One morning in early March 1760 two men met by chance in a street in York. Both in their mid40s, they were by then old friends, having known each other for almost 20 years. One, a plump, slightly jowly man of affable appearance, was a wealthy landowner, squire of the parish of Stillington, 10 miles north of the city. The other, nearly six feet tall, distinctively angular, with a long, sharp nose and thin to the point of gauntness, was an Anglican priest, vicar of two country livings, including Stillington. Stephen Croft, the squire, was setting out for London on private business but paused to ask after the fortunes of his friend. He had good reason, for the recent publication of two slim volumes of comic prose fiction, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, had quite unexpectedly made a local celebrity of the country parson.
The priest, the Rev Laurence Sterne, was unaffectedly delighted by the sudden shift in his fortunes. He had long sought to escape the predictable and uncongenial rural existence to which his modest income and still more modest prospects had restricted him. Even when his fiction became the toast of friends and acquaintances in York and the surrounding countryside, Sterne was not content. Ambition, and a stubborn belief in his work, left him hankering after further success in London, the undisputed centre of English cultural life. To this end, he devised imaginative stratagems aimed at bringing his novel to the notice of influential arbiters of metropolitan taste. Not even in his most optimistic moments, however, could Sterne have imagined that within two months of its first appearance Tristram Shandy would become the most talkedabout work of English fiction since Samuel Richardson had published Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded to comparable acclaim, two decades earlier.
Stephen Croft was better acquainted than most with the clergyman's ambitions and with the repeated disappointments he had endured over the past many years. Meeting him now, he showed generous delight at the turn in his friend's fortunes and immediately suggested that Sterne accompany him to London. All too familiar with the imprudent vicar's recurring financial problems, Croft even offered pay the cost of his journey: "in the vulgar Phrase . . . to frank him and defray his expenses back". Handsome as the proposal was, the clergyman hesitated, not out of delicacy but because the timing of the invitation was scarcely ideal. His wife, Elizabeth, was still recovering from a mental breakdown which had led her, some months earlier, to believe herself the Queen of Bohemia; the breakdown, it was whispered, had been caused by her husband's repeated and notorious infidelities. Stephen Croft was not to be put off, however, and he told Sterne bluntly that as he "cou'd not possibly do her any good by his attendance . . . he had better go along with him". Thus pressed, and with the single proviso that he should have an hour in which to go home and pack his best breeches, Sterne accepted.
On their arrival in London two days later Sterne joined Stephen Croft as the guest of the latter's daughter - and her husband - in their house in Chapel Street, close to Hyde Park. The following morning Sterne was missing at the breakfast table. He had left the house early to visit his London publishers, the celebrated booksellers Robert and James Dodsley, in their fashionable shop at the sign of "Tully's Head", in Pall Mall. Enquiring after Tristram Shandy, its author was "highly flattered, when the Shopman told him, that there was not such a Book to be had in London either for Love or money".
Such, at least, is the story told many years later by John Croft, brother of Sterne's friend Stephen. John Croft's anecdotes are not always reliable, but there can be little doubt as to the essential truthfulness of his account of this pivotal moment in Sterne's life. Born in Clonmel in 1713 [he spent part of his childhood in Co Wicklow], the second child of a younger son of a younger son of a family of Yorkshire gentry, Laurence Sterne had spent his days in an existence familiar enough to others of his class in 18th-century England. Possessing the estimable advantages of good birth and education, he entirely lacked the wealth necessary to support the social position he inherited. Like so many of his kind, Laurence Sterne had followed a well-worn path as he attempted to protect his genteel status and secure his future. Orphaned of his father when he was 17, he was able to take a degree at the University of Cambridge thanks to the financial assistance afforded him by a cousin. Having graduated, he took holy orders in the Church of England as soon as he was legally entitled to do so.
After his ordination at the age of 23, Sterne obtained a living in the rural Yorkshire parish of Sutton-on-the-Forest and, for a while, fulfilled his pastoral obligations conscientiously enough. Soon, however, he was called to duties of a different kind. In an age in which the Whig government kept a tight hold on the Church of England, the Anglican clergy were highly politicized and before long Sterne found himself playing a small but prominent part in county politics. Sterne owed his first living to the patronage of his uncle - a powerful church lawyer and a champion of the Whig party interest in Yorkshire. When the time was right, Dr Jaques Sterne called upon his nephew to discharge the debt by turning political journalist. So, in the early 1740s, Laurence Sterne took up his pen in support of the campaigns of the Whig candidates in two successive county elections. Before long, he was rewarded for his political efforts with a modest share of the preferments the Established Church of the 18th century offered to its favoured sons: a prebendal stall in York Minster, soon to be exchanged for another, more lucrative, prebend. Very quickly, however, Sterne found that the savage personal abuse he directed against his Tory opponents in his political journalism had an unwelcome tendency to be returned, with interest, on himself. Dismayed and discouraged, he abruptly turned his back on politics - although he knew that by so doing he would lose the patronage of his now alienated and vindictive uncle and with it his best hope of advancement in the Church.
Barely 30 years of age, Stern settled into an altogether quieter, more humdrum existence as vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest. He acquired a second living, Stillington, but the respectable tedium of a life in a country parish soon led to restlessness. At best, he could be a compassionate as well as conscientious priest: for more than 20 years there were those among the poorer and more vulnerable members of the local community who had reason to be grateful to him for acts of public benevolence and private charity. It was not long, however, before Sterne became intermittently careless of his more routine ecclesiastical duties, so bringing himself into conflict with his respectable country parishioners. Worse still, he gained a unsavoury but deserved reputation as a libertine, a clergyman whose numerous and ill-disguised infidelities brought scandal to the cloth. Only in the pulpit was his standing secure, for the affecting eloquence and apparent spontaneity of his preaching appealed as much to the more demanding urban congregations of York as to the humbler churchgoers of the Yorkshire countryside.
In his late 20s Sterne married Elizabeth Lumley, a young woman from a genteel northern background very similar to his own. In the early years of their marriage Elizabeth would bear a number of children, just one of whom - a daughter, Lydia - would survive infancy. Failing to find emotional or physical satisfaction in his marriage, however, Sterne embarked on a series of adulterous liaisons that he hoped might supplement the scant consolations offered by his relationship with an increasingly unhappy Elizabeth. Such gratification as he found was fleeting; the damage to his moral reputation was more enduring. Unhappy as they were in their personal relationship, however, Laurence and Elizabeth Sterne were at one in their determination to keep up the genteel appearances important to them both. As it became ever more apparent that Laurence's sudden retreat from politics and increasingly sour relations with his uncle had cut him off from the prospect of future ecclesiastical preferment, the Sternes ventured into farming, in a frustrating and ultimately frustrated attempt to supplement an income that never seemed adequate to their expenditure.
Occasionally, in the course of 20 years, some event of national importance - most notably the 1745 Jacobite rebellion - animated the even tenor of a generally staid existence. More frequently, there were acute frustrations arising from the fierce but essentially petty-minded politicking characteristic of the venal clerical circles centred on York Minster. For the most part, however, Sterne followed a tranquil, obscure existence in the Yorkshire countryside, living, like many others, a life compounded of small satisfactions and more enduring disappointments. The country parson's leisure hours were filled as predictably as his working life was ordered by the church calendar: for many years, he was later to write, "Books, painting, fiddling, and shooting were my amusements". Even the literary talent that had first revealed itself in his political journalism barely distinguished Sterne from many of his clerical contemporaries. He wrote sermons, of course, a little poetry; and, at the end of the 1750s, a short prose satire, A Political Romance, also known as The History of a Good Warm Watch-Coat. Like his farming, these forays into literature engaged his enthusiasm for a while, but after two decades they had brought him scant notice or reward. Two sermons which made their way into print did not sell well, while his single published poem appeared anonymously and went largely unremarked. Far worse, the witty Political Romance, which scathingly but imprudently exposed the rapaciousness of several easily identified members of the Minster clergy, was barely off the press when the archbishop of York hastily intervened to save the blushes of the Church and peremptorily ordered the entire edition to be burned.