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.” 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.
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 wh 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
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. 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 wh 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 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 h wickeder man its difficult to read of. Do you know the accompanying pamphlet. (My friend My Cooper gave me this copy, wh 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 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 Coffeehouse 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.
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 midnig
ht, 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,* 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.”
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 1707.
That Sterne completed the sketch and sent it off to Draper may seem improbable. But Sterne was certainly corresponding with Draper at this time. A photograph of the letter is given here along with Mr. Gibbs’s own version.
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. 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 agreeably.
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 5001. 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 pr
etty 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.
THE JOURNAL TO ELIZA
THIS Journal wrote under the fictitious names of Yorick & Draper — and sometimes of the Bramin & Bramine — but tis a Diary of the miserable feelings of a person separated from a Lady for whose Society he languish’d — The real Names — are foreigne — & the acct a copy from a french Manst — in Mr S —— —— s hands — but wrote as it is, to cast a Viel over them — There is a Counterpart — which is the Lady’s acct what transactions dayly happend — & what Sentiments occupied her mind, during this Separation from her admirer — these are worth reading — the translator cannot say so much in favr of Yoricks which seem to have little merit beyond their honesty & truth.
Complete Works of Laurence Sterne Page 116