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Sterne's Eugenius as Indiscreet Author: The Literary Career of John Hall-Stevenson
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
John Hall-Stevenson (1718-85), friend and college mate of Laurence Sterne and the “Eugenius” of Tristram Shandy, was galvanized into writing and publication by the meteoric success of Sterne. His second impetus was his friendship for John Wilkes and his admiration for Wilkes s most important satellite, Charles Churchill. From 1760 to 1783 he attempted to keep in the public eye with fables and fabliaux, verse epistles and satires, translations and imitations. Best known for Crazy Tales (1762), fabliaux ostensibly told by members of the “Demoniac” brotherhood at his own Skelton Castle, he developed a reputation for eccentricity and bawdry. Nevertheless, he was a man not only of a curious but also of a sound reading background, he was a classicist of some competence, and he could on occasion be an effective satirist. Though most often misdirected, his persistent efforts to interpret Sterne offer important comment on the milieu in which Tristram Shandy developed; and as a Wilkesite he was frequently able to make pungent comment on the personalities and issues of his era. (Includes as an appendix a bibliography of the works of Hall-Stevenson.)
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971
References
Notes
1 All quotations from John Hall-Stevenson in this paper are taken from the collected edition, described as follows on the title page: The works of John Hall-Stevenson, Esq. . . . Corrected and Enlarged. With Several Original Poems, Now First Printed, and Explanatory Notes. In Three Volumes. London, Printed by J. Nichols, for T. Debrett, Picadilly, and T. Becket, Pall-Mali. MDCCXCV. Volume and page numbers for passages cited are given in parentheses.
2 Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), ii, 671.
3 The Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. Lewis Perry Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), p. 113.
4 Ibid., p. 115.
5 Critical Review, 9 (1760), 322.
6 12 (1761), 459–62.
7 See The Best Fables of La Fontaine, trans. Francis Duke (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1961), Appendix, pp. 215–19.
8 See, e.g., Critical Review, 12 (1761), 459, above. In An Apology Addressed to the Critical Reviewers published in the same year, Churchill similarly attacked Smollett.
9 Letters, p. 182; London Chronicle, 10-12 June 1762.
10 See also “An Epistle from John Me, Esquire, to His Excellence My Lord SELF” (1778) in Works, ii, 225-32.
11 12 (1762), 475–80.
12 12(1762), 475–80.
13 Correspondence of Thomas Gray, iii, 932.
14 Letters, p. 122.
15 Letters, p. 181.
16 In interpreting these letters I have had the help of Arthur H. Cash, who has generously provided information and materials at several other points. Parts of these fragments have been used by Lee R. Lombard in “John Hall-Stevenson: The Eugenius of Sterne” (unpubl. Master's Thesis Columbia 1935), pp. 104–05, and by Louis C. Jones in The Clubs of the Georgian Rakes (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1942), pp. 155–65, though with an interpretation that I cannot wholly accept.
17 The Correspondence of John Wilkes and Charles Churchill, ed. Edward H. Weatherly (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1954), p. 10.
18 Ibid.
19 See Works, i, 134–37.
20 30 (1764), 415.
21 A letter from Hall-Stevenson to Sterne dated 13 July 1766, in which the writer mentions that he is “contrite for my bestiality to the Bishop of Gloucester]” (Letters, p. 279), makes it tempting to assign to Hall-Stevenson the anonymous pamphlet, The First Chapter of the Prophecies of the Poet Homer. With a Letter to the B. of G., published in London by J. Wilkie in 1766. Hall-Stevenson had, as we have seen, ample reason on his own and for his friend Sterne to attack Dr. Warburton, and even more reason now that he was an ardent Wilkesite. The “letter” is another of the numerous attacks on The Divine Legation of Moses, especially in regard to Warburton's contention that Book vi of the Aeneid represented the Eleusinian Mysteries. The whole work is full of the kind of pseudo-scholarship that Hall-Stevenson was later to use in his attack on Dr. Johnson in the Essay on the King's Friends (which also incidentally uses a passage from the Aeneid, Book vi, for another purpose). Moreover, its inclusion of a reference to what was apparently a trumped-up scandal involving the dissolute Thomas Potter, son of an Archbishop of Canterbury, and the wife of Bishop Warburton follows neatly a more elaborate reference to the same story in The Duellist (ll. 667–810) by Charles Churchill. It is also true that Hall-Stevenson made incidental attacks on Warburton in his poetry; and as late as the Moral Tales of 1783 there was a specific satirical reference (iii, 197) to the Divine Legatior and to what Warburton might have learned about sexua morality from Moses. In short, there is a good deal of circumstantial evidence for Hall-Stevenson's authorship There is not, however, enough to make the attribution entirely defensible.
22 Monthly Review, 38 (1768), 247; see also Critical Re view, 25 (1768), 69–70, and London Magazine, 37 (1768), 43
23 Correspondence with Thomas Gray, Richard West, and Thomas Ashton, ed. W. S. Lewis et al. (New Haven, Conn. Yale Univ. Press, 1948), ii, 169.
24 The Ghost, iii, 819–20, in Charles Churchill, The Poetica Works, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956).
25 Karl F. Thompson, “The Authorship of Yorick's ‘Sentimental Journey Continued,‘ ” N&Q, 195 (22 July 1950), 318–19, argued against Hall-Stevenson's authorship on bibliographical grounds. Internal evidence for the same argument may be adduced. I shall present it in a forthcoming article in SAQ, 70 (Spring 1971).
26 42 (1770), 132–33.
27 41 (1776), 247.
28 “Charles Churchill and A Fragment of an Epic Poem,” Harvard Studies in Philology and Literature, 15(1933), 313–27.
29 See The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, pp. 56465; and W. G. Brown, Charles Churchill (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1953), 158-61. Brown found grounds for rejecting the fragment as Churchill's in the fact that some of the political figures satirized by Hall-Stevenson were not satirized by Churchill. As an example, Lord Hardwick, included in Hall-Stevenson's satire, was defended by Churchill in The Candidate as the opponent of Sandwich in the contest for the High Stewardship of Cambridge.
30 R. B. Peake, Memoirs of the Colman Family (London: R. Bentley, 1841), 375–76.
31 Alexander Carlyle, Autobiography (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1860), pp. 453–56.
32 Private Papers, ed. Geoffrey Scott and F. A. Pottle (Mt. Vernon, N. Y.: W. T. Rudge, 1943), xiv, 212.
33 Eighteenth Century English Literature, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, Paul Fussell, Jr., and Marshall Waingrow (New York: Harcourt, 1969), p. 1528.