Kenneth Monkman, 1911-1998

Kenneth Monkman, Laurence Sterne scholar, died on March 22 aged 86. He was born on April 17, 1911.

Kenneth Monkman, at left, at the reinterment of Laurence Sterne at Coxwold in 1969

O 'tis a delicious retreat -- I am as happy as a Prince at Coxwold," wrote the 18th-century novelist and parson Laurence Sterne of his home in North Yorkshire. During the eight years he lived there, he composed most of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. The speaking voice of these two comic masterpieces draws readers into an extraordinarily vivid conversation, and they inspired in Kenneth Monkman a personal devotion that went far beyond the usual realms of scholarship. He made himself the new Prince of Coxwold, restoring Sterne's house, Shandy Hall, where Tristram Shandy is set, so that the visitor feels that Uncle Toby and Dr Slop might still be arguing in the next room.

In a life of delicious and purposeful obsession, Monkman not only saved the house, but built a specialist library of world importance and, from the Shandean muddle of his study, added significantly to knowledge about Sterne. Kenneth Mackay Monkman read for an honours degree in chemistry at the University of Leeds, but was not entirely engrossed by the course, during which he wrote the words for It's the Rhythm, a popular song to music by Bill Williamson, a pianist with Jack Hylton. The piece was recorded, and in the early 1970s was re-issued in sheet music form. It much amused him that his pension was briefly supplemented by fees from the Performing Right Society.

Leaving university, he spent his entire working life in journalism. He started his career in local newspapers in Yorkshire but was sacked from the Yorkshire Evening News for writing a satirical piece about grouse shooting which was printed facing a photograph of the proprietor standing proudly with his shooting party on the moors. This early spell of unemployment proved the turning point of his life, for he was persuaded by a friend to read Tristram Shandy. The book, and its author, became an obsession.

Over more than 60 years, Monkman put together the most extensive of all Sterne libraries and became acknowledged as the foremost authority on the life of the author. Much of his collection was built up during the period 1942-71 when he was a copywriter for the Overseas Service of the BBC. By working at weekends and taking time off in lieu, he was able to trawl the bookshops on the lookout for Sternean items. His policy of acquiring as many copies as possible of each of Sterne's works proved invaluable when he came to write his definitive bibliographies of Tristram Shandy and The Sermons of Mr Yorick, bibliographies which provide the now standard Monkman numbers to identify lifetime editions.

He bought his first Sterne letter in 1942, and was fortunate enough in 1949 to find one of the six Nollekens marble busts of Sterne sitting in a rather dusty antique shop. His uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time when Sterne material surfaced seemed to falter only once: in 1948 he was in hospital when one of only six known copies of A Political Romance was listed in a Peter Murray-Hill catalogue and bought by John Carter for the Beinecke Library at Yale. For 50 years Monkman lamented this lacuna in his collection. Surprisingly he did not buy a first edition of Tristram Shandy until 1962, impelled by the approach of the 1968 bicentenary of Sterne's death. Many more followed.

In 1963 he and his second wife, Julia, made a pilgrimage to Coxwold to see Shandy Hall, and were appalled to see the ruinous condition of the house in which two families were living and sharing a single cold water tap. They set up the Laurence Sterne Trust, persuaded the owners of the house to sell it to the trust, and set about raising funds for the restoration, with support from J. B. Priestley, Frank Muir, Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, William Rees-Mogg and many others.

The then Ministry of Works declined to help on the ground that restoration was not possible given the state of the building. But the trust took its cue from Tristram Shandy itself: "By all that is good and virtuous! if there are three drops of oyl to be got, and a hammer to be found within ten miles of Shandy-Hall, the parlour-door hinge shall be mended this reign. That the building stands today one of the best preserved and tended of England's literary houses is testimony to the determination of the Monkmans.

The house -- about which Pevsner had been dismissive -- turned out to be a mid-15th century timber-framed hall and he Monkmans were particularly rewarded by the discovery of medieval and Tudor wall paintings. The house and garden are open in the summer season but Shandy Hall is also the principal centre for Sterne scholarship.

Kenneth Monkman filled the house with his collection of books, pictures, ceramics, 18th-century newspapers, manuscripts and tithe receipts. He entered into negotiations with the University of York in an attempt to ensure that the collection would be preserved for future scholars. The discussions did not reach the conclusion he sought during his lifetime. The university, though, showed its recognition of his achievements by awarding him an honorary doctorate in 1990.

The effort he put into collecting and the restoration of Shandy Hall meant that he did not publish as much as he might have done. He believed that, being an amateur, his writings would be decried by university-based scholars, a group that, with very few exceptions, he was inclined to distrust. He felt that he had first claim on all the material he had accumulated over a long period of collecting, and that he was entitled to extra time to publish because of his efforts in restoring Sterne's house. Nor was he generally disposed to reveal any of the treasures or to collaborate with others in their publication.

However, to provide an outlet for his years of study, The Shandean, an annual volume devoted to Sterne and his writings, was established in 1989, and he became a regular contributor.

His bibliographical studies were renowned for their attention to detail and for sorely trying the patience of his fellow editors and the printer: corrections and additions made necessary by recent acquisitions meant that what had been intended to be final page proofs were as heavily revised as the galleys had been. But the bibliographies were definitive. Essays in which he set out to demonstrate Sterne's authorship of a wide range of anonymous newspaper articles and pamphlets have been less readily accepted by other scholars, though by putting the material forward he began a discussion which should help to define more clearly the canon of Sterne's work. In 1985 he published Sterne's Memoirs from the holograph manuscript which is now on permanent loan to Shandy Hall, and in 1991 the first edition since the 18th century of Sterne's The Clockmaker's Outcry was published in his honour.

In 1969, when the graveyard at St George's, Hanover Square, was sold to developers, Monkman was instrumental in removing Sterne's mortal remains (and gravestone) to Coxwold.

Kenneth Monkman married, first, Vita Duncombe-Mann but the marriage was dissolved. He then married Julia Bearder in 1959. She survives him along with a son from his first marriage (the musician Francis Monkman) and two sons from his second marriage.

(From The Times, 28 March 1998)

On March 22, 1998, Kenneth Monkman died in the hospital in Northallerton, Yorkshire, not far from Shandy Hall, Coxwold, his home for many years. While he was often suspicious of academics, who did not always accept his attributions to Sterne, we nonetheless owe him a great debt of gratitude for his work in Sterne studies. Beginning with his great interest in Sterne, which led him to amass a marvelous collection of books and artifacts, to his decision to buy and restore Shandy Hall in order to house the collection, to the founding of the Laurence Sterne Trust, his life for over fifty years was dedicated to the preservation of Sterne's memory. It is therefore fitting that he now lies beside Sterne in the churchyard in Coxwold.

Buying Shandy Hall, where he lived until his death, and where his widow Julia still lives, supervising the gardens which are worth a trip in themselves, was itself an act of dedication, for it was in terrible condition -- the upstairs floor had fallen into the dining room, the walls were filled with woodworm, and only a man with a vision would have contemplated such an act. For that alone I am grateful, as I am for his kindness towards me on the two occasions I visited Shandy Hall. He has left us a great legacy.

See, for example, Peter de Voogd's page on Shandy Hall.

(Posted to C18-L on 14 April 1998 by Martha F. Bowden, email mbowden@ksumail.kennesaw.edu)