Sentimental Journey, A, through France and Italy

Sentimental Journey, A, through France and Italy, by L. Sterne, published 1768.

The narrator, Parson Yorick (borrowed from Tristram Shandy), is a man of great charm, sensibility, and gallantry, who sets out to travel through France and Italy. He reveres ‘Dear sensibility!’ and is frequently moved to tears. In parodying fashionable works of travel, he contrasts his own appreciation with Smelfungus (a caricature of Smollett) and with Mundungus (perhaps a Dr Sharp), both of whom had written disparaging travel books about Europe. The parson is as full of gaiety and irony as of tender feeling. In his travels from Calais to Amiens, Paris, the Bourbonnais, and nearly to Modane, with his servant La Fleur, he enjoys many encounters with all manner of men, from marquis to potboy, and, more especially, with pretty women, who range from ladies of wealth and elegance to chambermaids and shop girls.

The book was no doubt based on Sterne's two journeys abroad in 1762–4 and 1765. It was well received by the public, and in 1769, after Sterne's death, was continued by a ‘Eugenius’, traditionally assumed to be Sterne's old friend Hall-Stevenson. A Sentimental Journey is probably the first English novel to survive in the handwriting of its author.