The Works of Laurence Sterne. With an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author. Complete in Eight Volumes. Volume 6. Letters of the Late Laurence Sterne to His Most Intimate Friends. With a Fragment, in the Manner of Rabelais

A small-town vicar suffering from tuberculosis, Laurence Sterne burst onto the literary scene with the phenomenally successful multi-volume fiction work Tristram Shandy. Sterne's work, which practically bursts at the seams with sexual innuendo, was extremely popular in the London of his day - although Tristram Shandy was denounced on moral grounds by such leading figures as Samuel Johnson and Samuel Richardson.