He reached England in extremely bad health, and never left it again; but
he had still nearly two years of fairly well filled life to run. The
ninth, or last volume of _Tristram_ occupied him during the autumn of
1766, and was produced with the invariable accompaniment of its author’s
appearance in London during January 1767. This visit, which lasted till
May, saw the flirtation with “Eliza” Draper, the young wife of an Indian
official, who was at home for her health, an affair which exalted Sterne
in the eyes of eighteenth-century sensibility, especially in France,
about as much as it has depressed him in the eyes not merely of the
propriety, not merely of the common sense, but of the romance of later
times. He was very ill when he got back to Coxwold, but recovered, and
in October was joined by his wife and daughter. Even then, however, the
community was a very temporary and divided one, for he took a house for
them at York, and they were not to stay in England beyond the spring. He
himself finished what we have of the _Sentimental Journey_, and went to
London with it, where it was published rather later than usual, on the
27th February 1768. Three weeks later its author, at his lodgings at 41
New Bond Street, in the presence only of a hired nurse and a footman,
who had been sent by some of his friends to inquire after him, took a
journey other than sentimental, and so far unreported. Some odd but not
very well authenticated stories gathered round his death, which occurred
on Friday the 18th March. It was said, and it is probable enough, that
his gold sleeve-links were stolen by his landlady. After his funeral,
scantily attended, at the burying-ground of St. George’s, Hanover
Square, opposite Hyde Park (which used to be known by the squalid brown
of its unrestored, and afterwards made more hideous by the bedizened red
of its restored chapel), his body is said to have been snatched by
resurrection men. And the myth is rounded off by the addition that the
remains, having been sold to the professor of anatomy at Cambridge, were
dissected there in public, one of the spectators, a friend of Sterne’s,
recognising the face too late, and fainting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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