Was the author of the world's most avant-garde novel stolen by grave robbers?

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Laurence Sterne, an 18th-century Anglican cleric, transformed literature with his digressive, experimental masterpiece Tristram Shandy. Yet his post-mortem journey was as chaotic as his prose. After his death in 1768, rumors persisted that his body was snatched for anatomical study, leading to a strange, centuries-long mystery regarding his final resting place.

Born in 1713 in Ireland, Laurence Sterne spent a nomadic, impoverished childhood following his father’s military postings before finding stability through the church. Ordained in 1738, he served as a vicar in Yorkshire for two decades. While he published sermons, his true vocation emerged late; at age 46, he penned A Political Romance, a satire that was burned by the church. This failure sparked his pivot to humor, resulting in the 1759 publication of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

Tristram Shandy defied every convention of its era. Spanning nine volumes over a decade, the novel famously delayed the protagonist's birth until the third volume, utilizing 'progressive digressions' and unconventional typography—including marbled and entirely black pages—to challenge the limits of print. While English critic Samuel Johnson dismissed the work as a fleeting oddity, European thinkers like Voltaire and Goethe hailed Sterne as a genius. His influence ripples through history, from the modernist experiments of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf to the avant-garde structures of Italo Calvino and David Foster Wallace.

Sterne’s life was marked by contradictions: he was a clergyman with a reputation as a libertine, a writer who sought fame through 'indecent' humor, and a man whose correspondence with Ignatius Sancho became a cornerstone of abolitionist literature. His death in 1768 at age 54 did not end the intrigue. Rumors suggested his corpse was stolen from St George’s, Hanover Square, and sold to Cambridge anatomists. In 1969, during a churchyard redevelopment, a skull matching a bust of Sterne was discovered among 11,500 remains. These bones were eventually transferred to Coxwold, finally settling the physical legacy of a man who spent his life dismantling the boundaries of the novel.

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