Williams, Helen (2020) The Good Humour Club or Doctors’ Club and Sterne’s Political Romance. The Shandean, 31. ISSN 0956-3083
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Abstract
This essay argues that Sterne’s satire in A Political Romance pokes fun not just at the disagreement between lawyer Francis Topham and Dean of York John Fountayne, as is well known by Sterne scholars, but also at the role of a convivial club in that disagreement. Through analysing an early manuscript minute book of an eighteenth-century gentleman’s club previously unknown to scholars, the Good Humour Club of York (c.1724-1800), it will be demonstrated that nine of the club’s ninety-nine identified members were known to Sterne and that four of those were central to the pamphlet wars which climaxed with Sterne’s Political Romance in 1759. Sterne’s self-reflexivity in the Romance, through which he deconstructs his own satirical project and creates the self-consciousness perceived by scholars as anticipating the humour of Tristram Shandy, can be seen as a response to, and a satire of, the Good Humour Club’s involvement in local ecclesiastical affairs.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Additional Information: | The Shandean, an annual volume devoted to Laurence Sterne and his works published by the International Laurence Sterne Foundation. For ordering The Shandean please use the order form at http://shandean.org/the-shandean/order-the-shandean/ |
| Subjects: | Q300 English studies |
| Department: | Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Humanities |
| Depositing User: | Elena Carlaw |
| Date Deposited: | 24 Sep 2020 11:48 |
| Last Modified: | 31 Jul 2021 12:49 |
| URI: | http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/44233 |
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