A Political Romance

A Political Romance is a satirical pamphlet by Laurence Sterne, first published in 1759, shortly before Tristram Shandy made him famous.

In the little parish of the tale, an old watch-coat, a pair of black plush breeches, and the competing claims of the clerk John and the sexton Trim produce a dispute wildly out of proportion to the objects involved. The narrator promises to explain the affair and repeatedly enlarges it instead.

The quarrel is an allegory of a real pamphlet war over offices and influence among Yorkshire clergymen. Sterne turns the maneuvering of patrons and church officials into a village battle over cast-off clothes, then follows the narrative with a satirical key and letters.

Mock solemnity, digression, eccentric punctuation, and the narrator's unstable control of his material all anticipate Sterne's later fiction. The pamphlet reduces institutional ambition to the scale of the petty appetites driving it.

"SIR,
In my last, for want of something better to write about, I told you what a World of Fending and Proving we have had of late, in this little Village of ours, about an old-cast-Pair-of-black-Plush-Breeches, which John, our Parish-Clerk, about ten Years ago, it seems, had made a Promise of to one Trim, who is our Sexton and Dog-Whipper.—To this you write me Word, that you have had more than either one or two Occasions to know a good deal of the shifty Behaviour of this said Master Trim,—and that you are astonished, nor can you for your Soul conceive, how so worthless a Fellow, and so worthless a Thing into the Bargain, could become the Occasion of such a Racket as I have represented."