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Sterne, Smollett and Scottish voices
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L—d! said my mother, what is all this story about? –
A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick – And one of the best of its
kind, I ever heard.
Sterne’s other contribution to literature is equally unique: A Sentimental
Journey through France and Italy (1767). It is an account of a journey in
which the narrator, the parson Yorick from Tristram Shandy, only gets as
far as Lyons in France. Again, Sterne is parodying a convention – that of
the fashionable travel journal – but at the same time his use of ‘sentimental’
in the title points up, perhaps ironically, a new emphasis on the ‘sensibility’
of Yorick. The person of sentiment was to bring a whole new range of
emotions into literature in the last decades of the eighteenth century.
Our satiety is to suppurate
(Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker)
The ‘outsider’, as observer of and commentator on English society (usually
London-based society) is an important figure in British writing. Spenser, in
the Elizabethan age, wrote from the distant exile of Ireland, as did Swift a
century later. Although he was born, educated, and spent most of his life in
Ireland, Swift would never have consented to being called Irish. The dramatist
William Congreve, also educated in Ireland, was a Yorkshireman; conversely,
Laurence Sterne was born in Ireland, but educated in Yorkshire.
The Anglo-Irish contribution to English literature is highly significant,
from Spenser to the present day. Scottish writing, little known in England
since the Reformation, became a major presence late in the eighteenth
century. The important figures were Johnson’s biographer Boswell, the
novelists Tobias Smollett and Henry Mackenzie, and the poets Robert
Fergusson, Ossian and Robert Burns. Smollett was Scottish. This was
important in the context of the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, which,
104 years after the Union of the Crowns, theoretically made the United
Kingdom a whole. Smollett’s finest novel, Humphry Clinker (1771) is one
of many works, in the novel and in poetry, and by a wide range of authors,
which underline difference rather than unity in the newly United Kingdom.
Like many of his contemporaries, including Goldsmith, Smollett
used journalism as a vehicle for his ideas. From Defoe to Dickens,