Scholia to the Florida Sterne Edition: Volume 9, Sterne’s Memoirs.

Abstract

In relating the story of his father, Roger Sterne, the author records that he was a “Lieutenant in Handysides Regiment, married to Agnes Hobert, widow of an Officer . . . her Family name, I believe was Nuttle—Tho’ upon Recollection, That was the name of her Father in Law—who was a noted Sutler in Flanders in Queen Anns Wars—when my Father married his Wifes Daughter N.B. (he was in debt to him)” (p. 6). The footnote suggests that Sterne hints here that either the father-in-law could pay off Roger’s debt or that Roger paid off the debt by marrying her. To this note, should be added W. M. Thackeray’s allusion to Roger Sterne in his historical novel, The History of Henry Esmond (1852, 1858).p. 12, n. 6 [add at end of note]. See David Pascoe, “Sterne and Thackeray’s ‘dreary double entendre,’” The Shandean, 32 (2021), 62–91, esp. 85. Pascoe chronicles a rapprochement of sorts between Sterne’s writings and Thackeray’s infamous condemnation of them, culminating in this passage in Henry Esmond (1858): “There was one comrade of Esmond’s, an honest little Irish lieutenant of Handyside’s, who owed so much money to a camp suttler, that he began to make love to the man’s daughter, intending to pay his debt that way; and at the battle of Malplaquet, flying away from the debt and lady too, he rushed so desperately on the French lines, that he . . . came a captain out of the action, and had to marry the suttler’s daughter after all, who brought him his cancelled debt to her father as poor Roger’s fortune” (Book III, ch. 5, ed. John Sutherland and Michael Greenfield [London: Penguin, 1985], 420). Thackeray invented much of this, as also some pertinent remarks a few chapters earlier (a passage Pascoe overlooked), an even more obvious salute to Sterne: “The officer in whose company Esmond was, the same little captain of Handyside’s regiment, Mr. Sterne, . . . an Irishman too, and as brave a little soul as ever wore a sword. ‘Bedad,’ says Roger Sterne, ‘that long fellow spoke French so beautiful that I shouldn’t have known he wasn’t a foreigner, till he broke out with his hulla-ballooing, and only an Irish calf can bellow like that.’—And Roger made another remark [in support of the Pretender] in his wild way, in which there was sense as well as absurdity” (Book III, ch. 3, 368–69). We might also record one further allusion to Sterne in Book III, ch. 9, 459), when the Pretender awakens and calls out, “Eh, La Fleur, un verre d’eau,” which is annotated by Sutherland: “This is perplexing, but presumably, still dazed, it is Miss Oglethorpe [his mistress] he calls for.” Rather, it almost certainly is a recall of Yorick’s French servant in A Sentimental Journey.