2013 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

COLLEGE NEWS I Jesus College Annual Report 2013 79
Crazy Castle, and was there to entertain Sterne and a rakish circle of friends – members of
his ‘Demoniacs’ club – with hunting, shooting, drinking, ribaldry, and idleness
(Hall-Stevenson’s brain never groped long in any gloom; as he put it in the same poem,
‘I keep thinking at my ease; / That is, I never think at all’). Sterne visited his friend at
Crazy Castle whenever he could, though the association with him was looked at askance
by the Church authorities. When in 1760 Hall-Stevenson, riding on the crest of the
success of the first volumes of Tristram Shandy, published two moderately obscene verse
epistles (one, indeed, entitled ‘To my Cousin Shandy on his coming to Town’ and both
declared by the poet Thomas Gray to be ‘absolute nonsense’), there was a rumour that
Sterne himself might be their author, bringing him stern admonishment from no less a
personage than the great theologian William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, who
urged him to end the connection with Hall-Stevenson which allowed such a rumour to
flourish.
Sterne left Jesus in April 1737 for the ordinary life of a clergyman. After a brief spell as
assistant curate at St Ives, near Huntingdon, he returned to Yorkshire where his Jesuan
uncle Jacques was Precentor of York and an influential member of the Church
establishment (though Sterne eventually displeased him and after a time he did little to
advance his nephew’s prospects). Sterne began again as assistant curate in Catton, not
far from his Elvington birthplace, and then, having been ordained priest, obtained and
cumulated the livings of Sutton-on-the-Forest in 1738, Stillington in 1744, and then in
1760 Coxwold. The first two volumes of Tristram Shandy had appeared at the very end of
1759 and the Coxwold years were to be those of the writing and publication of the
subsequent volumes (there were to be nine in all), as also of A Sentimental Journey through
France and Italy; years too in which Sterne, who should have remained a relatively
unknown country parson, though known for his skill as a preacher, gained a celebrity of
which he made much during frequent stays in London. Notoriety came too, since
Tristram Shandy with its humourous waywardness, its satirical wit, its Rabelaisian bawdy
was regarded by many as obscene, inexcusable from the pen of a clergyman. Sterne’s old
college itself, it should be said, is not exempt from a touch of obscenity, remembered as
it is in a piece of dubious innuendo concerning ‘the pricks which entered the flesh of
St. Radagunda’; though it also makes a less questionable appearance when Tristram
looks back fondly to the time ‘when [my father] went up along with me to enter my
name at Jesus College in ****’.
On obtaining the Coxwold living, Sterne took up residence in Shandy Hall, as his
new home was called by his friends (‘shandy’ a dialect word for ‘crackbrained’,
‘peculiar’). It was there that he spent the last years of his life, though with prolonged
periods in France in the hope of improving his health (he had suffered from pulmonary
tuberculosis since his Jesus days). He died in 1768 in London, on one of his many stays
in the capital, and was buried in St George’s cemetery, Paddington. Sterne’s, however,
was to be no unquiet grave: soon after the burial his body was stolen, transported to
Cambridge for dissection, recognized, transported back to London to be buried again in
St George’s, at rest at last until 1969 when the site of the cemetery was sold for
redevelopment and Sterne’s remains, along with his gravestone, went to Coxwold for
reburial in the graveyard behind St Michael’s. His friend, the actor and theatre manager
David Garrick, had penned an epitaph:
Shall Pride a heap of Sculptur’d Marble raise,
Some unmourn’d, worthless, titled Fool to praise?
And shall we not by one poor Grave-stone learn,
Where Humor, wit and Genius sleep with Sterne?