Ian Campbell Ross is associate professor of English, and a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. Of mixed Scottish, English and Irish background, he now lives in Co Wicklow - coincidentally close by Annamoe, where Laurence Sterne spent part of his boyhood. Among his publications are Public Virtue, Public Love: the Early Years of the Dublin Lying-In Hospital, the Rotunda (1986); Umbria: A Cultural History (1996), and Locating Swift (with Aileen Douglas and Patrick Kelly, 1998); he has also edited Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1983) for Oxford University Press. A founder of the Eighteenth-Century Ireland Society, he co-edited its journal Eighteenth-Century Ireland from 1986-95. He is currently a co-director of the Centre for Irish-Scottish Studies at TCD. His new biography, Laurence Sterne: A Life(Oxford University Press, £25), from which this extract is taken, is published this week.