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A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

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A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
Title page from Vol. I of the 1768 first edition.
AuthorLaurence Sterne
LanguageEnglish
Genresentimental novel, travel literature
PublisherT. Becket and P. A. De Hondt
Publication date
1768
Publication placeGreat Britain
Media typePrint, 12mo
Pages283, in two volumes
823.6
The Monk of Calais (1780) by Angelica Kauffman, depicting Yorick exchanging snuffboxes with Father Lorenzo: "having a horn snuff box in his hand, he presented it open to me.—You shall taste mine—said I, pulling out my box and putting it into his hand."

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy is a novel by Laurence Sterne, written and first published in 1768, as Sterne was facing death. In 1765, Sterne travelled through France and Italy as far south as Naples, and after returning, he determined to describe his travels from a sentimental point of view. The narrator is the Reverend Mr. Yorick, a character from his bestselling previous novel Tristram Shandy who also serves as Sterne's barely disguised alter ego. The book recounts his various adventures, usually of the amorous type, in a series of self-contained episodes. The book is less eccentric and more elegant in style than Tristram Shandy and was better received by contemporary critics.

Plot summary

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The Beautiful Grisette, 1853, by William Powell Frith, showing a scene from the book. Parson Yorick—depicted as Sterne—and the gloveseller, Grisette, are in her Paris shop.

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. He buys a chaise to continue his journey. The next town he visits is Montreuil, where he hires a servant to accompany him on his journey, a young man named La Fleur.

During his stay in Paris, 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. Yorick travels to Versailles, where he visits the Count de B**** to acquire a passport. 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 continues his voyage to Italy after staying in Paris for a few more days. Along the way he decides to visit 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 on the paratextual note "End of Vol. II."

Style

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The language of A Sentimental Journey is playful, with an interest in puns, especially sexual double entendres.[1] The final line of the novel illustrates the linguistic and metatextual playfulness of the book, and its allusive approach to sexuality.[2] Yorick is at a roadside inn, sharing a room with a lady and her fille de chambre (chambermaid). When Yorick can't sleep and accidentally breaks his promise to remain silent during the night, an altercation with the lady ensues. The final line is "when I stretch'd out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre's" (without a period at the end), which is followed by the paratextual note "End of Vol. II."[3] The sentence is open to interpretation. You can say the last word is omitted, or that he stretched out his hand, and caught hers (this would be grammatically correct). Another interpretation is to incorporate "End of Vol. II" into the sentence, so that he grabs the chambermaid's 'End'.

A Sentimental Journey is picaresque in its meandering series of disconnected adventures on the road.[4] It is also quixotic in its hero's over-attachment to a misguided ideal.[4] Structurally, 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.[1]

In the 1760s, travel writing was a popular literary genre, more respected than the novel.[4] Travel writing was also undergoing a popularizing shift, as older travel narratives like Joseph Addison's Remarks on several parts of Italy, &c., in the years 1701, 1702, 1703 were regarded as overly focused on classical scholarship, which was uninteresting and inaccessible to middle-class audiences.[4] 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.[4] 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.[4] Many stylistic aspects of A Sentimental Journey take these trends to their logical extreme.[4] 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.[2] 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.[5]

Composition and publication

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Before A Sentimental Journey, Sterne had been publishing the novel Tristram Shandy in installments 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.[6] 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 Shandy's ongoing installments.[4] 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.[6]

Sterne travelled to Paris in January 1762, before the Seven Years' War ended.[7] Sterne travelled to France and Italy several times in the 1760s, which inspired a parodic account of the Grand Tour in volume 7 of Tristram Shandy in 1765.[4] 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.[4]

Sterne wrote to his daughter about the new project in February of 1767. By June 1767, he was working seriously on it, with particular efforts in November and December.[4] During the process of composition, Sterne frequently exchanged passionate letters with a married woman, Elizabeth Draper. These letters and his novel both express intense, frustrated desire.[1] He signed all his letters to her as "Yorick".[4] (These letters would later be published as Letters to Eliza, also sometimes called Journal to Eliza, in 1773.)[4] In January 1768, the writing was complete for the first two volumes, and Sterne traveled to London to monitor the printing process.[2] Volumes 1 and 2 of A Sentimental Journey were published on February 27, 1768.[4] The novel was planned as a four-volume work, but only the first two were published due to Sterne's death in 1768.[1]

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.[1]

Reception

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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.[1]

In addition to the professional commentary of reviewers, the eighteenth-century response to the novel can also be found in an annotated first edition of A Sentimental Journey.[8] This unknown reader wrote their assessment at the bottom of the first page of the novel: "Stern was certainly a most elastic genious, by his sudden trancisions from one extreme to the other, not allways to his advantage, from starts or sally’s most sublime and elevated down to the most gross and beastly unpardonably as if he feard to be to highly admired."[8] They expressed their objection to the story of the dead ass by writing in the margin that it "does no honour to the Author it is forced & unnatural".[8] In other places where they disapproved Sterne's text, they initially glued several pages to render them unreadable, then pried them open and blacked out the objectionable paragraphs line by line. In this manner, they censor or expunge the chapters "‘The Rose. Paris" and "The Passport. Versailles."[8]

From Sterne's death through the nineteenth century, A Sentimental Journey was considered Sterne's best and most beloved work, and it was more widely reprinted than Tristram Shandy.[6] Eighteenth-century readers preferred it to Tristram Shandy, partly because it was less obviously sexual.[1] Its positive reputation was particularly promoted by the volume of extracts, The Beauties of Sterne, which was compiled by William Holland in 1782 and included many passages praised for their emotional power. The Beauties of Sterne went through twelve editions in ten years.[6]

By the mid-nineteenth century, the novel's reception grew more mixed, as Victorian readers were less tolerant of its 'indecencies'.[1] William Makepeace Thackeray influentially criticized its "corruption," though some of his contemporaries resisted this assessment.[1] Leslie Stephen also objected to Sterne's double entendres.[1] In the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf promoted a rejection of Victorian mores through her highly admiring introduction to a 1928 edition of the novel.[1] As others followed suit in embracing Sterne's proto-modernist experimentation with form, A Sentimental Journey began to be overshadowed for the first time by Tristram Shandy, which attracted scholarly attention for its more daring experiments in literary form.[1] Today, A Sentimental Journey is studied for its role in the broader phenomenon of eighteenth century sensibility.[1]

Analysis

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Tristram Shandy's account of Yorick's death (1761)

Fictionalized autobiography

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When Sterne first became a literary celebrity through the success of Tristram Shandy, he frequently used the name Tristram Shandy at social events, promoting an identification between himself and his novel's narrator.[4] Over time, his career as a clergyman prompted him to be identified instead with a secondary character from Tristram Shandy, Parson Yorick.[4] In Tristram Shandy, Parson Yorick is a melodramatically tragic figure: he is rejected by the church for his sense of humour, and dies of a broken heart. The novel 'mourns' him by presenting his epitaph ("Alas, poor YORICK!") and printing a page of solid black.[4] Parson Yorick's unsuccessful clerical career mirrored Sterne's provincial obscurity as a clergyman before Tristram Shandy.[4]

Sterne reinforced his public identification with Yorick when he published a collection of his own sermons under the title The Sermons of Mr. Yorick.[4] Two volumes of these sermons appeared in 1760, and two more in 1766.[4] The title page of A Sentimental Journey also identifies the narrative as "by Mr. Yorick."[3] Publishing A Sentimental Journey under Yorick's name primed readers to expect the character's lighthearted but fundamentally moral perspective.[2] It also encouraged them to see Sterne himself as more like Yorick than the more-questionable character of Tristram Shandy.[2]

Yorick comforting "Poor Maria", from the 1780 illustrated edition of A Sentimental Journey

Sexual desire as pro-social

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Although A Sentimental Journey was considered less lewd than Sterne's previous novel, it is still characterized by frequent sexualized wordplay and events.[1] The novel does not treat sexual desire as incompatible with spiritual faith or moral goodness; instead, it suggests that desire is one way of encouraging people toward the pro-social qualities of friendliness and generosity.[1][2] Several of Sterne's sermons present the idea that desire is granted to people by God, and that properly-directed desire promotes social harmony.[2] One of these sermons, "The Levite and his Concubine," is directly reworked in A Sentimental Journey.[2]

The interconnectedness of sympathy, sexual desire, and spirituality is particularly seen in Yorick's meeting with the peasant Maria.[2] Yorick seeks out the young and attractive Maria while she is alone in the countryside, mourning her lost husband; he finds her in tears, and is moved to tears himself. He uses his handkerchief to dry her eyes, and then his own, and then hers, and then his. In this moment, he "felt such undescribable emotions within" that he writes, "I am positive I have a soul," rejecting the materialist view that sees all human behaviour as "combinations of matter and motion."[3] This scene is often seen as sexually suggestive, particularly in Yorick's 'undescribable emotions'.[2] The scene is also sometimes seen as hyperbolic, calling Yorick's leap of logic into question.[2] However, in the context of eighteenth-century philosophic discourses, both tears and sexual desire can be understood as proof of an immaterial, immortal soul, because emotion is immaterial.[2]

A satirical print by Thomas Rowlandson, skeptical of the disinterested moral virtue of self-styled "men of feeling"

Potential for satire

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From Sterne's day to the present, readers have debated how seriously to take the novel's expressions of sentimental emotion. Eighteenth-century skeptics of the sentimental movement questioned the sincerity and disinteredness of those who promoted "feeling" as a new moral code. They particularly criticized the shallowness of moments where Yorick expresses emotion but takes no action.[6] Several twentieth-century scholars have argued that Yorick's feelings and religious expressions are intentionally excessive, and that he ought to be read as an unreliable narrator.[9] In treating the novel as a satirical one, they emphasize the many humorous scenes.[9] Thomas Keymer argues in The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne that the novel is best understood as offering the reader both options, serious or satirical, depending on their tastes.[6]

Attitude toward France

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Sterne's observations about French society were markedly less xenophobic than many English travel writers at the time. The war between France and Britain often prompted patriotic and nationalistic discourses about Britain's superiority. It was also conventional for the travel writer to comment on their homesickness for their home country as the best country, which Yorick entirely avoids doing.[4][1]

One indication that Sterne's attitude to France was more generous than that of his audience lies in the annotations of an unknown eighteenth-century reader. This reader added comments in the margins of their copy of the first edition, expressing their conviction that France was naturally plagued with poverty due to its absolutist and Catholic government. For example, when Yorick is in Paris this reader's annotations contrast Paris and London, "one a place of total gaiety & dissipation the other of industry & business".[8]

Legacy

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c. 1850 painting of "Poor Maria" by William Powell Frith

Illustrations

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A Sentimental Journey inspired a large number of illustrations, in the form of paintings, prints for sale, and decorated merchandise. Images of "Poor Maria," for example, were particularly popular.[1][10] Angelica Kauffmann painted Poor Maria in 1777,[11] and printed copies were sold throughout Europe.[12][10] The porcelain company Wedgwood created cameos of a similar "Poor Maria" image (and its companion shepherd portrait, the "Bourbonnais Shepherd") to decorate a wide range of products.[1][10] This best-selling motif appeared on personal adornments like brooches and shoe buckles, as well as household goods like teaware and vases.[1][10] In Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon's portrait painted by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun in 1789, she is depicted wearing a "Poor Maria" Wedgwood brooch at her waist.[10] The design was used on jasperware bud vases as late as the 1960s.[13]

Other popular scenes for illustration were Yorick and the grisette, and the captive.[1] Joseph Wright of Derby made four paintings based on A Sentimental Journey: one version of "The Captive" in 1774, another "The Captive" and a portrait of Maria in 1771, and a second portrait of Maria in 1781.[1]

Books written in response

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Beginning in 1769, several "continuations" of A Sentimental Journey were published, many of which claimed to be by Sterne.[1] One continuation has often been attributed to Sterne's long-time friend John Hall-Stevenson, who is identified with the character Eugenius in the novel. It is titled Yorick's Sentimental Journey Continued: To Which Is Prefixed Some Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. Sterne (1769), and was sometimes bound with Sterne's real volumes to produce an apparently complete work.[14][15] Another continuation, also published in 1769, "consisted largely of sexually titillating anecdotes about nuns."[1]

Other responses to A Sentimental Journey presented the perspectives of various side characters, such as the novel The Letters of Maria; to which is Added, an Account of her Death (1790).[16] This novel was published anonymously and initial reviewers assumed it was written by a man, but an 1814 catalogue from the Minerva Press identifies its author as "Miss Street".[16] Reviews criticized Street's writing as unable to live up to Sterne's, but her novel inspired its own response publication, a poem by M. Maria Cannon titled "Maria and St. Flos."[16] Another novel using a character from A Sentimental Journey is Jane Timbury's The Story of Le Fevre, From the Works of Laurence Sterne, which follows Yorick's servant.[16] This novel was also poorly reviewed for failing to live up to Sterne.[16]

In 1789, A Sentimental Journey was parodied by the anonymous novel A Man of Failing, which also targeted Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling.[6]

Jane Harvey published A Sentimental Tour through Newcastle in 1794, which borrows Sterne's prose style for a meandering tour of her small hometown, interspersed with philosophical reflections on the value of female education.[16]

In the 1880s, American writer Elizabeth Robins Pennell and her artist husband Joseph Pennell undertook a journey following Sterne's route. Their travels by tandem bicycle were turned into the book Our sentimental journey through France and Italy (1888).

Viktor Shklovsky considered Sterne one of his most important precursors as a writer, and his own A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922 was indebted to both Sterne's own Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy.[17]


Footnotes

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  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w "A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy". Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved 3 January 2025.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Jack, Ian; Parnell, Tim (10 July 2003). "Introduction". A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings. OUP Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-160620-5.
  3. ^ a b c Sterne, Laurence (1768). "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy". Literature in Context. Archived from the original on 10 September 2024. Retrieved 4 January 2025.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u Turner, Katherine (25 August 2010). "Introduction". A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Broadview Press. ISBN 978-1-77048-701-7.
  5. ^ Head, Dominic, ed. (2006). "Travels through France and Italy". The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 1124.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g Keymer, Thomas (20 August 2009). "A Sentimental Journey and the failure of feeling". The Cambridge Companion to Laurence Sterne. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-82756-0.
  7. ^ Sterne, Laurence (2008). Jack, Ian; Parnell, Tim (eds.). A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 236. ISBN 978-0-19-953718-1.
  8. ^ a b c d e Reed, Daniel (3 December 2024). "'The Figure of the Old with the Pathetic Tenderness of the New': An Early Reading of Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768)". Humanities. 13 (6): 166. doi:10.3390/h13060166. ISSN 2076-0787.
  9. ^ a b Owens, William James (1994). The evolution of Sterne's "A Sentimental Journey" (Ph.D. thesis). University of Virginia. ProQuest 304134411.
  10. ^ a b c d e "Poor Maria and the Bourbonnais Shepherd – when literature came into fashion · V&A". Victoria and Albert Museum. Retrieved 3 January 2025.
  11. ^ "The sentimental side of Angelica Kauffman". Apollo Magazine. 1 March 2024. Retrieved 3 January 2025.
  12. ^ "Maria". The British Museum. Archived from the original on 26 September 2024. Retrieved 3 January 2025.
  13. ^ "Wedgwood Jasperware Blue Bud Vase". The Magpie. Retrieved 3 January 2025.
  14. ^ Sterne, Laurence (2008). Jack, Ian; Parnell, Tim (eds.). A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 233. ISBN 978-0-19-953718-1.
  15. ^ "Sterne and Sterneana : Yorick's sentimental journey, continued to which is prefixed, some account of the life and writings of Mr. Sterne Vol. 3". Cambridge Digital Library. Retrieved 3 January 2025.
  16. ^ a b c d e f Williams, Helen (14 April 2023). "Laurence Sterne and Women's Writing". In Cope, Kevin L.; Cahill, Samara Anne (eds.). 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 28). Bucknell University Press. doi:10.2307/jj.18427177.5. ISBN 978-1-68448-465-2.
  17. ^ Richard Sheldon, intro. to Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922 (Dalkey Archive Press, 2004: ISBN 1564783545), p. xvi.
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