Laurence Sterne Biography Quotes 32 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Laurence Sterne was born on 24 November 1713 in Clonmel, County Tipperary, in a British military world that moved faster than a child could settle. His father, Roger Sterne, was an ensign in the army; the family followed the regiment through Ireland and England, living on irregular pay, favors, and endurance. The early pattern was one of perpetual displacement, a strict hierarchy of rank, and the intimate knowledge of how easily dignity can be lost - conditions that later fed Sterne's instinct for the vulnerable, the comic, and the bruised.

Roger Sterne died in 1731, leaving Laurence with a precarious inheritance: strong connections on paper and little security in fact. Unlike many Augustan writers shaped by London coffeehouses, Sterne came up through provincial corridors - garrisons, parishes, and cathedral politics - where character was observed at close range, and where private weakness hid beneath public propriety. That early exposure to both martial discipline and domestic uncertainty helps explain the peculiar tenderness of his satire: he could laugh, but he rarely laughed without remembering what it costs.

Education and Formative Influences

Sterne was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, taking his B.A. in 1737 and later an M.A., and he was ordained in the Church of England soon after. Cambridge gave him classical rhetoric and the skeptical habits of the latitudinarian clergy, while the wider literary climate offered models he would later fracture - Swift's moral rage, Pope's polish, and the periodical essayists' social anatomies. Yet Sterne's deepest formation came from temperament and circumstance: a man trained to speak of virtue from the pulpit while privately fascinated by impulse, chance, and the unruly motions of feeling.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

Through family patronage (notably the Jaques Sterne network in Yorkshire), he obtained clerical posts culminating in the prebend at York Minster and the living of Coxwold, where he wrote among parish obligations and cathedral rivalries. For years he published little, cultivating wit, friendships, and resentments; then, in his late forties, he detonated his own career with The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (first volumes 1759, then sequels through 1767), an experimental comic novel that made him instantly famous in London. Fame brought both money and strain; tuberculosis shadowed his later life, and he traveled in France and Italy seeking relief, converting illness into material for A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), published on the eve of his death in London on 18 March 1768.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Sterne's inner life was a contest between frailty and performance. He believed in the moral value of laughter not as escape but as a way of lengthening the spirit under pressure: "I am persuaded that every time a man smiles - but much more so when he laughs - it adds something to this fragment of life". That line is not merely epigram; it is self-diagnosis from a man living with illness, debt-anxiety, and the exhausting vigilance of reputation. His comedy is therefore medicinal and tactical - a means to keep the self from closing into bitterness, and a way to make readers complicit in mercy.

Formally, Sterne turned the novel into a theater of consciousness: digressions, blanks, dashes, marbled pages, and narrative delays enact a mind that refuses to be marched in straight lines. The famous opening complaint, "I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me". , frames existence as accident and misattention - a comic origin story with metaphysical bite. Against the age's taste for system, Sterne distrusted critics and their tidy verdicts; "Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, - though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, - the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!" The protest is personal: criticism threatened the delicate balance he cultivated between indecency and tenderness, between the erotic wink and the humane tear.

Legacy and Influence

Sterne's impact reaches far beyond the eighteenth-century vogue for "sensibility". Tristram Shandy became a foundational text for later experiments in narrative time, self-reflexive fiction, and the comedy of interruption; its descendants run from Diderot to Joyce, Woolf, and postmodern metafiction. His Sentimental Journey, meanwhile, helped redefine travel writing as a study of perception and ethical response, not itinerary. Sterne endures because he made the novel honest about the mind's wanderings and the body's limits, showing that empathy can be sharpened - not dulled - by wit, and that a life fragmented by chance can still be stitched into meaning through voice.