STERNE, LAURENCE (1713-1768), English humorist, was the son of Roger Sterne, an English officer, and great-grand son of an archbishop of York. He was born at Clonmel, Ireland, on Nov. 24, 1713, a few days after the arrival of his father's regiment from Dunkirk. For ten years the boy and his mother moved from place to place after the regiment, from England to Ireland, and from one part of Ireland to another. Sterne's early knowledge of garrison life enabled him to draw the portraits of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. He was fixed for eight or nine years at a school at Halifax in Yorkshire. His father died when he was in his eighteenth year. He was sent to Jesus College, Cam bridge, where he took his degree in 1736. Through the influence of his uncle, precentor and canon of York, he obtained (1738) the living of Sutton-in-the-Forest, near York. Two years after his marriage in 1741 to Elizabeth Lumley he was presented to the neighbouring living of Stillington, and did duty at both places. He was also a prebendary of York Cathedral.
Sutton was Sterne's residence for twenty uneventful years. He kept up an intimacy which had begun at Cambridge with John Hall-Stevenson (1718-1785), a witty and accomplished epicurean, owner of Skelton Hall ("Crazy Castle") in the Cleveland district of Yorkshire. Stevenson's various occasional sallies in verse and prose—his Fables for Grown Gentlemen (1761-177o), and his Crazy Tales (1762), bear a resemblance in spirit and turn of thought to Sterne's work, inferior as they are in literary genius. In 1759 Sterne wrote a skit on a quarrel between Dean Fountayne and Dr. Topham, a York lawyer, over the bestowal of an office in the gift of the archbishop. This sketch, in which Topham figures as Trim the sexton, and the author as Lorry Slim, gives an earnest of Sterne's powers as a humorist. It was not published until after his death, when it appeared in 1769 under the title of A Political Romance, and afterwards the History of a Warm Watch-Coat. The first two volumes of Tristram Shandy were issued at York in 1759 and advertised in London on Jan. r, 176o, and at once made a sensation.
For the last eight years of his life after this sudden leap out of obscurity we have a faithful record of Sterne's feelings and movements in letters to various persons, published in 1775 by his only child, Lydia Sterne de Medalle, and in the Letters from Yorick to Eliza (1766-1767), also published in 1775. At the end of the sermon in Tristram he had intimated that, if this sample of Yorick's pulpit eloquence was liked, "there are now in the possession of the Shandy family as many as will make a handsome volume, at the world's service, and much good may they do it."
Accordingly, when a second edition of the first instalment of Tristram was called for in three months, two volumes of Sermons by Yorick were announced. Although they had little or none of the eccentricity of the history, they proved almost as popular.
Sterne's clerical character was far from being universally injured by his indecorous freaks as a humorist : Lord Fauconberg pre sented the author of Tristram Shandy with the perpetual curacy of Coxwold. To this new residence he went in high spirits with his success, "fully determined to write as hard as could be," seeing no reason why he should not give the public two volumes of Shandyism every year and why this should not go on for forty years. Vols. iii. and iv. appeared in 1761; vols. v. and vi. in January 1762. But he was ordered to the south of France; and he came back after two and a half years very little stronger. He was overjoyed with his reception in Paris. He continued to build up his history of the Shandy family, but the work did not progress as rapidly as it had done. The digressions became extensive. In vol. vii. the work is allowed to stand still while the writer is being transported from Shandy Hall to Languedoc. Vol. viii. begins the long-promised story of Uncle Toby's amours with the Widow Wadman. After seeing to the publication of this instal ment of Tristram and of another set of sermons—more pro nouncedly Shandean in their eccentricity—he quitted England again in the summer of 1765, and travelled in Italy as far as Naples. The ninth and last and shortest volume of Tristram, concluding Toby Shandy's amours, appeared in 1767.
This despatched, Sterne turned to a new project, The Senti mental Journey through France and Italy. Its plan admitted of any length that the author chose, but, after seeing the first two volumes through the press in the early months of 1768, Sterne's strength failed, and he died in his lodgings, 41 Old Bond Street, London, March 18, three weeks after the publication.
An excellent edition of Sterne's works, edited by Professor George Saintsbury, was issued in six volumes in 1894. See also J. J. Texte, Rousseau et les origines du cosmopolitisme litteraire (1895) ; Thayer, Laurence Sterne in Germany (1905) ; Walter Sichel, Sterne: a Study (Iwo) ; L. Melville, Life and Letters of Laurence Sterne (2 vols. 1911) G. Rabizzani, Sterne in Italia (192o) ; W. L. Cross, The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne, new ed. (1929).