The Journal to Eliza and Various letters by Laurence Sterne and Elizabeth DraperSterne, Laurence
General
The Journal to Eliza and Various letters by Laurence Sterne and Elizabeth Draper
Sterne, Laurence
Draper, Elizabeth, 1744-1778; Novelists, English -- 18th century -- Correspondence; Sterne, Laurence, 1713-1768 -- Correspondence
Mrs. Draper was buried in the cloisters of Bristol Cathedral, where to
her memory stands a monument symbolizing in its two draped figures
Genius and Benevolence, the qualities given her in the inscription. The
next year the Abbé Raynal, the French historian of the Indies—over whom
Mrs. Draper had cast her spells, first in India and afterwards in
England—wrote about her in mad eulogy. He had wept, he said, with Eliza
over Sterne; and at the time of her death, she was intending to quit her
country for a life with him in France. “A statuary,” he goes on to say
in description of Mrs. Draper, “who would have wished to represent
Voluptuousness, would have taken her for his model; and she would
equally have served for him who might have had a figure of Modesty to
display. * * * Every instant increased the delight she inspired; every
instant rendered her more interesting. * * * Eliza then was very
beautiful? No, she was simply beautiful: but there was no beauty she did
not eclipse, because she was the only one that was like herself.”[1] And
long afterwards, James Forbes, to whose _Oriental Memoirs_ we owe so
much for the social India of those days, paid his tribute to Mrs.
Draper. Anjengo he averred would ever be celebrated as the birthplace of
Eliza: “a lady with whom I had the pleasure of being acquainted at
Bombay, whose refined tastes and elegant accomplishments require no
encomium from my pen.” To the various places where Mrs. Draper lived in
India the curious long made pilgrimages. Colonel James Welsh of the
Madras infantry visited the house at Anjengo where she was supposed to
be born, and carried away from a broken window pieces of oyster-shell
and mother-of-pearl as mementos. He took pains to write also in his
_Memoirs_ that the house she lived in at Tellicherry was still standing
in 1812. Belvidere House, at Mazagon, overlooking the harbour at
Bombay—the house from an upper window of which Eliza escaped by a rope
ladder to the ship of Sir John Clark—was long believed to be haunted by
her spirit, “flitting about in corridor or verandah in hoop and
farthingale.” Sketches of Belvidere were brought to England by J. B.
Fraser, the traveller and explorer; and from them Robert Burford painted
a panorama[2] for public exhibition in London. For nearly a century, it
is said, a tree on the estate of her uncle Tom Whitehill at Masulipatam
was called Eliza’s tree in memory of her sojourn there.
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INTRODUCTION
LETTERS FROM YORICK TO ELIZA.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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