Sterne laurence biography for kids

Laurence Sterne was born in Clonmel, Ireland in , son of an army ensign. During his first ten years the family moved from barracks to barracks. At the age of ten, Laurence went to school in Halifax and later went on to study divinity and classics at Jesus College, Cambridge. He was ordained into the Church of England as a deacon in after graduating that year.

With the help of his uncle, Dr Jaques Sterne Precentor of York , he began to make a moderately successful ecclesiastical career. He was ordained priest in and was granted the living of Sutton-on-the-Forest, to which he added six years later the living of Stillington. He married Elizabeth Lumley in and had a daughter, Lydia — the only one of his children to survive infancy.

Two of his sermons were published in and , but the publication of a satirical pamphlet in displayed his talents as a writer.

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The pamphlet, A Political Romance, was suppressed; but it gave Sterne the inspiration for a more ambitious work, and he contacted the London bookseller, Robert Dodsley with the draft of one volume of a work entitled The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Unable to secure a guarantee of publication, Sterne revised the work and in printed and published the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy by paying for it himself and sending it to London.

Tristram Shandy was an immediate success. Sterne had already published the first two volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman when he came to Coxwold in