Journal to Eliza is a work by British author Laurence Sterne. [1] [2] It was published posthumously in 1904. [3] It is written as a diary, but was supposedly intended as a love letter to Eliza Draper. Sterne accurately predicted that it would be published long after the deaths of both himself and Draper.
Sterne wrote it in the summer of 1767, as he neared the end of his life. At that time he was also writing A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy , where the 'little picture of Eliza' that Yorick wears around his neck is mentioned at the outset. [4]
The journal is in the form of a diary-cum-letter and was inspired by his deep affection for Mrs. Elizabeth Draper whom he had met when she visited England in 1765–1767. She was the 22 year old wife of an East India Company official and sister of Rawson Hart Boddam. [5] Her husband had brought her to recuperate from illness. [6] Given both parties were already married, the relationship was regarded as scandalous. [7]
The author adopts the pseudonym Parson Yorick, who previously appeared in his two best known novels, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. In Tristram Shandy we are told that the parson is related to the famous, fictional jester Yorick whose skull is disinterred in William Shakespeare's Hamlet:
"It has often come into my head, that this post could be no other than that of the king's chief Jester;—and that Hamlet's Yorick, in our Shakespear, many of whose plays, you know, are founded upon authenticated facts,—was certainly the very man." [8]
In a second example of the author's playfulness with names, Sterne and Eliza receive the pet names ‘Bramin’ and ‘Bramine’ throughout. Given the Brahmin Hindu priestly caste is renowned for austerity and wisdom, Sterne thereby draws attention to his real-life role as a priest. Simultaneously, Eliza's epithet Bramine highlights her connections with India.
This playful religious name-calling serves to remind us that Sterne was an Anglican clergyman. Remembered now for his fiction, in his day more copies of his sermons were published than of his novels. [9]
There is characteristically Sternian ambiguity in the Journal concerning whether it was written as a private extended love letter to Elizabeth Draper, or was intended for publication as literature. It appears to be both autobiographical and an imaginative work of fiction, and Sterne says he is writing for posterity:
"...when You and I are at rest for ever— Some Annotator or explainer of my works in this place will take occasion, to speak of the Friendship which Subsisted so long and faithfully betwixt Yorick and the Lady he speaks of." [10]
Laurence Sterne was an Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican cleric. He is best known for his comic novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767) and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768).
Yorick is a character in William Shakespeare's Hamlet.
This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1767.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, also known as Tristram Shandy, is a novel by Laurence Sterne. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others following over the next seven years. It purports to be a biography of the eponymous character. Its style is marked by digression, double entendre, and graphic devices. The first edition was printed by Ann Ward on Coney Street, York.
Richard Sterne was a Church of England priest, Archbishop of York from 1664 to 1683.
William Combe was a British miscellaneous writer. His early life was that of an adventurer, his later was passed chiefly within the "rules" of the King's Bench Prison. He is chiefly remembered as the author of The Three Tours of Doctor Syntax, a comic poem, illustrated by artist Thomas Rowlandson's colour plates, that satirised William Gilpin. Combe also wrote a series of imaginary letters, supposed to have been written by the second, or "wicked" Lord Lyttelton. Of a similar kind were his letters between Swift and "Stella". He also wrote the letterpress for various illustrated books, and was a general hack.
Richard Mead, FRS, FRCP, was an English physician. His work, A Short Discourse concerning Pestilential Contagion, and the Method to be used to prevent it (1720), was of historic importance in advancing the understanding of transmissible diseases.
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) is a novel by Laurence Sterne. It follows the Reverend Mr. Yorick on a picaresque journey through France, narrated from a sentimental point of view. Yorick is a character from Sterne's bestselling previous novel Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) who also serves as Sterne's alter ego. The novel was planned as a four-volume work, but Sterne died in 1768 with only the first two volumes published; Yorick never makes it to Italy.
Hafen Slawkenbergius is a fictional writer referenced in Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy. Slawkenbergius was "distinguished by the length of his nose, and a great authority on the subject of noses".
A Cock and Bull Story is a 2005 British comedy film directed by Michael Winterbottom. It is a film-within-a-film, featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing themselves as egotistical actors during the making of a screen adaptation of Laurence Sterne's 18th-century metafictional novel Tristram Shandy. Gillian Anderson and Keeley Hawes also play themselves in addition to their Tristram Shandy roles. Since the book is about a man attempting but failing to write his autobiography, the film takes the form of being about failing to make the film.
Shandy Hall is a writer's house museum in the former home of the Rev. Laurence Sterne in Coxwold, North Yorkshire, England. Sterne lived there from 1760 to 1768 as perpetual curate of Coxwold. He is remembered for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.
Eliza Draper is best known as Laurence Sterne's Eliza. She was his muse and is commemorated in his Sentimental Journey and Journal to Eliza. She had literary talents that were developed under Sterne's influence, and she wrote many long and interesting letters from India, vividly describing the life and customs there.
Yorick is an unseen character in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet. He is the dead court jester whose skull is exhumed by the First Gravedigger in Act 5, Scene 1, of the play. The sight of Yorick's skull evokes a reminiscence by Prince Hamlet of the man, who apparently played a role during Hamlet's upbringing:
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?
As a literary mode, sentimentalism, the practice of being sentimental, and thus tending towards making emotions and feelings the basis of a person's actions and reactions, as opposed to reason, has been a recurring aspect of world literature. Sentimentalism includes a variety of aspects in literature, such as sentimental poetry, the sentimental novel, and the German sentimentalist music movement, Empfindsamkeit. European literary sentimentalism arose during the Age of Enlightenment, partly as a response to sentimentalism in philosophy. In eighteenth-century England, the sentimental novel was a major literary genre. The genre developed in England between 1730 and 1780 at the time of high enlightenment from where it spread to other European literatures. Its philosophical basis primarily came from Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, a pupil of John Locke.
Johann Joachim Christoph Bode was a well-known German translator of literary works.
Christopher Unborn is the tenth novel by the Mexican author Carlos Fuentes. Originally published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica in 1987, the first U.S. edition was published in 1989 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Laurence Sterne was an Anglican clergyman. In that position he delivered many sermons. Early in his career, he decided to publish his sermons. At first, only two were published. Sterne later parodied sermon writing in his novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman along with adding semi-serious sermons directly into the text. Throughout his career, Sterne continued to preach and collect his own sermons.
The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper is a complex satirical novel by Prussian Romantic-era author E. T. A. Hoffmann. It was first published in 1819–1821 as Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern, in two volumes. A planned third volume was never completed.
John Hall-Stevenson, in his youth known as John Hall, was an English country gentleman and writer.
The Captive, from Sterne is a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby completed in 1774 and now in the National Gallery of Canada. Sterne's Captive, first exhibited by the artist in 1778, is a similar painting by Wright in the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. The latter painting resulted in a rare engraving, as its purchaser commissioned a print run of only twenty copies before the copper printing plate was destroyed. In 2012, Derby Museum commissioned another Captive painting from Emma Tooth.
...when the first two volumes of The Sermons of Mr. Yorick appeared in May 1760, they did so with an impressive list of subscribers and eventually ran to more lifetime editions than the best-selling Tristram Shandy. In spite of their popularity in the 1760s and the decades after his death, Sterne's forty-five sermons are now the most neglected part of his canon.