Sterne's Works Volumes. 1 to 6.

Tan leather binding with red title plate, raised banding and gilt lettering on the spine. ( missing volume 7) good compendium

Laurence Sterne (24 November 1713 – 18 March 1768) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican cleric. He wrote the novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, published sermons and memoirs, and indulged in local politics. He grew up in a military family that travelled mainly in Ireland but briefly in England. An uncle paid for Sterne to attend Hipperholme Grammar School in the West Riding of Yorkshire, as Sterne's father was ordered to Jamaica, where he died of malaria some years later. He attended Jesus College, Cambridge on a sizarship, gaining bachelor's and master's degrees. While Vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest, Yorkshire, he married Elizabeth Lumley in 1741. His ecclesiastical satire A Political Romance infuriated the church and was burnt. Having found a talent for writing, he published early volumes of his best-known novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Sterne travelled to France to find relief from persistent tuberculosis, documenting his travels in A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, published weeks before his death. His posthumous Journal to Eliza addresses Eliza Draper, for whom he had romantic feelings. Sterne died in 1768 and was buried in the yard of St George's, Hanover Square. It has been said that his body was stolen after burial and sold to anatomists at Cambridge University, but recognised and reinterred. His alleged skull was found in the churchyard and transferred to Coxwold churchyard in 1969 by the Laurence Sterne Trust. Sterne wrote a religious satire work called A Political Romance in 1759. Many copies of his work were destroyed. According to a 1760 anonymous letter, Sterne "hardly knew that he could write at all, much less with humour so as to make his reader laugh". At the age of 46, Sterne dedicated himself to writing for the rest of his life. It was while living in the countryside, having failed in his attempts to supplement his income as a farmer and struggling with tuberculosis, that Sterne began work on his best-known novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, the first volumes of which were published in 1759. Sterne was at work on his celebrated comic novel during the year that his mother died, his wife was seriously ill, and his daughter was also taken ill with a fever. He wrote as fast as he possibly could, composing the first 18 chapters between January and March 1759. Due to his poor financial position, Sterne was forced to borrow money for the printing of his novel, suggesting that Sterne was confident in the prospective commercial success of his work and that the local critical reception of the novel was favourable enough to justify the loan. The publication of Tristram Shandy made Sterne famous in London and on the continent. He was delighted by the attention, famously saying "I wrote not [to] be fed but to be famous." He spent part of each year in London, being fêted as new volumes appeared. Even after the publication of volumes three and four of Tristram Shandy, his love of attention (especially as related to financial success) remained undiminished. In one letter, he wrote "One half of the town abuse my book as bitterly, as the other half cry it up to the skies — the best is, they abuse it and buy it, and at such a rate, that we are going on with a second edition, as fast as possible." Indeed, Baron Fauconberg rewarded Sterne by appointing him as the perpetual curate of Coxwold, North Yorkshire in March 1760. In 1766, at the height of the debate about slavery, the composer and former slave Ignatius Sancho wrote to Sterne encouraging him to use his pen to lobby for the abolition of the slave trade. In July 1766 Sterne received Sancho's letter shortly after he had finished writing a conversation between his fictional characters Corporal Trim and his brother Tom in Tristram Shandy, wherein Tom described the oppression of a black servant in a sausage shop in Lisbon which he had visited. Sterne's widely publicised response to Sancho's letter became an integral part of 18th-century abolitionist literature.