A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick

A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Laurence Sterne is one of the most innovative and influential works of eighteenth-century travel literature, blending the conventions of the Grand Tour with Sterne’s distinctive wit, pathos, and satiric irony. Published in 1768 under the persona “Mr. Yorick,” the book represents Sterne’s late-career turn from the sprawling digressions of *Tristram Shandy* to a more compact form, yet it continues his experiments in voice, narrative form, and the fusion of humor with moral sentiment. The “sentimental journey” does not dwell on monuments, landscapes, or political observations, but rather on fleeting encounters, everyday details, and emotional impressions—whether Yorick giving alms to beggars, exchanging snuffboxes, conversing with peasants, or reflecting on the kindness and follies of strangers. Sterne reimagines travel as an inward and affective experience, where benevolence, sensibility, and self-knowledge emerge through the play of chance meetings, minor inconveniences, and comic misunderstandings.

At once parody and performance, the *Journey* is both a response to and a satire of other contemporary travel narratives, particularly Tobias Smollett’s *Travels through France and Italy* with its spleen and irritability. Sterne’s Yorick moves in the opposite spirit—seeking moments of sympathy, intimacy, and joy, while also exposing the equivocations of desire, vanity, and concupiscence. The result is a work that oscillates between tenderness and comic irony, dramatizing the paradoxes of eighteenth-century “sensibility.” Sterne’s contemporaries hailed the book for its refinement of feeling, its pathos, and its moral undertones, and it quickly became a model for the “sentimental” mode in literature and culture. At the same time, modern critics emphasize its doubleness: a text that teaches readers to value benevolence and civility, while also inviting them to laugh at Yorick’s foibles and recognize the comic muddle of human motives. A Sentimental Journey remains a touchstone for understanding both the culture of sensibility and Sterne’s enduring comic vision.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1967.