Читать книгу The Journal to Eliza and Various letters by Laurence Sterne and Elizabeth Draper - Laurence Sterne - Страница 4
ОглавлениеLETTERS FROM YORICK TO ELIZA.
AS narrated in the introduction to the first volume of Letters and Miscellanies, Mrs. Draper was induced to print some of the letters that she received from Sterne in the spring of 1767. The slight volume, with the dedication and preface reproduced here, made its appearance in February, 1775. Except for the ten letters that this volume contained, the correspondence between Sterne and Mrs. Draper seems to have been lost. Among the lost letters, were several from Sterne, and all of Mrs. Draper’s replies covering the same period. The latter were so many that Sterne spent an entire afternoon in sorting and arranging them. And to be lamented much more is the disappearance of the long ship letters that passed between the Bramin and Bramine in the summer and fall of the same year. In May, Sterne took four days for an overland letter to Mrs. Draper and in August he dispatched another to chaperon one from Mrs. James. While in his retreat at Coxwold he wept for an evening and a morning over Eliza’s narration of the dangers and miseries of her voyage. “Thou wouldst win me by thy Letters,” he records in his journal to her, “had I never seen thy face or known thy heart.”
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.
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
