THE Journal to Eliza AND VARIOUS LETTERS

ELIZABETH DRAPER.

STERNE married Miss Lumley of York. He afterwards held sentimental converse with Miss Fourmantelle, Lady Percy, “My witty widow Mrs. F—,” &c., &c. But his one passion was for the Eliza to whom this volume is dedicated. “Not Swift,” he wrote to her just before she sailed for India, “so loved his Stella, Scarron his Maintenon, or Waller his Sacharissa, as I will love and sing thee, my wife elect! All those names, eminent as they are, shall give place to thine, Eliza.”

Mrs. Elizabeth Draper was daughter to one May Sclater who went out to India when a mere boy. He married there a Miss Whitehill, and settled at Anjengo, a small factory on the coast of Malabar, where Elizabeth was born on April 5, 1744. In ivdue time she was sent to England for the “frivolous education” accorded to “girls destined for India.” “The generality of us,” she wrote in sorrowful retrospect, “* * * were never instructed in the Importance of any thing, but one Worldly Point, that of getting an Establishment of the Lucrative kind, as soon as possible, a tolerable complection, an Easy manner, some degree of taste in the adjustment of our ornaments, some little skill in dancing a minuet, and singing an air.” With no training in “useful Employments,” she returned to India in her fourteenth year to become, six months later, the wife of Daniel Draper, her elder by some twenty years. Since 1750 Draper had been in the service of the East India Company, and in 1759, the year after his marriage, he was appointed Secretary to the Government at

Bombay, where with some interruptions he continued for the rest of his life in India. His faithful services were eventually rewarded by a seat in the Council and the post of Accountant General. If a somewhat heavy official, he was described by a friend and admirer as “a very noble and vgood-humoured man.” There was nothing unusual about the Draper marriage, which now seems so ill-sorted in respect to age; and we may suppose that neither husband nor wife found it too uncomfortable. A boy was born in 1759, and two years later a girl, named for her mother—the Eliza or Betsey who figures in one of the letters. In 1765, the Drapers brought their children to England that they might be given an English education. Later in the same year Mr. Draper went back to Bombay, but his wife remained in England to recover her health, which had been much weakened by child-bearing and the heat of India.

There was then living in Gerrard Street, Soho, a retired Indian commodore named William James. After making a fortune in the Bombay Marine Service, he returned to England, married an attractive wife, and soon won a place in the “best” London society. Early in 1767, Sterne began going to the Jameses for dinner, especially of a Sunday; and the friendship quickly became intimate. Under date of February 23, Sterne wrote to his daughter Lydia: “I wish I had you with me—and I would introduce you to vione of the most amiable and gentlest of beings, whom I have just been with— * * * a Mrs. James, the wife of as worthy a man as I ever met with—I esteem them both.” It was no doubt at the house of these “kind friends in Gerrard Street” that Sterne made the acquaintance of Mrs. Draper—and most likely on his arrival in London at the very beginning of January, 1767. Half in love on first sight, Sterne soon became completely engrossed with his new passion. And well he might, for though Eliza may not have been handsome, she was young, good looking

at least, and most agreeable in manner. “Your eyes,” Sterne wrote to her, “and the shape of your face (the latter the most perfect oval I ever saw) * * * are equal to any of God’s works in a similar way, and finer than any I beheld in all my travels.” Mrs. Draper was then called by her London friends, says one of her letters, the Belle Indian. Sterne saw much of her at the Jameses; she visited his lodgings in Old Bond Street; they made excursions together in and about London; and when separated from her, Sterne communed with her “sweet sentimental picture.” As the time was approaching viifor her to return to India—she sailed on April 3, 1767—he addressed to her the extraordinary epistles that all the world knows, and for months afterwards he recorded his sensations in a journal which he hoped some day to place in her hands.

The sojourn of Mrs. Draper in England had been to the change and harm of her character. With her little knowledge of the world, she took Sterne and her flatterers too seriously. She was no doubt attractive in appearance, with her oval face and light airs, but her admirers said to her face that she was beautiful; and worse than that, they tried to make out that she possessed qualities of mind which, if cultivated, would surely lead to distinction in literature. They sent her back to the dull humdrum of India with the literary ambitions of Mrs. Montagu and the blue-stockings. Henceforth she was to find at Bombay a great “Dearth of every thing which could charm the Heart—please the Fancy, or speak to the judgment.” Still Mrs. Draper seems for a time to have made the best of the situation. Writing from Tellicherry in 1769 to a friend in England, she spoke with respect if not with enthusiasm of viiiher husband, whom she was assisting in his official correspondence. But by 1772 she became thoroughly sick of India and of her husband in particular. In a letter to Mrs.

James from Bombay she lamented that she was compelled to remain in a detestable country, where her health was declining, and her mind was tortured by the desire to return to England and be with her daughter. At this time she was no longer living with Draper as a wife, and for sufficient reasons, for he was engaged in open intrigue with an attendant—a Mrs. Leeds. In retaliation and despair, Mrs. Draper abruptly left her husband on the night of January 14–15, 1773, in company with Sir John Clark of the Navy, then in command of a frigate at Bombay. She sought refuge for a time with a “kind uncle,” Tom Whitehill, at Rajahmandry, and the next year she returned to England, where much attention was paid to her as Sterne’s Eliza. She associated, perhaps not to her good fame, with John Wilkes the politician; and, if an anecdote of Rogers is to be trusted, William Combe, the literary hack, could boast “that it was with him, not ixwith Sterne, that Eliza was in love.” More to be pitied than to be censured, the unfortunate Mrs. Draper died at Bristol

on August 3, 1778, in the thirty-fifth year of her age.

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, xshe 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 xiJohn 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.

LETTERS 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 xivCoxwold 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.

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,’ xviand 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 xviiMr. 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.

THE JOURNAL TO ELIZA.

NEARLY one half of the manuscript volume just described is occupied by The Journal to Eliza, or The Bramine’s Journal, as Sterne perhaps intended to call it. On the first page is a note by Sterne himself, wherein it is said, with a characteristic attempt at mystification, that the names “Yorick and Draper—and sometimes the Bramin and Bramine”[3]—are fictitious, and that the entire record is “a copy from a French manuscript—in Mr. S——’s hands.” Then follow seventy-six pages of writing, with about twenty-eight lines to the page, and finally a page with only a few words upon it. The leaves are folio in size, and except in the case of the first and the last, both sides are written upon.

This curious diary was composed during the first months after Sterne’s separation from xxMrs. Draper. On a certain day late in March 1767, Sterne handed Mrs. Draper into a postchaise for Deal, and turned away to his London lodgings “in anguish.” Before parting, each promised to keep an intimate journal that they might have “mutual testimonies to deliver hereafter to each other,” should they again meet. While Mrs. Draper was at Deal making preparations for her voyage to India, Sterne sent her all that he had written; and on the thirteenth of April he forwarded by a Mr. Watts, then departing for Bombay, a second instalment of his record. These two sections of Sterne’s journal—and likewise all of Mrs. Draper’s, for we know that she kept one—have disappeared. The extant part begins on the thirteenth of April, 1767 and comes down to the fourth of August in the same year. The sudden break was occasioned by the expected return of Mrs. Sterne from France, where she had been living for some time. After her arrival at Coxwold, the journal

could be carried on only by stealth; and besides that, Sterne felt her presence—and even the thought of it—a restraint upon the fancy. A postscript was added on the xxifirst of November announcing that Mrs. Sterne and Lydia had just gone to York for the winter, while he himself was to remain at Coxwold to complete the Sentimental Journey. There were hints that the journal would be resumed as soon as he reached London in the following January. But Sterne probably did not carry out his intention. At least nothing is known of a later effort.

In Sterne’s introductory note, the Journal is described as “a Diary of the miserable feelings of a person separated from a Lady for whose Society he languish’d.” Already worn out by a long stretch of dinners, Sterne completely broke down under the strain of Mrs. Draper’s departure for India. “Poor sick-headed, sick-hearted Yorick!” he exclaims, “Eliza has made a shadow of thee.” As his illness increased, the Sunday visits in Gerrard Street were broken-off, and the sick and dejected lover shut himself up in his lodgings to abstinence and reflection. To allay the “fever of the heart” with which he was wasting, he had recourse to Dr. James’s Powder, a popular remedy of the period which, so said the advertisement, xxiiwould cure “any acute fever in a few hours, though attended with convulsions.” On going out too soon after taking the nostrum, Sterne caught cold and came near dying. Physicians were called in, and twelve ounces of blood were taken from the patient in order “to quiet,” says Sterne, “what was left in me.” The next day the bandage on

his arm broke loose and he “half bled to death” before he was aware of it. Four days later he found himself much “improved in body and mind.” On feeling his pulse, the doctors “stroked their beards and look’d ten per ct. wiser.” The patient was now in condition for their last prescription: I “am still,” he writes, “to run thro’ a Course of Van Sweeten’s corrosive Mercury, or rather Van Sweeten’s Course of Mercury is to run thro’ me.” The doctors dismissed, Sterne finally experimented at his own risk with a French tincture called L’Extrait de Saturne, and on the next day he was able to dine out once more.

During his illness his “room was always full of friendly Visitors,” and the “rapper eternally going with Cards and enquiries.” With these friends, among whom were xxiiiLord and Lady Spencer, he had yet to dine; and then on the twenty second of May he set out for Yorkshire. On the twenty eighth he reached his “thatched cottage” at Coxwold, and began another course of corrosive Mercury. His “face as pale and clear as a Lady after her Lying in,” he rose from his bed to take the air every day in his postchaise drawn by “two fine horses,” and by the middle of June he was “well and alert.” So he went over to Hall-Stevenson’s at Crazy Castle, where on the neighboring beach, “as even as a mirrour of 5 miles in Length,” squire and parson ran daily races in their chaises, “with one wheel in the Sea, & the other in the Sand.” In the course of the summer, Sterne paid another visit to Crazy Castle; Hall-Stevenson came to Coxwold for a day or two, and they went together to Harrogate to drink the waters. By the 27th of July they were back at York for the races. At

the beginning of the next month, Sterne was “hurried backwards and forwards abt. the arrival of Madame”—an event that had long been impending to the suspense and torture of his mind.