Few of Reverend Laurence Sterne's Yorkshire parishioners could have anticipated his sudden and spectacular transformation from country parson to one of the most internationally-famous novelists of the eighteenth century. Had they been forewarned, they all could have predicted that his favourite themes would be sex and laughter. His sermon on the Sunday after his marriage in 1741 was a discourse upon Luke 5:5 -- "We have toiled all night, and have taken nothing." Sterne's usual pulpit technique was to trot out the predictable scriptural passage and then, heads nodding, trump it: " 'It is better to go to a house of mourning than a house of feasting...sorrow is better than laughter ' -- for a crack-brained order of Carthusian monks, I grant, but not for men of the world ... FULL STORY »
