Review: Sterne's Memoirs

 “Laurence Sterne springs a new surprise, read the envelope that had landed on my doormat. 

It’s not exactly a new surprise, the book came out in 1985. A leaflet in the back includes a Shandy Hall appeal, designed to help Kenneth and Julia Monkman, who were live-in, unpaid curators. The leaflet points out how Kenneth is now isn his mid-seventies and look for money to establish a paid curator, ‘not quite yet perhaps, but eventually’. Kenneth seemed to be something of an obsessive, he was eventually buried at the foot of Sterne’s grave, I hope Sterne gave him a warm welcome. His wife, Julia, planned out a famously beautiful garden which is the home to a huge amount of moths, she took over from Kenneth and then when she died, was replaced by Patrick Wildgust, who is still the curator.

Sterne’s Memoirs was the first book ‘to come out of Shandy Hall since A Sentimental Journey’. Many books have come out (or been republished) through Shandy Hall since. I’ve been a punter for a few of them, including being part of the crowdfunding for the re-publication of ‘Caine’s Jawbone’, which has since become a tik-tok viral hit. They only printed 500 copies and it’s beautifully done. A delicately marbled cover, thick paper with an introduction and commentary and then the work itself, reproduced in Sterne’s own handwriting, with his crossings out and crammings in - he was more a crammer inner than a crosser outer. 

The downside of this gorgeous presentation is the effort it takes to read his writing. There is a printed insert with the version of his memoirs presented by his daughter in her edition of his letters. The surprise mentioned on the envelope are the little differences between the edited, printed version and the manuscript. Key among them, the date of composition. Sterne started writing these before he was a celebrity and not as he was dying. 

To be honest, a lot of the differences, whether he mentioned a Herbert or Hobert, did not mean much to me, being a fond reader of Sterne but not all that knowledgeable about him and his life. I can see how someone who is as indebted in the weeds of Sterne’s life as I am in Johnson’s or Kit Smart’s, the details would be invaluable and very exciting.

As such, a few memories of Sterne were interesting in themselves to me. I was aware his father had been in the army but not quite how enmeshed into army life the Sterne’s had been in. Not only had his father been involved in battles all over the globe, but Laurence found himself all around the British isles. from Dublin to the Isle of Wight. His father’s biggest injury came, not from battle, but a duel fought. He was later shipped off to Jamaica, where he died of fever. Laurence lovingly describes his father as someone “so innocent in his own intentions, that he suspected no-one, so that you might have cheated him for ten times in a day if nine had not been insufficient.” - A similar sentence later used to describe Uncle Toby.

While it’s clear from Tristram Shandy that Sterne favoured his father than his mother, we find out a little more about her. Laurence’s father was her second husband, her first has also been in the army. She had many children, most of them were sickly and few survived. We learnt about the deaths of little Joram, Mary, Anne and Devischer. We also learn that Laurence became a bit of a celebrity in Ireland as a child when he fell through a mill-race, while the mill was turning. 

No mention is made of the fake memoirs of Sterne created by Richard Griffiths under the name of Tri-juncta-in-uno. Griffiths claimed to have seen some notes Sterne made about his life, maybe he saw these? Well… I’ve seen them now, and in a lovely edition. I’ll gladly read them again and probably a number of times.