Читать книгу The Journal to Eliza and Various letters by Laurence Sterne and Elizabeth Draper онлайн

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1. The Journal to Eliza.

2. A Letter from Sterne at Coxwold to Mr. 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.

INTRODUCTION

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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.