The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [337]
Deliberated in the Sorbonne, the tenth of April, 1733.
A. LE MOYNE,
L. DE ROMIGNY,
DE MARCILLY.
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LAURENCE STERNE
Laurence Sterne was born on November 24, 1713, at Clonmel in Tipperary, Ireland. His father, Roger, was an itinerant army ensign, the black-sheep son of a prominent family of Yorkshire gentry and grandson of the archbishop of York; his mother was the daughter of an army provisioner. Sterne’s early childhood was spent traveling between Ireland and England as his father’s fortunes dictated; not until he was ten years old did the boy permanently settle in Yorkshire. From 1723 until his father’s death in Jamaica in 1731 he was sent to school near Halifax. In 1733 he entered Jesus College, Cambridge. Less than two months after taking his B.A. degree in 1737, Sterne was ordained a deacon and, like many deserving but impoverished young men of his station, embarked on a career in the church. His first appointment was to the curacy of St. Ives, but a year later, in 1738, he was invested into the priesthood and named vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest, a village some eight miles north of York.
There, in “a bye corner of the kingdom,” as he later described it, Sterne passed the next twenty years of his life as an unobtrusive yet cultivated rural clergyman. In 1741, after a one-year courtship, he married Elizabeth Lumley, daughter of the vicar of perhaps the richest parish in Yorkshire, and through his wife’s influence received additional income by becoming vicar of the neighboring parish of Stillington. The marriage was generally unhappy, although it did produce a daughter, Lydia, who was born in 1747.
During the 1740s and 1750s Sterne engaged in a brief flurry of political writing, and some of his pieces have been identified in surviving issues of the York Gazetteer, a paper representing Whig interests. In addition, he published several sermons; one, “The Abuses of the Conscience,” is noteworthy because Sterne later included it verbatim in Tristram Shandy. Yet it was the appearance in 1759 of his witty, satiric pamphlet entitled A Political Romance—which lambasted members of the York church courts for their pettiness and