4. Draft of a Letter from Laurence Sterne to Daniel Draper.
5. A Letter from Elizabeth Draper at Bombay to Anne James, dated April 15, 1772.
6. Two Letters from W. M. Thackeray to J. W. Gibbs dated May 31, and September 12, [1851.]
About the genuineness of every part of this manuscript material there can be no doubt. The Journal to Eliza and the letters to Mr. and Mrs. James and to Daniel Draper are in Sterne’s own hand-writing. The first letter “has been through the post, and is franked by Lord Fauconberg, the patron of the Coxwold living.” The second letter has also passed through the post. The letter from Mrs. Draper is likewise in her own hand. And to the Thackeray letters have been preserved the original covering envelopes.
INTRODUCTION
THE JOURNAL TO ELIZA.
NEARLY one half of the manuscript volume just described is occupied by The Journal to Eliza, or The Bramine’s Journal, as Sterne perhaps intended to call it. On the first page is a note by Sterne himself, wherein it is said, with a characteristic attempt at mystification, that the names “Yorick and Draper—and sometimes the Bramin and Bramine”[[3]]—are fictitious, and that the entire record is “a copy from a French manuscript—in Mr. S——’s hands.” Then follow seventy-six pages of writing, with about twenty-eight lines to the page, and finally a page with only a few words upon it. The leaves are folio in size, and except in the case of the first and the last, both sides are written upon.
This curious diary was composed during the first months after Sterne’s separation from Mrs. Draper. On a certain day late in March 1767, Sterne handed Mrs. Draper into a postchaise for Deal, and turned away to his London lodgings “in anguish.” Before parting, each promised to keep an intimate journal that they might have “mutual testimonies to deliver hereafter to each other,” should they again meet. While Mrs. Draper was at Deal making preparations for her voyage to India, Sterne sent her all that he had written; and on the thirteenth of April he forwarded by a Mr. Watts, then departing for Bombay, a second instalment of his record. These two sections of Sterne’s journal—and likewise all of Mrs. Draper’s, for we know that she kept one—have disappeared. The extant part begins on the thirteenth of April, 1767 and comes down to the fourth of August in the same year. The sudden break was occasioned by the expected return of Mrs. Sterne from France, where she had been living for some time. After her arrival at Coxwold, the journal could be carried on only by stealth; and besides that, Sterne felt her presence—and even the thought of it—a restraint upon the fancy. A postscript was added on the first of November announcing that Mrs. Sterne and Lydia had just gone to York for the winter, while he himself was to remain at Coxwold to complete the Sentimental Journey. There were hints that the journal would be resumed as soon as he reached London in the following January. But Sterne probably did not carry out his intention. At least nothing is known of a later effort.