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 * * * * * * *’s 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 Coffee-house 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.[[9]]
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 midnight, 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,[[10]] 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.”
INTRODUCTION
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 1767. That Sterne completed the sketch and sent it off to Draper may seem improbable. But Sterne was certainly corresponding with Draper at this time.[[11]] A photograph of the letter is given here along with Mr. Gibbs’s own version.[[12]]
INTRODUCTION