residence there (letter of 29 Jan. 1964).
16 Mrs. Gurney has called my attention to a Rubric in the Book of Common Prayer (1549) which was amended in 1661 to read: “The Curates of every Parish shall often admonish the people, that they defer not the Baptism of their children longer than the first or second Sunday next after their birth, or other holy-day falling between, unless upon a great and reasonable cause, to be approved by the Curate.” In a letter of 2 Oct. 1964 she comments, “Although it is not easy to say how strictly these instructions were adhered to, especially by the mid 18th century, they would at least account for the usual custom of early baptism.”
17 Mrs. Gurney found no record of his baptism between 1726 and 1729, when, according to the information in the notes, he would have been born. It is, of course, possible that he was born elsewhere and moved to Sutton at some time prior to his employment.
18 See the account of Hunter in the DNB.
19 The biographical accounts of him which had appeared in print were all very sketchy, including the “Memoirs of the Life and Family of Mr. Sterne. Written by Himself,” which appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine, xiv (1775), 520–522. The same account, or versions of it, appeared in various editions of his letters and works from this time on. Sir John Hill had published a short account of Sterne in the Royal Female Magazine (April 1760), as had John Hall-Stevenson in a preface to a spurious continuation of the Sentimental Journey (1769). The 1790's did produce renewed discussion of Sterne's work, largely emanating from an essay by Dr. Ferriar of Manchester (1794 and reprinted several times) which charged Sterne with plagiarism. See also the following articles in the Gentleman's Magazine: lxiv (1794), 406–407, 593, 615; lxvii (1797), 565–566, 755; lxviii (1798), 471, 673–675; lxix (1799), 196–197; lxx (1800), 741; and lxxvi (1806), 407–409.
20 N. S. iv, x (Jan.-June 1861), 702. See also n. 6 above. If the added notation in the MS was Hunter's work, he reviewed his Sterne notes in 1852 when he found in Notes and Queries an “illustration” of them.
21 British Museum Egerton MS. 2848, f. 33.
