Sermons of Laurence Sterne

The writer Laurence Sterne delivered hundreds of sermons across his career as an Anglican clergyman. Of these, forty-five were published: in two pamphlets in 1747 and 1750, and in three book collections in 1760, 1766, and 1769.

Sterne spent most of his clerical career as the vicar at Sutton-on-the-Forest and a prebendary of York. A skilled public speaker, he preached regularly at his small rural parish, and for a larger audience at York Minster. Two of his public sermons in York were published as pamphlets while he was an obscure rural clergyman, "The Case of Elijah and the Widow of Zerephath" in 1747 and "Abuses of Conscience" in 1750. In 1760, Sterne became a literary celebrity for his comic novel Tristram Shandy. One widely praised scene featured a character reading the sermon "Abuses of Conscience", attributed to Sterne's self-insert character Parson Yorick. To capitalize on his newfound fame, Sterne published his first collection of sermons the same year, under the title The Sermons of Mr. Yorick. He published two more volumes in 1766. After Sterne's death in 1768, his daughter Lydia and close friend John Hall-Stevenson published a three-volume collection in 1769 under the title Sermons by the Late Rev. Mr. Sterne. All three book collections were partially financed by subscription, and listed hundreds of supporters.

Stylistically, the sermons are noted for their light-hearted character sketches, similar to his fiction writing. They also extensively re-use writing by other authors. This re-use has been characterized as plagiarism by Sterne's critics, though historians today see textual borrowing as an uncontroversial part of sermon-writing in the eighteenth century. Sterne borrowed most frequently from John Tillotson, an Archbishop of Canterbury who influentially focused on preaching "practical divinity" rather than complex doctrinal issues. Other major influences include Joseph Hall, Samuel Clarke, and Joseph Butler. When first published, Sterne's sermons were widely praised, and reprinted even more often than his novels. Readers wrestled with the contradictions between Sterne's reputation as a bawdy humourist and the moral purity expected from a clergyman. One reviewer wrote, "we are astonished a man can deliver such sentiments, and act such a life!" As religious writing grew less popular, interest in Sterne's sermons declined substantially. They have never been out of print, but they are no longer widely read or studied except by scholars interested in Sterne's fiction.