A Tomb in Bayswater by Alice Meynell

Name: A Tomb in Bayswater
Author: Alice Meynell

“A Tomb in Bayswater” is Alice Meynell’s reflective essay on the neglected London grave of Laurence Sterne, using the physical tomb as a way to judge memory, literary fame, time, taste, and moral reputation. Meynell begins by noting that few Londoners know where Sterne is buried, though his grave remains visible and tended near the noisy westward road out of London. She treats the uncertainty over whether Sterne’s body truly lies beneath the stone as secondary: the grave matters less as a relic than as a provocation to thought. From there she turns to the strangeness of historical time. Two centuries seem long if measured by childhood, whose years expand enormously in memory, but adult decades are brief; a mere handful of mature lives links the present to Sterne, Pope, Swift, the French Revolution, Wordsworth, Keats, and the great painters. The essay is not sentimental about Sterne. Meynell acknowledges his genius but refuses easy forgiveness for the persistent indecency and evasive impropriety in *Tristram Shandy*. She praises Henry Morley’s expurgated edition as one that preserves the masterpiece while removing much that a decent reader need not regret losing. Her position is exacting: Sterne is great, but his greatness does not absolve his moral and artistic offenses. The tombstone itself becomes an object of sharp scrutiny. Meynell is intrigued by the inscription, raised by two anonymous “Brother Masons,” though Sterne was not a Mason. Its couplets praise him extravagantly as a humane, unstained, misunderstood satirist persecuted by fools and prudes. Meynell exposes the muddle of its images and arguments, yet also grants that the verse possesses the formal self-command of its age. Even weak eighteenth-century couplets, she suggests, could achieve a kind of balance and propriety now often absent. The headstone is ugly, heavy, vain, and provincial, but historically revealing. The surrounding burial ground has been transformed by modern philanthropy into a recreational square, with most tombstones cleared away and stacked against the walls. Meynell sees this as another form of forgetting: the dead are tidied into anonymity. A small grave inscription for a three-year-old girl, Miss Susannah Headlam, briefly pierces that oblivion by the pathos of its prim exactness. Around the abandoned ground, sparrows, cats, plane-trees, and dry autumn light create a vivid urban solitude. The essay’s true subject is not simply Sterne’s grave, but the unstable afterlife of reputation. Meynell meditates on how a city forgets its dead, how monuments misstate the people they commemorate, how literary fame survives moral discomfort, and how modern improvements can erase historical presence while pretending to preserve public good. The Bayswater tomb stands as an awkward remnant: not sacred, not beautiful, not fully trustworthy, but still potent because it gathers together the claims of art, memory, judgment, and time.

By Alice Meynell · First published 1922 · Genre: Literary Essay, Biographical Criticism, Literary Criticism · 1,424 words

First lines

Not many Londoners, it seems, know where amongst them Sterne was buried; but his tomb stands where it did, duly tended, so that the superscription is clean and clear, within perpetual sound of the voices, of the feet, of the hootings, and of the wheels on the long westward road that starts for Oxford from Tyburn Gate. Perhaps the story told by the surgeon who thought he recognized a dead man anonymous upon a dissecting table, at the time of Sterne's death in Bond-street, has discouraged the national and the local interest in an accessible London grave of the great. Yet it matters little whether the dust beneath this grey, Georgian, braggart, vain, heavy, and ungenerous headstone be now mingled with the dust that was the body of Sterne; or at least it is a question that touches no more than the fancy.

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A Tomb in Bayswater is listed on Textopian as an essay by Alice Meynell, dated 1922 CE.

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Work type: Essay
Author: Alice Meynell
Date: 1922 CE
Language: English
Genres: Literary Essay, Biographical Criticism, Literary Criticism, Topographical Writing, Historical Essay
Length: 1,424 words
Structure: 1 section, 11 paragraphs
Reading fit: Fairly Difficult (10th-12th Grade)

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Genres

Literary Essay — The work is a reflective prose essay centered on Sterne's grave, using observation, judgment, historical memory, and stylistic meditation rather than plot.
Biographical Criticism — It evaluates Laurence Sterne's reputation, moral character, literary legacy, and reception through the symbolic occasion of his tomb.
Literary Criticism — The essay discusses Sterne's relation to Tristram Shandy, Henry Morley's edited edition, Scriblerian satire, and the moral and aesthetic problem of reading Sterne.
Topographical Writing — The piece is rooted in a precise London location, describing Bayswater, the burial ground, the road from Tyburn Gate, the chapel, trees, stones, and urban sounds.