This is a guest post by Melvyn New, author of Apphia Peach, George Lord Lyttelton, and ‘The Correspondents’: An Annotated Edition of a Forgotten Gem (1775)
I first became interested in The Correspondents as the result of an essay in The Shandean, by Peter de Voogd, outlining the work’s several mentions of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey. As the general editor of The Florida Edition of the Works of Sterne, I have had a 55-year engagement with his works, but at best a peripheral interest in the hundreds of imitations in their wake. That task was ably undertaken by other scholars, and much has been written about Sterne’s influence on subsequent literature, an influence at times manifested in the brilliant writings of other great authors like Goethe and Jean Paul Richter, but far more often in the mediocre works of late eighteenth-century sentimentalism or insipid attempts to out-bawdry Sterne’s subtle wit.
The Correspondents (1775) is, to my mind, a forgotten gem, not an imitation of Sterne, but an embodiment of his most profound moments. Published anonymously, it was immediately recognized as embodying the situation of George Lord Lyttelton (1709–1773) and his much younger daughter-in-law Apphia Peach Lyttelton (1743–1840). The Lyttelton family denied their authorship, obviously disturbed by the fact that Lyttelton’s wayward son had deserted Apphia 4 months after marrying her in 1772, after which she and Lord Lyttelton lived in close proximity until his death a year later, a period chronicled in this exchange of letters.
While it remains possible that The Correspondents is a forgery, I have argued in the introduction to this edition my conviction that the letters are authentic. Lyttelton, an accomplished poet and prose writer, now near the end of his life, and Peach, who almost certainly attracted his attention as early as 1767–1768, and who probably married his son at the father’s instigation, found themselves again attracted to one another despite the awkwardness of consanguinity. The earlier relationship had, I suggest, taken its cue and comfort when observing an equally mismatched pair, Sterne and Eliza Draper, at the salon of Commodore William and Anne James, a London refuge for those connected to India. Peach would leave England in 1769 to marry a cousin there, but he died while she was enroute. Shortly after arriving, she married instead Colonel Joseph Peach, but his death 6 months later brought her back to England, and the disaster of her marriage to son Thomas Lyttelton.
It is no accident, then, that in the early pages of the correspondence between George Lyttelton and Apphia, Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey is invoked; or that after their most intimate moment, described with all of Sterne’s magnificently ambiguous suggestiveness, his sermon on the ‘Abuses of Conscience’ is invoked. Indeed, throughout the letters, with their many literary allusions, their engagement with Shakespeare (‘Alas, poor Yorick!’), and their dance of intimacy, characterised by numerous approaches and retreats, Lyttelton and Peach capture the genius of Sterne’s persistent insights, in both Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, into the power of human desire, and – for him and for the correspondents – the equal power of human conscience. I believe The Correspondents is a work by two very talented authors, worthy to be read alongside both A Sentimental Journey and The Sorrows of Werther.