It was immortalised both on record and on a film that played in US theatres for a week in 1964 as well as being the subject of books written by cast members William Redfield and Richard L. Sterne.

Laurence Sterne ( 24 November 1713 – 18 March 1768 ) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman.

Laurence Sterne was born 24 November 1713 in Clonmel, County Tipperary.

His father, Roger Sterne, was an Ensign in a British regiment recently returned from Dunkirk.

Roger's regiment was disbanded on the day of Sterne ’ s birth, and within six months the family had returned to Yorkshire in northern England.

The first decade of Sterne ’ s life was spent moving from place to place as his father was reassigned throughout Ireland.

In 1724, his father took Sterne to Roger's wealthy brother, Richard, so that Sterne could attend Hipperholme Grammar School near Halifax ; Sterne never saw his father again as Roger was ordered to Jamaica where he died of a fever in 1731.

Sterne was admitted to a sizarship at Jesus College, Cambridge, in July 1733 at the age of 20.

Sterne seems to have been destined to become a clergyman, and was ordained as a deacon in March 1737 and as a priest in August, 1738.

Shortly thereafter Sterne was awarded the vicarship living of Sutton-on-the-Forest in Yorkshire ( 1713 – 1768 ).

Sterne ’ s life at this time was closely tied with his uncle, Dr. Jaques Sterne, the Archdeacon of Cleveland and Precentor of York Minster.

Sterne ’ s uncle was an ardent Whig, and urged Sterne to begin a career of political journalism which resulted in some scandal for Sterne and, eventually, a terminal falling-out between the two men.

Jaques Sterne was a powerful clergyman but a mean-tempered man and a rabid politician.

It was while living in the countryside, having failed in his attempts to supplement his income as a farmer and struggling with tuberculosis, that Sterne began work on his most famous novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the first volumes of which were published in 1759.

Sterne was at work on his celebrated comic novel during the year that his mother died, his wife was seriously ill, and he was ill himself with consumption.

Sterne continued his comic novel, but every sentence, he said, was “ written under the greatest heaviness of heart .” In this mood, he softened the satire and recounted details of Tristram's opinions, eccentric family and ill-fated childhood with a sympathetic humour, sometimes hilarious, sometimes sweetly melancholic — a comedy skirting tragedy.

During this period Sterne never lived in one place for more than a year.

In 1741 – 42 Sterne wrote political articles supporting the administration of Sir Robert Walpole for a newspaper founded by his uncle but soon withdrew from politics in disgust.

Sterne lived in Sutton for twenty years, during which time he kept up an intimacy which had begun at Cambridge with John Hall-Stevenson, a witty and accomplished bon vivant, owner of Skelton Hall in the Cleveland district of Yorkshire.

Thus, Sterne lost his chances for clerical advancement but discovered his real talents ; until the completion of this first work, " he hardly knew that he could write at all, much less with humour so as to make his reader laugh ".

Sterne continued to struggle with his illness, and departed England for France in 1762 in an effort to find a climate that would alleviate his suffering.

Sterne is best known for his novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, for which he became famous not only in England, but throughout Europe.

" Both during his life and for a long time after, efforts were made by many to reclaim Sterne as an arch-sentimentalist ; parts of Tristram Shandy, such as the tale of Le Fever, were excerpted and published separately to wide acclaim from the moralists of the day.

* Bibliography for the study of Laurence Sterne

The performance was immortalised both on record and on a film that played in US theatres for a week in 1964 as well as being the subject of books written by cast members William Redfield and Richard L. Sterne.

In 1833, in the living room of the Adolphus Sterne House in Nacogdoches, Houston was baptized into the Catholic faith in order to qualify under the existing law for property ownership in Coahuila y Tejas.

Among his friends and acquaintances were many English artists and satirists of the period, for instance, Francis Hayman, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne.

In the village there is Elvington Hall, built during Elizabethan times and remodelled in the 18th century by John Carr ; famous writer Laurence Sterne lived there for a period of his childhood ; Roger Jacques and Simone Sterne, his grandparents, controlled the manor prior to 1700.

Other major 18th century English novelists are Samuel Richardson ( 1689-1761 ), author of the epistolary novels Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded ( 1740 ) and Clarissa ( 1747-8 ); Henry Fielding ( 1707 – 54 ), who wrote Joseph Andrews ( 1742 ) and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling ( 1749 ); Laurence Sterne ( 1713 – 68 ) who published Tristram Shandy in parts between 1759 and 1767 ; Oliver Goldsmith (? 1730-74 ) author of The Vicar of Wakefield ( 1766 ); Tobias Smollett ( 1721 – 71 ) a Scottish novelist best known for his comic picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle ( 1751 ) and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker ( 1771 ), who influenced Charles Dickens ; and Fanny Burney ( 1752-1840 ), whose novels " were enjoyed and admired by Jane Austen ," wrote Evelina ( 1778 ), Cecilia ( 1782 ) and Camilla ( 1796 ).

He won a Best Actor award at Cannes for his part as Mischa Bjelkin in Helmut Käutner's Himmel ohne Sterne.

He also accused Laurence Sterne of " pornography " for Tristram Shandy.

When Burns said: " The rank is but the guinea stamp, The man's the gowd for a ' that "; when Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, said, " Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an ideal and local value to a bit of base metal, but gold and silver will pass all the world over without any other recommendation than their own weight ," what did these writers do but adopt — adopt without improving — Manly's fine saying to Freeman, in the first act: " I weigh the man, not his title ; ' tis not the king's stamp can make the metal better or heavier "?

* In Laurence Sterne ´ s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Volume I, Chapter II, there is a reference to the homunculus: "(...) the animal spirits, whose business it was to have escorted and gone hand-in-hand with the homunculus, and conducted him safe to the place destined for his reception.

Kazinczy, known for possessing great beauty of style, was inspired greatly by the masterpieces of Lessing, Goethe, Wieland, Klopstock, Ossian, La Rochefoucauld, Marmontel, Molière, Metastasio, Shakespeare, Sterne, Cicero, Sallust, Anacreon, and many others.

Indeed, the novel, in which Sterne manipulates narrative time and voice, parodies accepted narrative form, and includes a healthy dose of " bawdy " humor, was largely dismissed in England as being too corrupt.

Richard Sterne ( c. 1596 – 1683 ) was a Church of England priest, Archbishop of York from 1664 to 1683.

Tristram Shandy, a novel by Laurence Sterne, became a " cult " object in England and throughout Europe, with important cultural consequences among those who could afford to purchase books during the era of its publication.

Without a passport at a time when England is at war with France ( Sterne traveled to Paris in January 1762, before the Seven Years ' War ended ), he risks imprisonment in the Bastille.

* Richard Sterne ( bishop ) ( c. 1596 – 1683 ), a Church of England priest and Archbishop of York

He directed the production of a vast work on Social England in 1893-1898 ; he wrote, for several series of biographies, studies of Coleridge ( 1884 ), Sterne ( 1882 ), William III ( 1888 ), Shaftesbury ( 1886 ), Strafford ( 1889 ), and Lord Salisbury ( 1891 ); he compiled a biography of Sir John Franklin, the Arctic explorer ( 1896 ); and after a visit to Egypt he published a volume on the country, and in 1897 appeared his book on Lord Cromer, the man who had done so much to bring it back to prosperity.

Sterne was gratified by his reception in France where reports of the genius of Tristram Shandy had made him a celebrity.

Aspects of this trip to France were incorporated into Sterne ’ s second novel, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, which was published at the beginning of 1768.

* 1768: I may add the gender too of the person I am to govern — Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.

* A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy Laurence Sterne, ( 1929 ) Paris, illus.

# Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy ; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy

In Berlin in 1923 he published his memoirs about 1917-22 called Sentimental ' noe puteshestvie, vospominaniia ( A Sentimental Journey ) after A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne.

# Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy ; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

Sterne entrusted her with the disposition of his papers upon his departure for France.

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy is a novel by the Irish author Laurence Sterne, written and first published in 1768, as Sterne was facing death.

In 1765, Sterne travelled through France and Italy as far south as Naples, and after returning determined to describe his travels from a sentimental point of view.

* LibriVox audiorecording of A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne, read by Martin Geeson: http :// www. archive. org / details / sentimentaljourney_0911_librivox

Laurence Sterne, who met Smollett in Italy, satirized Smollett's jaundiced attitude in the character of Smelfungus in A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, which was written in part as an answer to Smollett's book.

* Laurence Sterne: A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy 1929.

Smelfungus is a name given by Laurence Sterne to Tobias Smollett as author of a volume of Travels through France and Italy, for the snarling abuse he heaps on the institutions and customs of the countries he visited.