A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) is a novel by Laurence Sterne. It follows the Reverend Mr. Yorick on a picaresque journey through France, narrated from a sentimental point of view. Yorick is a character from Sterne's bestselling previous novel Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) who also serves as Sterne's alter ego. The novel was planned as a four-volume work, but Sterne died in 1768 with only the first two volumes published; Yorick never makes it to Italy.
The book follows the genre conventions of a travel narrative, with a playful and fragmented writing style. A key theme is the interconnected nature of sympathy and sexual desire, which both inspire strong pro-social feelings. Analysis of the book often seeks to answer whether its depictions of extreme emotion are meant to be serious, or whether Yorick is an unreliable narrator intended to mock the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility.
At its first publication, A Sentimental Journey was widely praised for being more emotionally moving and less bawdy than Tristram Shandy. In the first decades after his death, A Sentimental Journey was Sterne's most popular work. Victorian readers disapproved more strongly of its sexual content, and its reputation declined. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a rehabilitation of Sterne generated more interest in the novel, though it is often now overshadowed by Tristram Shandy.
Plot summary
Yorick's journey starts in Calais, where he meets a monk who begs for donations to his convent. Yorick initially refuses to give him anything, but later regrets his decision. He and the monk exchange their snuff-boxes as a gesture of friendship. He sees a woman, Madame L—, and is intrigued by her; he will continue to encounter her throughout the novel. Yorick buys a chaise to continue his journey. Yorick then inserts a preface cataloguing different kinds of travellers.
After some time in Calais, the next town he visits is Montreuil, where he hires a servant to accompany him on his journey, a young man named La Fleur. Along the way, they pass a man mourning for his dead ass; Yorick sympathizes with him, but his sympathy is interrupted by his carriage driving away too quickly. They travel through Nampont and Amiens before arriving in Paris.
In Paris, he is distracted by the beauty of a shop girl (grisette) when he asks her for directions to the Opera Comique. After the opera, Yorick is informed that the police inquired for his passport at his hotel. Without a passport at a time when England is at war with France, he risks imprisonment in the Bastille. He sees a starling in a cage, which seems to be repeating the phrase "I can't get out"; he is unable to free it and, dwelling on its captivity, becomes miserable imagining the suffering of a prisoner in the Bastille.
Yorick travels to Versailles to acquire a passport, and visits the Count de B****. When Yorick notices the count reads Hamlet, he points with his finger at Yorick's name, mentioning that he is Yorick. The count mistakes him for the king's jester and quickly procures him a passport. Yorick fails in his attempt to correct the count, and remains satisfied with receiving his passport so quickly.
Yorick returns to Paris and stays a few more days before continuing his voyage to Italy. He visits Maria—who was introduced in Sterne's previous novel, Tristram Shandy—in Moulins. Maria's mother tells Yorick that Maria has been struck with grief since her husband died. Yorick consoles Maria, and then leaves.
After having passed Lyon during his journey, Yorick spends the night in a roadside inn. The novel ends abruptly in the middle of a scene, with a double entendre.
Composition and publication
Development in response to Tristram Shandy
A Sentimental Journey was partly written in response to the declining public opinion of Sterne's previous novel, Tristram Shandy, which he had been publishing in instalments since 1762. Tristram Shandy was primarily a comic novel, with some passages of moral sentiments. It was most praised for its sentimentality, with some reviewers suggesting that Sterne was better at writing pathos than humour. As the 1760s went on, the general literary taste also grew more disapproving of lewd content, contributing to the declining appreciation for (and sales of) Tristram Shandys ongoing instalments. In 1765, Ralph Griffiths reviewed the latest volumes of Tristram Shandy by saying that the public was no longer interested in that novel, directly advising Sterne to begin a new one focused on sentimentality. Griffiths later took credit for the publication of A Sentimental Journey, which he praised.
Concurrently with writing Tristram Shandy, Sterne travelled to Paris in January 1762, before the Seven Years' War ended. He visited France until 1764, followed by a trip through France and Italy from 1765 to 1766. These travels inspired a parodic account of the Grand Tour in volume 7 of Tristram Shandy in 1765. Still inspired, he decided to write a new book which would experiment with the genre of the travel narrative, and revive his literary reputation after the declining sales of Tristram Shandy.
Sterne first mentioned his plans for a new project in the summer of 1766, when he wrote that he would start a new travel-oriented four-volume work after he had finished the ninth volume of Tristram Shandy. That ninth volume was published in January 1767, and he wrote again about his ideas for a travel narrative in a letter to his daughter in February of 1767. Sterne was very ill that spring, but better in the summer. By June 1767, he was working seriously on the novel, with particular efforts in November and December. His illness grew severe again in December. During the process of composition, Sterne frequently exchanged passionate letters with a married woman, Elizabeth Draper. These letters commented on and influenced his novel-writing, and both express intense, frustrated desire. He signed all his letters to her as "Yorick". The letters were later published as Letters from Yorick to Eliza in 1773, and more of his correspondence as Journal to Eliza in 1904.
Publication In January 1768, the writing was complete for the first two volumes, and Sterne travelled to London to monitor the printing process. The first two volumes of A Sentimental Journey were published on February 27, 1768. The publication of the book was partly funded through subscriptions and begins with a list of the subscribers' names. Notable subscribers include the Archbishop of York and the Marquis of Rockingham, as well as the famous actor David Garrick. Elizabeth Draper subscribed under the pseudonym "Sterne's Eliza", purchasing three copies. Subscribers had the option of receiving their copy printed on higher-quality paper. The book ends with a tipped-in page promising subscribers that they will receive the final two volumes the next winter. However, only the first two were published due to Sterne's death in March.
The book went through dozens of editions in the late eighteenth century, indicating substantial sales. The second edition appeared on March 29, 1768—barely a month after the first edition and eleven days after Sterne's death. A Sentimental Journey was rapidly and widely translated on its publication. German and French editions appeared the same year as the English, and by the early 1800s it had been translated into seven other European languages. It was soon published with a variety of annotated critical editions, starting with a 1782 edition which provided a French glossary. It also appeared in pocket-sized editions to be carried on readers' travels. At least fourteen illustrated editions were published between 1768 and 1810, with different illustrators. Later editions include illustrations by Thomas Heath Robinson (1869–1954), Vera Willoughby (1870–1939), Gwen Raverat (1885–1957), and Brian Robb (1913–1979).
Style
Playful and fragmented language The language of A Sentimental Journey is playful, with an interest in puns, especially sexual double entendres. The final line of the novel — which suggests grabbing a woman's "end" through the well-timed paratextual note indicating the end of the volume — illustrates the linguistic and metatextual playfulness of the book, and its allusive approach to sexuality. Through aposiopesis, Sterne often abandons a sentence or a narrative at a key moment, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks as to what should follow. Sterne suggested that this narrative technique put the reader at fault for any salacious interpretations of his text, writing: "If it is not thought a chaste book, mercy on them that read it, for they must have warm imaginations, indeed!" The novel is particularly likely to leave an obvious blank, with a word or phrase censored through asterisks or dashes, when the topic is sex or death.
Structurally, the novel is picaresque in its meandering series of disconnected adventures on the road. It is also quixotic in its hero's over-attachment to a misguided ideal (namely, fashionable sensibility). The novel moves between tableaux-like scenes with little information about the links between them, often omitting explanations of how Yorick actually travelled along his journey. The modernist writer Virginia Woolf, praising Sterne's writing as a precursor to the narrative technique of stream of consciousness, wrote: "He was travelling in France indeed, but the road was often through his own mind, and his chief adventures were not with brigands and precipices but with the emotions of his own heart."
Genre of travel writing
At its publication, A Sentimental Journey was reviewed as a travel narrative rather than a novel, and well-received in reviews for its fresh contributions to that genre. In the 1760s, travel writing was a popular literary genre, more respected than the novel. Travel writing was also undergoing a popularizing shift, as older travel narratives like Joseph Addison's Remarks on several parts of Italy, &c. were regarded as overly focused on classical scholarship, which was uninteresting and inaccessible to middle-class audiences. Travel narratives were rarely written by the small elite of aristocratic young men who went on a formal Grand Tour; instead, they were written by more middle-class travellers, whose journeys might have practical motivation. To better entertain their readers, travel writers began to emphasize personal anecdotes over scholarship or practical guidebook catalogues, and each writer sought to cultivate a distinctive narrative voice. Many stylistic aspects of A Sentimental Journey take these trends to their logical extreme. In both Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, Sterne promotes the idea that travel (and travel writing) should prioritize social connection rather than formulaic sight-seeing. A Sentimental Journey can also be seen as an answer to Tobias Smollett's decidedly unsentimental Travels Through France and Italy. Sterne had met Smollett during his travels in Europe, and strongly objected to his spleen, acerbity and quarrelsomeness. He modelled the character of Smelfungus on Smollett.
A structural feature taken from travel writing is the organization of the work into chapters named after the characters' location, rather than numbered sequentially. A new chapter begins each time there is a change of scenery, even if Yorick remains in the same city, such that the chapters describe the boundaries of individual narrative tableaux. Reinforcing this connection, the chapter titles usually add a short description of the key event in the scene. A 1768 review in the Critical Review describes the use of "whimsical titles" for the chapters as an "imitation of some celebrated authors".
Fictionalized autobiography