THE
WORKS AND LIFE
OF
LAURENCE STERNE.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
YORK EDITION.
The Sutton Issue of the LIFE and WORKS of LAURENCE STERNE,
printed at The Westminster Press, New York, is limited to
Seven Hundred and Fifty Sets, of which this is Set No. 4
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration:
LAURENCE STERNE
Etching by Hédouin.
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE
JOURNAL TO ELIZA
AND
VARIOUS LETTERS
BY
LAURENCE STERNE
AND
ELIZABETH DRAPER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY
WILBUR L. CROSS
[Illustration: Publisher’s Logo]
J. F. TAYLOR & COMPANY
NEW YORK
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 1904, by
J. F. TAYLOR & COMPANY
NEW YORK
THE WESTMINSTER PRESS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE
JOURNAL TO ELIZA
AND
VARIOUS LETTERS
TAKEN FROM
THE GIBBS MANUSCRIPTS
AND
OTHER SOURCES
MOSTLY PUBLISHED NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME
[Illustration: Publisher’s Logo]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION ii
LETTERS FROM YORICK TO ELIZA 15
THE JOURNAL TO ELIZA 51
ORIGINAL LETTERS OF LAURENCE STERNE 155
LETTERS OF ELIZABETH DRAPER 165
AN EULOGY BY THE ABBÉ RAYNAL 281
FOOTNOTES 288
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Laurence Sterne. Etching by Frontispiece
Hédouin
Tomb of Eliza Draper in 50
Bristol Cathedral
Commodore James, by Sir Joshua 157
Reynolds
Belvidere House, by Lee 173
Woodward Zeigler, from an
original sketch by J. B.
Frazer
Abbé Raynal 279
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
ELIZABETH DRAPER.
STERNE married Miss Lumley of York. He afterwards held sentimental
converse with Miss Fourmantelle, Lady Percy, “My witty widow Mrs. F—,”
&c., &c. But his one passion was for the Eliza to whom this volume is
dedicated. “Not Swift,” he wrote to her just before she sailed for
India, “so loved his Stella, Scarron his Maintenon, or Waller his
Sacharissa, as I will love and sing thee, my wife elect! All those
names, eminent as they are, shall give place to thine, Eliza.”
Mrs. Elizabeth Draper was daughter to one May Sclater who went out to
India when a mere boy. He married there a Miss Whitehill, and settled at
Anjengo, a small factory on the coast of Malabar, where Elizabeth was
born on April 5, 1744. In due time she was sent to England for the
“frivolous education” accorded to “girls destined for India.” “The
generality of us,” she wrote in sorrowful retrospect, “* * * were never
instructed in the Importance of any thing, but one Worldly Point, that
of getting an Establishment of the Lucrative kind, as soon as possible,
a tolerable complection, an Easy manner, some degree of taste in the
adjustment of our ornaments, some little skill in dancing a minuet, and
singing an air.” With no training in “useful Employments,” she returned
to India in her fourteenth year to become, six months later, the wife of
Daniel Draper, her elder by some twenty years. Since 1750 Draper had
been in the service of the East India Company, and in 1759, the year
after his marriage, he was appointed Secretary to the Government at
Bombay, where with some interruptions he continued for the rest of his
life in India. His faithful services were eventually rewarded by a seat
in the Council and the post of Accountant General. If a somewhat heavy
official, he was described by a friend and admirer as “a very noble and
good-humoured man.” There was nothing unusual about the Draper marriage,
which now seems so ill-sorted in respect to age; and we may suppose that
neither husband nor wife found it too uncomfortable. A boy was born in
1759, and two years later a girl, named for her mother—the Eliza or
Betsey who figures in one of the letters. In 1765, the Drapers brought
their children to England that they might be given an English education.
Later in the same year Mr. Draper went back to Bombay, but his wife
remained in England to recover her health, which had been much weakened
by child-bearing and the heat of India.
There was then living in Gerrard Street, Soho, a retired Indian
commodore named William James. After making a fortune in the Bombay
Marine Service, he returned to England, married an attractive wife, and
soon won a place in the “best” London society. Early in 1767, Sterne
began going to the Jameses for dinner, especially of a Sunday; and the
friendship quickly became intimate. Under date of February 23, Sterne
wrote to his daughter Lydia: “I wish I had you with me—and I would
introduce you to one of the most amiable and gentlest of beings, whom I
have just been with— * * * a Mrs. James, the wife of as worthy a man as
I ever met with—I esteem them both.” It was no doubt at the house of
these “kind friends in Gerrard Street” that Sterne made the acquaintance
of Mrs. Draper—and most likely on his arrival in London at the very
beginning of January, 1767. Half in love on first sight, Sterne soon
became completely engrossed with his new passion. And well he might, for
though Eliza may not have been handsome, she was young, good looking at
least, and most agreeable in manner. “Your eyes,” Sterne wrote to her,
“and the shape of your face (the latter the most perfect oval I ever
saw) * * * are equal to any of God’s works in a similar way, and finer
than any I beheld in all my travels.” Mrs. Draper was then called by her
London friends, says one of her letters, the _Belle Indian_. Sterne saw
much of her at the Jameses; she visited his lodgings in Old Bond Street;
they made excursions together in and about London; and when separated
from her, Sterne communed with her “sweet sentimental picture.” As the
time was approaching for her to return to India—she sailed on April 3,
1767—he addressed to her the extraordinary epistles that all the world
knows, and for months afterwards he recorded his sensations in a journal
which he hoped some day to place in her hands.
The sojourn of Mrs. Draper in England had been to the change and harm of
her character. With her little knowledge of the world, she took Sterne
and her flatterers too seriously. She was no doubt attractive in
appearance, with her oval face and light airs, but her admirers said to
her face that she was beautiful; and worse than that, they tried to make
out that she possessed qualities of mind which, if cultivated, would
surely lead to distinction in literature. They sent her back to the dull
humdrum of India with the literary ambitions of Mrs. Montagu and the
blue-stockings. Henceforth she was to find at Bombay a great “Dearth of
every thing which could charm the Heart—please the Fancy, or speak to
the judgment.” Still Mrs. Draper seems for a time to have made the best
of the situation. Writing from Tellicherry in 1769 to a friend in
England, she spoke with respect if not with enthusiasm of her husband,
whom she was assisting in his official correspondence. But by 1772 she
became thoroughly sick of India and of her husband in particular. In a
letter to Mrs. James from Bombay she lamented that she was compelled to
remain in a detestable country, where her health was declining, and her
mind was tortured by the desire to return to England and be with her
daughter. At this time she was no longer living with Draper as a wife,
and for sufficient reasons, for he was engaged in open intrigue with an
attendant—a Mrs. Leeds. In retaliation and despair, Mrs. Draper abruptly
left her husband on the night of January 14–15, 1773, in company with
Sir John Clark of the Navy, then in command of a frigate at Bombay. She
sought refuge for a time with a “kind uncle,” Tom Whitehill, at
Rajahmandry, and the next year she returned to England, where much
attention was paid to her as Sterne’s Eliza. She associated, perhaps not
to her good fame, with John Wilkes the politician; and, if an anecdote
of Rogers is to be trusted, William Combe, the literary hack, could
boast “that it was with him, not with Sterne, that Eliza was in love.”
More to be pitied than to be censured, the unfortunate Mrs. Draper died
at Bristol on August 3, 1778, in the thirty-fifth year of her age.
Mrs. Draper was buried in the cloisters of Bristol Cathedral, where to
her memory stands a monument symbolizing in its two draped figures
Genius and Benevolence, the qualities given her in the inscription. The
next year the Abbé Raynal, the French historian of the Indies—over whom
Mrs. Draper had cast her spells, first in India and afterwards in
England—wrote about her in mad eulogy. He had wept, he said, with Eliza
over Sterne; and at the time of her death, she was intending to quit her
country for a life with him in France. “A statuary,” he goes on to say
in description of Mrs. Draper, “who would have wished to represent
Voluptuousness, would have taken her for his model; and she would
equally have served for him who might have had a figure of Modesty to
display. * * * Every instant increased the delight she inspired; every
instant rendered her more interesting. * * * Eliza then was very
beautiful? No, she was simply beautiful: but there was no beauty she did
not eclipse, because she was the only one that was like herself.”[1] And
long afterwards, James Forbes, to whose _Oriental Memoirs_ we owe so
much for the social India of those days, paid his tribute to Mrs.
Draper. Anjengo he averred would ever be celebrated as the birthplace of
Eliza: “a lady with whom I had the pleasure of being acquainted at
Bombay, whose refined tastes and elegant accomplishments require no
encomium from my pen.” To the various places where Mrs. Draper lived in
India the curious long made pilgrimages. Colonel James Welsh of the
Madras infantry visited the house at Anjengo where she was supposed to
be born, and carried away from a broken window pieces of oyster-shell
and mother-of-pearl as mementos. He took pains to write also in his
_Memoirs_ that the house she lived in at Tellicherry was still standing
in 1812. Belvidere House, at Mazagon, overlooking the harbour at
Bombay—the house from an upper window of which Eliza escaped by a rope
ladder to the ship of Sir John Clark—was long believed to be haunted by
her spirit, “flitting about in corridor or verandah in hoop and
farthingale.” Sketches of Belvidere were brought to England by J. B.
Fraser, the traveller and explorer; and from them Robert Burford painted
a panorama[2] for public exhibition in London. For nearly a century, it
is said, a tree on the estate of her uncle Tom Whitehill at Masulipatam
was called Eliza’s tree in memory of her sojourn there.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
LETTERS FROM YORICK TO ELIZA.
AS narrated in the introduction to the first volume of _Letters and
Miscellanies_, Mrs. Draper was induced to print some of the letters that
she received from Sterne in the spring of 1767. The slight volume, with
the dedication and preface reproduced here, made its appearance in
February, 1775. Except for the ten letters that this volume contained,
the correspondence between Sterne and Mrs. Draper seems to have been
lost. Among the lost letters, were several from Sterne, and all of Mrs.
Draper’s replies covering the same period. The latter were so many that
Sterne spent an entire afternoon in sorting and arranging them. And to
be lamented much more is the disappearance of the long ship letters that
passed between the Bramin and Bramine in the summer and fall of the same
year. In May, Sterne took four days for an overland letter to Mrs.
Draper and in August he dispatched another to _chaperon_ one from Mrs.
James. While in his retreat at Coxwold he wept for an evening and a
morning over Eliza’s narration of the dangers and miseries of her
voyage. “Thou wouldst win me by thy Letters,” he records in his journal
to her, “had I never seen thy face or known thy heart.”
The ten letters that have survived bore when written no date except the
hour of the day or the day of the week, and they were published by Mrs.
Draper without any indication of date whatever. The first brief note,
sent with a present of the _Sermons_ and _Tristram Shandy_, evidently
belongs to January, perhaps to the last week of the month when appeared
the ninth volume of _Shandy_. And very soon afterwards, no doubt, Sterne
dispatched the second note in which he would persuade Eliza to admit him
as physician in her illness, notwithstanding “the etiquettes of this
town say otherwise.” The succeeding eight letters were daily missives
from Sterne to Eliza while she was at Deal waiting for the signal of
embarkation from the _Earl of Chatham_, which was to bear her to India.
On her departure the blood broke from poor Yorick’s heart.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
THE GIBBS MANUSCRIPTS.
THESE manuscripts are by far the most important Sterne discovery of the
nineteenth century. They are named from their former owner, Thomas
Washbourne Gibbs, a gentleman of Bath, into whose possession they came
midway in the century. How this piece of good fortune happened to him,
we leave to his own pen to relate:
“Upon the death of my father,” he writes, “when I was eleven years old,
a pile of old account books, letters, common-place books, and other
papers of no documentary value was set aside as waste, and placed in a
room where I used to play. I looked through the papers, and found the
journal and letters. An early fondness for reading had made me
acquainted with the well-known extracts from the writings of Sterne—‘The
Story of Maria,’ ‘The Sword,’ ‘The Monk,’ ‘Le Fevre,’ and a small book
containing the ‘Letters of Yorick and Eliza,’ and finding these names in
the letters and book, I took all I could find, and obtained permission
to preserve them, and they have been in my possession ever since. How
they came into the hands of my father, who was a great reader, and had a
large collection of books, I never had any means of knowing.”
Mr. Gibbs showed the curious manuscripts to his friends, and in May,
1851, sent a part of them to Thackeray, then at work upon the _English
Humourists_. Except for a mention of this incident in a _Roundabout_
(the pages were afterwards suppressed), nothing was publicly known
concerning the manuscripts until March, 1878, when Mr. Gibbs read before
the Bath Literary Institution a paper on “Some Memorials of Laurence
Sterne,” the substance of which was printed in _The Athenæum_ for March
30, 1878. On the death of Mr. Gibbs in 1894, the manuscripts passed
under his bequest to the British Museum. They are numbered 34527 among
the additional manuscripts acquired in 1894–1899. They contain:
1. The Journal to Eliza.
2. A Letter from Sterne at Coxwold to Mr. and Mrs. James, dated August
10, 1767.
3. A Letter from Sterne at York to Mr. and Mrs. James, dated December
28, 1767.
4. Draft of a Letter from Laurence Sterne to Daniel Draper.
5. A Letter from Elizabeth Draper at Bombay to Anne James, dated April
15, 1772.
6. Two Letters from W. M. Thackeray to J. W. Gibbs dated May 31, and
September 12, [1851.]
* * * * *
About the genuineness of every part of this manuscript material there
can be no doubt. The _Journal to Eliza_ and the letters to Mr. and Mrs.
James and to Daniel Draper are in Sterne’s own hand-writing. The first
letter “has been through the post, and is franked by Lord Fauconberg,
the patron of the Coxwold living.” The second letter has also passed
through the post. The letter from Mrs. Draper is likewise in her own
hand. And to the Thackeray letters have been preserved the original
covering envelopes.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
THE JOURNAL TO ELIZA.
NEARLY one half of the manuscript volume just described is occupied by
_The Journal to Eliza_, or _The Bramine’s Journal_, as Sterne perhaps
intended to call it. On the first page is a note by Sterne himself,
wherein it is said, with a characteristic attempt at mystification, that
the names “Yorick and Draper—and sometimes the Bramin and
Bramine”[3]—are fictitious, and that the entire record is “a copy from a
French manuscript—in Mr. S——’s hands.” Then follow seventy-six pages of
writing, with about twenty-eight lines to the page, and finally a page
with only a few words upon it. The leaves are folio in size, and except
in the case of the first and the last, both sides are written upon.
This curious diary was composed during the first months after Sterne’s
separation from Mrs. Draper. On a certain day late in March 1767, Sterne
handed Mrs. Draper into a postchaise for Deal, and turned away to his
London lodgings “in anguish.” Before parting, each promised to keep an
intimate journal that they might have “mutual testimonies to deliver
hereafter to each other,” should they again meet. While Mrs. Draper was
at Deal making preparations for her voyage to India, Sterne sent her all
that he had written; and on the thirteenth of April he forwarded by a
Mr. Watts, then departing for Bombay, a second instalment of his record.
These two sections of Sterne’s journal—and likewise all of Mrs.
Draper’s, for we know that she kept one—have disappeared. The extant
part begins on the thirteenth of April, 1767 and comes down to the
fourth of August in the same year. The sudden break was occasioned by
the expected return of Mrs. Sterne from France, where she had been
living for some time. After her arrival at Coxwold, the journal could be
carried on only by stealth; and besides that, Sterne felt her
presence—and even the thought of it—a restraint upon the fancy. A
postscript was added on the first of November announcing that Mrs.
Sterne and Lydia had just gone to York for the winter, while he himself
was to remain at Coxwold to complete the _Sentimental Journey_. There
were hints that the journal would be resumed as soon as he reached
London in the following January. But Sterne probably did not carry out
his intention. At least nothing is known of a later effort.
In Sterne’s introductory note, the _Journal_ is described as “a Diary of
the miserable feelings of a person separated from a Lady for whose
Society he languish’d.” Already worn out by a long stretch of dinners,
Sterne completely broke down under the strain of Mrs. Draper’s departure
for India. “Poor sick-headed, sick-hearted Yorick!” he exclaims, “Eliza
has made a shadow of thee.” As his illness increased, the Sunday visits
in Gerrard Street were broken-off, and the sick and dejected lover shut
himself up in his lodgings to abstinence and reflection. To allay the
“fever of the heart” with which he was wasting, he had recourse to Dr.
James’s Powder, a popular remedy of the period which, so said the
advertisement, would cure “any acute fever in a few hours, though
attended with convulsions.” On going out too soon after taking the
nostrum, Sterne caught cold and came near dying. Physicians were called
in, and twelve ounces of blood were taken from the patient in order “to
quiet,” says Sterne, “what was left in me.” The next day the bandage on
his arm broke loose and he “half bled to death” before he was aware of
it. Four days later he found himself much “improved in body and mind.”
On feeling his pulse, the doctors “stroked their beards and look’d ten
per c^t. wiser.” The patient was now in condition for their last
prescription: I “am still,” he writes, “to run thro’ a Course of Van
Sweeten’s corrosive Mercury, or rather Van Sweeten’s Course of Mercury
is to run thro’ me.” The doctors dismissed, Sterne finally experimented
at his own risk with a French tincture called _L’Extrait de Saturne_,
and on the next day he was able to dine out once more.
During his illness his “room was always full of friendly Visitors,” and
the “rapper eternally going with Cards and enquiries.” With these
friends, among whom were Lord and Lady Spencer, he had yet to dine; and
then on the twenty second of May he set out for Yorkshire. On the twenty
eighth he reached his “thatched cottage” at Coxwold, and began another
course of corrosive Mercury. His “face as pale and clear as a Lady after
her Lying in,” he rose from his bed to take the air every day in his
postchaise drawn by “two fine horses,” and by the middle of June he was
“well and alert.” So he went over to Hall-Stevenson’s at Crazy Castle,
where on the neighboring beach, “as even as a mirrour of 5 miles in
Length,” squire and parson ran daily races in their chaises, “with one
wheel in the Sea, & the other in the Sand.” In the course of the summer,
Sterne paid another visit to Crazy Castle; Hall-Stevenson came to
Coxwold for a day or two, and they went together to Harrogate to drink
the waters. By the 27th of July they were back at York for the races. At
the beginning of the next month, Sterne was “hurried backwards and
forwards ab^t. the arrival of Madame”—an event that had long been
impending to the suspense and torture of his mind.
To some the _Journal_ will be most interesting for the light it sheds
upon Sterne’s doings for four months in the last year of his life. By it
may be determined the dates of letters and the order of Sterne’s
movements in London and then in Yorkshire. It is no doubt a fragment of
trustworthy autobiography. To others it may appeal as a Shandean essay.
Indeed Sterne himself thought the story of his illness—especially in its
first stages—as good as any of the accidents that befell Mr. Tristram
Shandy. All will see that the _Journal_ is a sentimental document. For
just as in the _Sentimental Journey_, Sterne here lets his fancy play
about trivial incidents and trivial things. A cat as well as a donkey
may become an emotional theme:
“Eating my fowl,” he records for July 8, “and my trouts & my cream & my
strawberries, as melancholly as a Cat; for want of you—by the by, I have
got one which sits quietly besides me, purring all day to my sorrows—&
looking up gravely from time to time in my face, as if she knew my
Situation.—how soothable my heart is Eliza, when such little things
sooth it! for in some pathetic sinkings I feel even some support from
this poor Cat—I attend to her purrings—& think they harmonize me—they
are _pianissimo_ at least, & do not disturb me.—poor Yorick! to be
driven, w^{th}. all his sensibilities, to these resources—all powerful
Eliza, that has had this magic^l. authority over him; to bend him thus
to the dust.”
With him was always the picture of Eliza, who had sat for him just
before going down to Deal. It may have been one of Cosway’s; but we
do not know, for it has disappeared along with all other portraits
of Mrs. Draper. It rested upon his table as he wrote his daily
record of incident and emotion. To it he said his matins and
vespers, and felt all his murmurs quieted by the spirit that spoke
to him from the “gentle sweet face.” “I’ve been,” he says, “as far
as York to day with no Soul with me in my Chase, but y^r.
Picture—for it has a _Soul_ I think—or something like one which has
talk’d to me, & been the best Company I ever took a Journey with.”
He showed the portrait to the Archbishop of York—“his Grace, his
Lady and Sister”—and told them “a short but interesting Story” of
his “friendship for the original.” It was taken over to Crazy Castle
where it went round the table after supper and Eliza’s health with
it. And finally, says Sterne, in allusion to the _Sentimental
Journey_, “I have brought y^r. name _Eliza!_ and Picture into my
work—where they will remain—when you and I are at rest for ever.”
But with Sterne sentiment must end in humor; and so came that daring
fancy of some Dryasdust commenting in a far distant time on Yorick
and Eliza: “Some Annotator,” says Sterne, “or explainer of my works
in this place will take occasion to speak of the Friendship w^{ch}.
subsisted so long & faithfully betwixt Yorick & the Lady he speaks
of—Her Name he will tell the world was Draper—a Native of
India—married there to a gentleman in the India Service of that
Name—who brought her over to England for the recovery of her health
in the Year 65—where She continued to April the year 1767. It was
ab^t. three months before her Return to India, That our Author’s
acquaintance & hers began. M^{rs}. Draper had a great thirst for
knowledge—was handsome—genteel—engaging—and of such gentle
disposition & so enlightened an understanding,—That Yorick (whether
he made much opposition is not known) from an acquaintance—soon
became her Admirer—they caught fire, at each other at the same
time—& they w^d. often say, without reserve to the world, & without
any Idea of saying wrong in it, That their Affections for each other
were _unbounded_—M^r. Draper dying in the Year * * * * * This Lady
return’d to England & Yorick the year after becoming a Widower—They
were married—& retiring to one of his Livings in Yorkshire, where
was a most romantic Situation—they lived & died happily—and are
spoke of with honour in the parish to this day.”
Sterne felt sure that the marriage with Eliza would take place within
three years. He had so written on the impulse of the moment in
dedicating an almanac to her, and he believed that impulse came from
heaven. In the meantime Eliza was omnipresent in the spirit. “In
proportion,” writes Sterne, “as I am thus torn from y^r. embraces—_I
cling the closer to the Idea of you_. Your Figure is ever before my
eyes—the sound of y^r. voice vibrates with its sweetest tones the live
long day in my ear—I can see & hear nothing but my Eliza.” As he sat
down to his _Sentimental Journey_, Eliza entered the library without
tapping, and he had to shut her out before he could begin writing. On
another day, the dear Bramine was asked to stay that her presence might
“soften and modulate” his feelings for a sentimental portrait—the fair
Fleming, it may be, or the beautiful Grisette, or the heartbroken Maria.
To Eliza he dedicated “a sweet little apartment” in his “thatched
palace,” and entered there ten times every day to render his devotions
to her in “the sweetest of earthly Tabernacles.” And for his future
“Partner and Companion” he built a pavilion in “a retired corner” of his
garden, where he sat in reverie, and longed and waited for that day’s
sleep when he might say with Adam—“_Behold the Woman Thou has given me
for Wife._”
The woman that had been given him for wife twenty-five years before was
still in France. But she was then about to visit her husband for the
purpose of obtaining from him provision for the support of herself and
daughter in southern France. After repeated delays Mrs. Sterne reached
Coxwold on the second of October. As Sterne looks forward to this visit,
his “heart sinks down to the earth.” He would be in health and strength,
if it were not for this cloud hanging over him with “its tormenting
consequences.” Taking this distress for theme, his friend Hall-Stevenson
wrote “an affecting little poem” which Sterne promised to transcribe for
Eliza. When illness prevented Mrs. Sterne from setting out from France
as soon as she expected, her husband became impatient at the detention,
for he was anxious “to know certainly _the day and hour of this
Judgment_.” “The period of misery,” covering a month at length came and
passed. Half in love with her husband because of his humanity and
generosity, Mrs. Sterne went to York to spend the winter. In the spring
she was to retire into France, “whence,” says Sterne, “she purposes not
to stir, till her death.—& never, has she vow’d, will give me another
sorrowful or discontented hour.” These last weeks with his wife brought
to Sterne one consolation more.—Mrs. Sterne confessed to her husband
that at the time of her marriage she made herself out ten years younger
than she really was. “God bless,” he writes to Eliza, “& make the
remainder of her Life happy—in order to w^{ch}. I am to remit her three
hundred guineas a year.”
Much that was said, in an earlier volume, of the _Sentimental Journey_
might be appropriately repeated here of the _Journal to Eliza_. Once
Sterne was at the point of dying broken hearted because of his
separation from Miss Lumley. Twenty-five years after marriage she became
“a restless unreasonable Wife whom neither gentleness or generosity can
conquer.” With Mrs. Draper, Sterne was no doubt more deeply in love than
he had ever been with his wife. He would have married her, but for the
barriers. And yet, had he married her, the time must surely have come
when even Eliza would have found her place supplanted. For sincere as
Sterne may have been for the moment, his emotions were fugitive and
volatile. If one woman were not at hand for evoking them, another would
answer as well; if not one object, why then another. Whole passages—and
this is one of the Sterne curiosities—are taken from the letters to Miss
Lumley and carried over into the _Journal to Eliza_, as applicable, with
a few minor changes, to the new situation. It was hardly more than
writing “Molly” for “Fanny,” or “our faithful friend Mrs. James” for
“the good Miss S——” and the old “sentimental repasts” once graced by
Miss Lumley could be served anew for Eliza.[4]
To explain these remarkable parallelisms,—sometimes word for word—Mr.
Sidney Lee has recently suggested that Mrs. Medalle, in editing her
father’s correspondence, “foisted some passages from the _Journal_ on
her mother’s love-letters.”[5] Mrs. Medalle was certainly unscrupulous
enough for that; but it is more likely that Sterne deliberately adjusted
the letters to the _Journal_ from copies preserved at Coxwold. Miss S——
of York consoled with him in the earlier days while Miss Lumley was away
in Staffordshire. Mrs. James now consoles with him for the loss of
Eliza. The situations are similar; and why should not the same or
similar language be used in describing them. Sterne’s plagiarism from
himself in the _Journal_ is by no means confined to the sentimental
passages. The letter dated June 7, 1767, to A. Lee Esq., descriptive of
the golden age at Coxwold, was worked into the _Journal_ for the second
of July. And in reverse order, the Shandean story of Sterne’s illness
recorded in the _Journal_ for the twenty-second of April, was retold on
the twenty-first of May in a letter to the Earl of S——. This was, as has
been seen, the manner of the sermons, of which two were nearly alike
except for the different texts.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
THACKERAY AND THE JOURNAL.
WHILE Thackeray was preparing his lectures on the _English Humourists_,
Mr. Gibbs sent him the _Journal to Eliza_ in a parcel which seems to
have contained also the copy of the _Letters from Yorick to Eliza_ now
bound with the Gibbs Manuscripts. Surprise has been expressed by
Sterne’s biographers—Mr. Percy Fitzgerald and Mr. Sidney Lee—that
Thackeray “made no use” of the _Journal_, as if he thought it “of slight
importance.” The biographers also say that it was lent to Thackeray
“while he was lecturing on Sterne.” As a matter of fact, Thackeray must
have received the Manuscripts nearly a month before his lecture; and as
will be seen, he did make some use of them. But we will let Thackeray
first speak for himself. The following letter to Mr. Gibbs is postmarked
May 31, 1851 and June 1, 1851.
13 Young St.
Kensington
May 31 [1851.]
Dear Sir
I thank you very much for your obliging offer, and the kind
terms in w^h. you make it. If you will send me the MSS I will
take great care of them, and gratefully restore them to their
owner.
Your very faithful Serv^t.
W M THACKERAY
It may be taken for granted that the Manuscripts reached Thackeray in
the course of a week. The lecture on Sterne and Goldsmith—the last of
the series—was read at Willis’s Rooms on the afternoon of Thursday July
3, 1851.[6] After a long delay, the Manuscripts were returned to Mr.
Gibbs, with a comment on the man Sterne as revealed by the _Journal_. I
give the letter just as Thackeray wrote it, save for erasures and
substitutions:
Kensington
12 September [1851.]
Dear Sir
Immediately after my lectures I went abroad and beg your pardon
for having forgotten in the hurry of my departure to return the
MSS w^h. you were good enough to lend me. I am sorry that
reading the Brahmin’s letters to his Brahmine did not increase
my respect for the Reverend Laurence Sterne.
In his printed letters there is one XCII[7] addressed to Lady P. full of
love and despair for my Lady & pronouncing that he had got a ticket for
Miss xxx benefit that night, which he might use if deprived of the
superior delight of seeing Lady P. I looked in the Dramatic Register (I
think is the name of the book) to find what lady took a benefit on a
Tuesday, & found the names of _2_, 1 at Covent Garden, & one at Drury
Lane, on the same Tuesday evening, and no other Miss’s benefit on a
Tuesday during the Season. Miss Poyntz I think is one of the names, but
I’m 5 miles from the book as I write to you, and forget the lady’s name
& the day.
However on the day Sterne was writing to Lady P., and going to Miss ——’s
benefit, he is _dying_ in his Journal to the Brahmine, can’t eat, has
the Doctor, & is in a dreadful way.
He wasn’t dying, but lying I’m afraid—God help him—a falser & wickeder
man its difficult to read of. Do you know the accompanying pamphlet.[8]
(My friend M^r. Cooper gave me this copy, w^h he had previously sent to
the Reform club, & has since given the club another copy) there is more
of Yorick’s love making in these letters, with blasphemy to flavor the
compositions, and indications of a scornful unbelief. Of course any man
is welcome to believe as he likes for me _except_ a parson, and I can’t
help looking upon Swift & Sterne as a couple of traitors and renegades
(as one does upon Bonneval or poor Bem the other day,) with a scornful
pity for them in spite of all their genius and greatness.
With many thanks for your loan believe me Dear Sir
Very faithfully yours
W. M. THACKERAY
It may be that Thackeray left the _Journal_ unread until after the
lecture on Sterne and Goldsmith. No positive statement can be made about
that. But it is not probable that he would fail to examine at once
Sterne manuscripts that he “gratefully” received. True, no quotation is
made from the _Journal_ for the lecture—and in that sense Thackeray
“made no use of it”—but a careless perusal of the document is precisely
what would lead one to the unreasonable view that Thackeray took of
Sterne. He was evidently much amused by the account Sterne gives of a
fever brought on by the loss of Eliza—the minute circumstances of the
blood letting and the wise physicians, the farewell to Eliza and the
announcement on an evening that “I am going,” to be corrected the next
morning by “So shall not depart as I apprehended.” At this point
Thackeray turned to that famous letter written on an afternoon at the
Mount Coffee-house to Lady P., which bears no date except “Tuesday, 3
o’clock,” though in the standard editions of Sterne it is among the
letters for April 1767. Sterne writes to “my dear lady” that if she will
permit him to spend the evening with her, he will gladly stay away from
Miss * * * * * * *’s benefit, for which he has purchased a box ticket.
On consulting the Dramatic Register, Thackeray discovered that the only
actresses to receive benefits on a Tuesday in April 1767 were Miss Pope
at Drury Lane and Miss Poitier at Covent Garden. The date for each was
the twenty-first. The very day then, that Sterne was dying for Eliza, he
was also dining in the Mount Coffee-house and trying to make an
assignation with Lady P. Cleverly forged as Thackeray’s chain may seem,
it has one weak link. The date of the letter to Lady P. is undetermined.
In Mrs. Medalle’s edition of the correspondence, the letter was placed
near the end as if it belonged to December 1767 or to January 1768. In
the collected edition of Sterne’s works, it first appeared with the
letters for April 1767. April 21, 1767 is impossible, for Sterne was
surely too ill then to leave his lodgings. On that very day, as
Thackeray might have observed, Sterne wrote to Mr. and Mrs. James that
he was “almost dead” from the bleeding. It may be supposed, if you like,
that Sterne could exaggerate or even sham an illness to awaken Eliza’s
pity for him, but he could have had no motive for deceiving his friends
in Gerrard street. Without much doubt the correct date for the letter is
Tuesday, April 23, 1765. As he sat in the Mount Coffee-house, Sterne was
debating within himself whether he should pass the evening with Lady
Percy, or attend the benefit to be given at Covent Garden to Miss
Wilford, a popular dancer, who was to appear on that evening as Miranda
in Mrs. Centlivre’s _Busy Body_.[9]
How much Thackeray’s unfortunate mistake may have contributed to the
violence of his essay in the _Humourists_ we shall never know. It may
have been the very thing which clenched his opinion that Sterne’s word
was never to be trusted. At any rate, no one can longer say that
Thackeray “made no use of” the _Journal to Eliza_. Thereafter Thackeray
usually assumed a more genial tone when Sterne became the theme. Nobody
can object to that letter he wrote in Sterne’s room at Dessein’s Hôtel
for Miss Baxter in America. “Sterne’s picture”—to quote a sentence or
two from the delightful passage—“Sterne’s picture is looking down on me
from the chimney piece at which he warmed his lean old shanks ninety
years ago. He seems to say ‘You are right. I _was_ a humbug: and you, my
lad, are you not as great?’ Come, come Mr. Sterne none of these tu
quoques. Some of the London papers are abusing me as hard as ever I
assaulted you.” Then there is this same fancy elaborated into a
_Roundabout_: Thackeray is again in Sterne’s room at midnight, when a
lean figure in black-satin breeches appears in the moonlight to call him
to account with menacing finger for that mistrust and abuse of ten years
back. But there is also another _Roundabout_ in which Sterne
figures—_Notes of a Week’s Holiday_,[10] wherein Thackeray returns to
the old assault with terrific fury. The _Journal to Eliza_, there
mentioned by title, is focussed with an anecdote misread from Dutens’
_Memoirs_, for a scathing portrait of a “wretched old sinner.” Thackeray
seems to have immediately repented of his loss of temper, for the
passage—two pages in length—was not allowed to go into the collected
_Roundabouts_. It has, I think, never been reprinted. Hence the
biographers may be pardoned for saying that Thackeray made no use of
“Sterne’s own Journal to Eliza,” sent him by “a gentleman from Bath.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
THE AUTOGRAPH LETTERS.
THE two letters from Sterne to Mr. and Mrs. James are not original
drafts that were, according to the usual statement, afterwards recast
and elaborated. They are the very letters that went through the mails to
their destination; and their counterparts found in the printed
collections are only mutilated forms for which Sterne’s daughter is
responsible. Mrs. Medalle possessed every quality that should damn the
editor. She was ignorant; she was careless; she was dishonest. That the
letters as Sterne wrote them may be easily compared with the
mutilations, I have printed the two sets side by side in their due place
among the _Letters and Miscellanies_; and I here reprint the authentic
copies, that the material of the Gibbs Manuscripts may be all together.
To both letters Mrs. Medalle gave wrong dates. Words and phrases were
inserted for the improvement of her father’s style. An amusing passage
on the impending visit of Mrs. Sterne was stricken out. And the
references to Mrs. Draper—her journal, letters, and Sterne’s anxiety for
her—were either deleted or emasculated. This want of the literary
conscience no doubt vitiates the entire Sterne correspondence that
appeared under the supervision of Mrs. Medalle.
In the Sterne curiosity-shop, where one strange thing lies hidden
beneath another, nothing has been uncovered quite so curious as the
draft of a letter to Daniel Draper, Esq., of Bombay. Sterne evidently
found it difficult to explain to the husband of Eliza the kind of love
he felt for her; for he begins a sentence, breaks it off, starts in
anew, draws pen through word and phrase once more, and finally passes
into chaos on arriving at the verge of a proposal that Mrs. Draper shall
be permitted to return to England and live under his platonic
protection. The letter bears no date, but as its substance is contained
in the _Journal_ for the second of June, it was probably written soon
after Sterne’s coming to Coxwold in the early summer of 1767. That
Sterne completed the sketch and sent it off to Draper may seem
improbable. But Sterne was certainly corresponding with Draper at this
time.[11] A photograph of the letter is given here along with Mr.
Gibbs’s own version.[12]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
THE LETTERS OF ELIZABETH DRAPER.
NO apology is necessary for including in the works of Sterne the letters
of Mrs. Draper. If the journal she kept for him on the voyage to India
and the letters to him covering the year 1767 may not be recovered, we
have in their stead several letters, of which some have appeared in
print and others are in manuscripts that are accessible.[13] Most
important of all is the long ship-letter (forming a part of the Gibbs
Manuscripts) from Bombay to Mrs. James in London. It is really the
fragment of an autobiography, down to 1772. Now thoroughly
disillusioned, Mrs. Draper passes in review her early education, the
ill-starred marriage, the friendship with Sterne, the efforts to aid
widow and daughter, her literary aims and ambitions, and the sorrow that
was fast settling close upon her. Of Sterne she says: “I was almost an
Idolator of His Worth, while I fancied Him the Mild, Generous, Good
Yorick, We had so often thought him to be.” But “his Death,” she must
add with words underscored, “gave me to know, that he was tainted with
the Vices of Injustice, meanness & Folly.” Of her treatment by Mrs.
Sterne and Lydia she makes bitter complaint, and for the best of
reasons. For them she collected, with the aid of Colonel Campbell,
twelve hundred rupees among her friends in India; and Lydia she invited
to come and live with her. Her kindness was met with a threat to publish
her letters to Sterne, then in the hands of the widow and daughter. The
sad record is relieved by many charming feminine traits of character,
and it is ennobled by the mother yearning to be with her children left
behind in England.
One aspect of the self-drawn portrait has especial interest. Mrs. Draper
was—I have said it—a blue-stocking. She was probably not acquainted with
Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, whose assemblies of blue-stockings were then
famous; but the _Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear_ had
reached India. After reading Mrs. Montagu’s book, Mrs. Draper declared
that she “would rather be an Attendant on her Person, than the first
Peeress of the Realm.” And so under this new inspiration Mrs. Draper
resumed the scribbling to which she had been encouraged by Sterne. “A
little piece or two” that she “discarded some years ago,” were
completed; they were “not perhaps unworthy of the press,” but they were
never printed. Though these efforts seem to be lost, Mrs. Draper took
advantage of the occasion to weave into her letter to Mrs. James various
little essays which may be described in her phrase as “of the moral
kind,” because they have to do with practical conduct. Anxiety for the
welfare of her daughter Betsey, who had been put to school at
Kensington, leads to several pages on the boarding-school and the
parlor-boarder, which are good enough to find a place in one of Mrs.
Chapone’s letters. A little way on, she relates the “story of a married
pair, which,” she says, “pleased me greatly, from the sensible
singularity of it.” The tale tells of a wealthy and indolent man in
North India who married a smart young woman to “rouse his mind from its
usual state of Inactivity”—and he succeeded. The wife, too, discarded
her light airs, and became a most agreeable woman. It all reads like a
character sketch from Margaret Duchess of Newcastle. There is also an
experiment in the sentimental style, wherein is told the story of “a
smart pretty French woman,” who, shutting out all promiscuous loves and
friendships, kept her heart for her dear husband alone and one “sweet
woman” across the Alps. “The lovely Janatone,” writes Mrs. Draper, “died
three Years ago—after surviving her Husband about a Week and her Friend
a twelvemonth.” And besides these, there are other sketches from life,
and vivid descriptions of society at Bombay. If Eliza did not write
exactly, as Sterne flattered her, “with an angel’s pen,” she knew how to
ramble agreably.
Of other letters by Mrs. Draper, thirteen are now owned by Lord Basing
of Hoddington, a descendant of Mrs. Draper’s uncle, Richard Sclater.
These letters, which are said to relate mostly to family affairs, have
not been procured for this collection. But their tenor may perhaps be
inferred from the letter dated Tellicherry, April 1769, which is here
printed from the autograph copy in the British Museum. Though the name
of the man to whom it was addressed is left blank, the contents show
that he was a friend of the Drapers who had retired from the service and
returned to England. The letter presents a portrait of Mrs. Draper, not
the blue-stocking but the sensible wife who has resolved to adjust
herself to the humdrum and drudgery of official India. Her husband, she
says, has lost his two clerks, and so she is “maintaining his
correspondence for him.” Quite remarkable, too, as her good sense, is
the knowledge she shows of the intrigues and blunders that culminated in
the troubles with Hyder Ali, then besieging Madras and striking terror
throughout South India.
Mrs. Draper’s career in India is brought to a close by the letters
written on the eve of her elopement. Now in private hands at Bombay,
they were published, with an introductory essay, in the _Times of India_
for February 24, 1894, and in the overland weekly issue for March 3,
1894. In the first of them Mrs. Draper gives “a faithful servant and
friend”—one Eliza Mihill—an order on George Horsley, Esq., in England
for all her jewels, valued at 500_l._ or more. Accept them, the generous
woman writes, “as the best token in my power, expressive of my good will
to you.” Of the Mr. Horsley, one of Mrs. Draper’s closest friends, who
had gone to England for his health, a pretty character-sketch was made
two years before in the long letter to Mrs. James. To him she addressed
a brief impassioned note—the second of the series—explaining what she
has done for Betty Mihill and what she is about to do for her own
freedom. The third letter, which is to her husband, in justification of
her conduct, was composed under great agitation of mind, as she was
awaiting the moment of the last perilous step. Her pearls and silk
clothes she left behind, taking, of all her ornaments, only the picture
of Betty—“my dearest girl,” far off in England.
For Mrs. Draper after her escape to England, material is scant. There is
really nothing very trustworthy except an undated letter to Wilkes the
politician, thanking him for a “French volume” and beseeching him to
cease from his flattery. This letter, of which the original is in the
British Museum, is here printed from Mr. Fitzgerald’s copy. A degrading
anecdote of Combe’s is omitted, as it seems more likely to be false than
true. We conclude with the eulogy on Eliza by the Abbé Raynal, the
second ecclesiastic to be startled out of propriety by that oval face
and those brilliant eyes.
W. L. C.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LETTERS
FROM
YORICK TO ELIZA.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO THE
RIGHT HONOURABLE
LORD APSLEY,
LORD HIGH CHANCELLOR
OF ENGLAND.[14]
MY LORD,