“I well remember” says Tristram Shandy, the ‘hero’ of Laurence Sterne’s hugely popular comic novel (1759 – 1767), ‘the greatest shaggy dog story in the language’ (so Christopher Ricks, the literary scholar), “when my father went up along with me to enter my name at Jesus College in * * * *, it was a matter of just wonder with my worthy tutor and two or three fellows of that learned society that a man who knew not so much the names of his tools – the elements of Logick and Rhetorick were so blended up in him – should be able to work after that fashion with them” (vol. 1, chap. xix). It would have been unthinkable for any other college to have been chosen. Laurence Sterne’s great-grandfather, Richard, the staunch royalist had been its Master 1634 – 1643 and, briefly, again at Charles II’s restoration in 1660 (before becoming bishop of Carlisle and then archbishop of York). His grandfather, Simon, had been a Fellow-Commoner though, in the manner of Fellow-Commoners , not troubling to take a degree and leaving to marry a Yorkshire heiress and play, with limited success, the part of a country landowner. His uncle, Jacques, had held one of the scholarships that his archbishop grandfather had founded at Jesus, as did Laurence’s older cousin Richard, Laurence himself and, after him, two younger cousins. So Laurence was one of four members of the fourth generation of Sternes to come to the College. But this was not all: his schoolmaster at Hippersholme, near Halifax in Yorkshire, Nathan Sharpe, had been at Jesus too: he had entered as a sizar in 1692.
It was only Laurence’s own father, Roger – the younger son of a younger son – who had not been at the College. He had instead joined the army as a volunteer, had received a field-commission (he had, that is, stepped into a dead man’s shoes), becoming an infantgry ensign, marrying a camp-follower (a fellow officer’s widow), and then dying while Laurence was still at school. It was that older cousin, Richard, who arranged for him to come to the College – Laurence was almost 20 on entry in November 1733 – giving him an allowance of £30 a year which, together with one of his great-grandfather’s scholarships for boys from Yorkshire or Nottinghamshire and one of the College’s own, enabled him to make ends meet.
Except for his having been severely ill (probably with tubercolosis), from which he suffered for the rest of his life, very little more is known about the future novelist’s time at the College than about that of any other of his fellow students, almost all of whom were young men from poorish backgrounds hoping, as he was, to make a career in the church or as schoolmasters or (as Nathan Sharpe had) as both. Between 1733 and 1737, when Sterne graduated and was ordained deacon, the community to which he belonged, was a very small one, with no more than 30 students, and rarely more than the three or four fellows in residence whom Tristram Shandy and his father had encountered on the day of his admission. For most of his time as an undergraduate Sterne’s tutor was Lynford Caryll, who had himself entered Jesus as a poor orphan, had been given a Rustat and other scholarships, and then become a Fellow – and was, in due course, to be Master, the first, and for the next 120 years, the only former student of the College to preside over it. Sterne remembered him kindly, writing in a letter more than thirty years’ later: “He used to let me have my way when I was under his direction, and that showed his sense, for I was born to travel out of the common road and to get aside from the highway path, and he had sense enough to see it, and not to trouble me with trammels. “ There is, perhaps, a hint here that the great range of reading so exuberantly displayed in Tristram Shandy – ‘a novel about writing a novel’ (Ricks again) – had begun while Sterne was an undergraduate.
Sterne made one life-long friend while at Jesus: John Hall (after marrying, Hall-Stevenson), who arrived at the end of his second year. Hall had inherited a country estate in Yorkshire when only 13, and entered the College at 17 as a Fellow Commoner, leaving it, as was customary, degree-less. That he was four years younger than Sterne may help to explain why these two orphans, one rich, one poor, so rapidly became close friends. Hall was to be a minor poet, to become markedly eccentric, and for many years to be Sterne’s (usually convivial) neighbour at his Yorkshire house which he had named ‘Crazy Castle’, and from whence came forth ‘Crazy Tales.’ More than thirty years after they first met, Hall-Stevenson was to be with Sterne in his final illness.
Graduating in January 1737, Sterne sought and found at St Ives in Huntingdonshire (less than 15 miles from Cambridge) a curacy, was ordained deacon in March, and left the college to take up his duties on Easter Day. His stay at St Ives was brief: within the year he obtained a curacy looking after a parish in the West Riding of Yorkshire for its rector, Richard Sowray, another Jesuan, who had acquired two parishes too far away from each other for him to be able to care for both. Sterne’s return to Yorkshire brought him back into the notice of his uncle Jacques, now not only a prebendary of York, and the most dominant and business-like member of the cathedral chapter, but also archdeacon of Cleveland, who soon ensured that his nephew was given a parish of his own, eight miles north of York and became a prebendary too. So Laurence was able to live in York and, with the aid of his uncle and the cousin who had made it possible for him to go to Cambridge, to enter into its social life, engage in some political journalism, court his future wife, and begin to acquire a reputation as a popular and effective preacher. Archbishop Herring (yet another Jesuan!) chose the young prebendary to preach at his enthronement in 1743. Sterne had made brief visits to the College in the summer of 1740 (to take his M.A.) and 1741. But so far there had been little, save his extended family connections, to distinguish him from the scores of young clergymen emerging from Jesus and other Cambridge colleges looking for jobs and acquiring only rather modest preferments in the church. It was to be almost another twenty years before the first volumes of the multi-volumed Tristram Shandy were to appear, take the English reading public by storm and make its country-parson author a centre of attention in the fashionable social world of London and the subject of one of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ most memorable portraits.
Further reading: Arthur H. Cash,: Laurence Sterne, 2 vols (London 1975 – 1986).