The ten letters that have survived bore when written no date except the hour of the day or the day of the week, and they were published by Mrs. Draper without any indication of date whatever. The first brief note, sent with a present of the Sermons and Tristram Shandy, evidently belongs to January, perhaps to the last week of the month when appeared the ninth volume of Shandy. And very soon afterwards, no doubt, Sterne dispatched the second note in which he would persuade Eliza to admit him as physician in her illness, notwithstanding “the etiquettes of this town say otherwise.” The succeeding eight letters were daily missives from Sterne to Eliza while she was at Deal waiting for the signal of embarkation from the Earl of Chatham, which was to bear her to India. On her departure the blood broke from poor Yorick’s heart.
INTRODUCTION
THE GIBBS MANUSCRIPTS.
THESE manuscripts are by far the most important Sterne discovery of the nineteenth century. They are named from their former owner, Thomas Washbourne Gibbs, a gentleman of Bath, into whose possession they came midway in the century. How this piece of good fortune happened to him, we leave to his own pen to relate:
“Upon the death of my father,” he writes, “when I was eleven years old, a pile of old account books, letters, common-place books, and other papers of no documentary value was set aside as waste, and placed in a room where I used to play. I looked through the papers, and found the journal and letters. An early fondness for reading had made me acquainted with the well-known extracts from the writings of Sterne—‘The Story of Maria,’ ‘The Sword,’ ‘The Monk,’ ‘Le Fevre,’ and a small book containing the ‘Letters of Yorick and Eliza,’ and finding these names in the letters and book, I took all I could find, and obtained permission to preserve them, and they have been in my possession ever since. How they came into the hands of my father, who was a great reader, and had a large collection of books, I never had any means of knowing.”
Mr. Gibbs showed the curious manuscripts to his friends, and in May, 1851, sent a part of them to Thackeray, then at work upon the English Humourists. Except for a mention of this incident in a Roundabout (the pages were afterwards suppressed), nothing was publicly known concerning the manuscripts until March, 1878, when Mr. Gibbs read before the Bath Literary Institution a paper on “Some Memorials of Laurence Sterne,” the substance of which was printed in The Athenæum for March 30, 1878. On the death of Mr. Gibbs in 1894, the manuscripts passed under his bequest to the British Museum. They are numbered 34527 among the additional manuscripts acquired in 1894–1899. They contain:
1. The Journal to Eliza.
2. A Letter from Sterne at Coxwold to Mr. and Mrs. James, dated August 10, 1767.
3. A Letter from Sterne at York to Mr. and Mrs. James, dated December 28, 1767.