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Forged Letters of Laurence Sterne Author(S): Lewis P Forged Letters of Laurence Sterne Author(s): Lewis P. Curtis Source: PMLA, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Dec., 1935), pp. 1076-1106 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/458110 Accessed: 10-08-2016 22:21 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA This content downloaded from 159.178.22.27 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 22:21:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms LXVII FORGED LETTERS OF LAURENCE STERNE A,S many have learned to their dismay, the materials upon which Sterne's biography is at present based offer problems of unusual complexity, problems that are due in part to the man's intricate and elusive nature and in part to his daughter and to his swarm of imitators. Sterne, it is evident, was too great a humorist ever to be quite honest either with his own or with future generations. He amused himself in his letters by deceiving his contemporaries and mystifying posterity. For many years now his devices have been familiar matter: he rewrote his letters with his eye upon the press; sometimes he made portions of a letter serve more than one correspondent; and, though lately we have known it, he readdressed a letter much after the manner of Pope in the expectation that the substituted name of Eliza Draper would make a better impression than that of an unidentified countess. Nor have his daughter and his imitators exactly resolved the perplexi- ties of biographers. Lydia, who in 1775 edited three volumes of her father's letters, was so irresponsible as to suggest to Wilkes that if he would write a few letters in imitation of Sterne's style she would insert them as genuine. By suppressing names of persons mentioned in the letters she made identification of some of them practically out of the question. To add to this confusion, which a discreet though foolish daughter purposely created, the forgers and imitators provided their own deceptions in the wake of the colossal popularity of Sterne's writ- ings during the last years of the eighteenth century. A forged volume of Tristram Shandy appeared in 1760 and another in 1766. Four years later Sterne's acquaintance, Richard Griffith, gulled the public with his Posthumous Works of a late celebrated Genius, a book which Goethe be- lieved genuine and which the credulous Alfred Hedouin actually trans- lated in 1853.1 It was not perhaps without a hope of profit that up- wards of ninety imitations of Sterne were published between 1760 and 1800. Although forgeries of Sterne's great novel no longer raise doubts as to their being forgeries, they are useful at least in suggesting that since Sterne's fiction was deemed profitable to imitate his letters too may have suffered the attention of the forger. One has, in fact, only to turn to the whole corpus of published letters purporting to be written by him to perceive that some of them did not meet with entire acceptance from 1 Harvey W. Thayer, Laurence Sterne in Germany (New York, 1905), pp. 74, 103-108. 1076 This content downloaded from 159.178.22.27 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 22:21:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Lewis P. Curtts 1077 critics even in the eighteenth century. To examine these doubtful letters, of which I distinguish forty-seven, is merely to discover reasons enough why they may not lightly be attributed to Sterne. If, then, they prove to be forgeries, the familiar biographies of Sterne have been partially vitiated by a reliance upon them. And yet, should they by any chance contain fragments of genuine information respecting Sterne or even writing by him, it would be unwise to dismiss them wholly. Clearly a means of determining the nature of each of the forty-seven letters in question is imperative. And since no manuscript authority is known to exist for these particular letters, the enquirer is thrust back upon familiar and alternative methods of detection. The first of these methods consists in listening to an author's verbal rhythms and in judging the questioned document by means of the similarity or dissimilarity of rhythm. It consists ultimately in saying to oneself, "I do (or I don't) think this sounds like ." To be sure, Spedding has employed it with impressive results. But the method is more serviceable in determining the authorship of verse than of prose. There is Coleridge's superb folly to remember, when in demonstrating the Porter's speeches in Macbeth to be an interpolation "perhaps with Shakspere's consent" he declared emphatically that with the exception of two sentences "of the rest not one syllable has the ever-present being of Shakspere." The method has the weakness of rarely bringing com- batants upon common ground. It is so much a matter of my ear versus thy ear. Hence in this study of forty-seven suspicious letters I do not rest my case upon observed differences of prose rhythm and, because they are only less tenuous, of content andI reflected personality. I prefer to this method the more pedestrian one of parallel passages. These I have noted. I have considered them both frequently and skeptically. And I have always returned to my initial belief that the writer of the forty-seven letters among which these passages are to be found was not Sterne but his friend and imitator, William Combe, the author of the Tours of Dr. Syntax. Early in his life Combe, as a smart young fellow about town, attached himself to the circle of Sterne's admirers. Born in Bristol about 1741, he had at an early age come up to London where he "learnt accounts at a School in Windmill Street."2 At twelve he entered Eton, remained there three years,3 and in 1756 dipped for a time into that obscurity which too frequently surrounds him. He is said by one biographer4 to 2 Joseph Farington, Tke Faringion Diary (London, 1922-28), i, 114. 3 R. A. Austen-Leigh, The Eton College Register 1753-1790 (Eton, 1921), p. 118. 4 Ackermann's Repository of Arts, Aug. 1823, p. 87. This content downloaded from 159.178.22.27 on Wed, 10 Aug 2016 22:21:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 1078 Forged Letters of Laurence Sterne have attended Oxford in 1760 and by another5 to have made a tour upon the Continent, after which in 1766 he entered the office of a solicitor in the Temple and was later called to the bar. Records to substantiate these remarks are forthcoming neither from Oxford nor from the Inns of Court.6 But we are told that at this period in his life he "possessed some fortune, a graceful person, elegant manners, a taste for literature, and an extensive acquaintance,"7 all of which blessings had been aided by the will of his benefactor, Alderman William Alexander, who died September 23, 1762, leaving him a fortune of ?2000. This indeed was a smaller sum than Walpole8 and Farington9 thought he had received. In any event he moved liberally among young men of wealth. In their company he may have met Sterne, introduced by mutual acquaintances such as Sir James Macdonald, Lord Beauchamp, and John Constantine Phipps, all of whom had been his schoolfellows at Eton. The time of this meeting was probably the year 1765 when Combe subscribed to the third and fourth volumes of the Sermons of Mr. Yorick. The next year, in July, 1766, Sterne refers in a letter to his having left him his postchaise.'0 A month later, writing to Becket from Coxwold, he en- quires: "Is Mr Combes in Town? If you see him, tell him to write to me."1' Further indication of intimacy between them appears to lie in a letter Sterne presumably wrote to Combe in 1767.12 Finally we have Crabbe Robinson's Diary: Of these connections, and of the adventures of his youth, he [Combe] was very fond of talking, and I used to enjoy the anecdotes he told me after dinner, until one day, when he had been very communicative, and I had sucked in all he related with greedy ear, Fraser said, laughing to Walter, "Robinson, you see, is quite a flat; he believes all old Combe says." . This, of course, was a sad interruption to my pleasure. I might otherwise have enriched these reminiscences with valuable facts about Sterne."3 If we may trust the purport of Ox 177, which Governor Cross believes addressed to this slippery scapegrace, the collapse of Combe's finances in 1767 obliged him to take refuge in France. For some years he occupied himself with the transient offices of an adventurer, and wandered, it is 5J. C. Hotten, ed., Dr. Syntax's Three Tours, by William Combe (London [1868]), p. viii. 6 Information from H. A. C. Sturgess, Librarian and Keeper of the Records, Middle Temple Library. I Repository of Arts (London, 1823), 3rd Ser., II, 87. 8 Letters of Horace Walpole, Supplement, ii, 153.
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