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

thumb|upright|[[Portrait of Laurence Sterne painted by Joshua Reynolds, 1760]]

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. In Tristram Shandy, Parson Yorick is a minor character with a melodramatically tragic story: he is rejected by the church for his sense of humour, and dies in poverty. The novel mourns him by presenting his epitaph ("Alas, poor YORICK!") and printing a page of solid black. Parson Yorick's unsuccessful clerical career mirrored Sterne's provincial obscurity as a clergyman before Tristram Shandy, and Sterne was often publicly identified with Yorick. Sterne published a collection of his own sermons under the title The Sermons of Mr. Yorick, with two volumes in 1760 and two more in 1766. Publishing A Sentimental Journey under Yorick's name primed readers to expect the character's lighthearted but fundamentally moral perspective. It also encouraged them to see Sterne himself as more like Yorick than the morally questionable character of Tristram Shandy, which would improve Sterne's shaky reputation.

Analysis

Sexual desire as pro-social

thumb|Yorick comforting "Poor Maria", painted by [[Angelica Kauffmann]]

Although A Sentimental Journey was considered less lewd than Sterne's previous novel, it is still characterized by frequent sexualized wordplay and events.

In the early twentieth century, a new biography of Sterne and a decline in social conservatism prompted a re-evaluation of the novel. It was particularly popular in the 1920s, when more than a dozen new editions were published. Virginia Woolf, a modernist writer, promoted a rejection of Victorian mores through her highly admiring introduction to a 1928 edition of the novel. Angelica Kauffmann, an artist primarily known for her history paintings, painted Poor Maria in 1777, and printed copies were sold throughout Europe.

Other popular scenes for illustration were Yorick and the grisette, the captive he imagines in the Bastille, made four paintings inspired by the novel: one version of The Captive in 1774, another Captive and a portrait of Maria in 1777, and a second portrait of Maria in 1781. It has often been attributed to Sterne's long-time friend John Hall-Stevenson, who is associated with the character of Eugenius, but that attribution is no longer considered plausible. Another continuation, also published in 1769, "consisted largely of sexually titillating anecdotes about nuns."

Footnotes

Bibliography

  • A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, Literature in Context: An Open Anthology of Literature. 2021. Web.
  • A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy at Project Gutenberg
  • A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy public domain audiobook at LibriVox
  • Editions of A Sentimental Journey held by the Laurence Sterne Trust
  • Images from an 1875 French edition extra-illustrated with watercolors in the margins by Louis Émile Benassit