A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
 Title page from Vol. I of the first edition | |
| Author | Laurence Sterne |
|---|---|
| Country | Great Britain |
| Language | English |
| Genre | sentimental novel, travel literature |
| Publisher | T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt |
Publication date | 1768 |
| Media type | Print, 12mo |
| Pages | 283, in two volumes |
| OCLC | 972051212 |
| 823.6 | |
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) is a novel by Laurence Sterne. Its main character, the Reverend Mr. Yorick, is from Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), a novel that Sterne wrote before A Sentimental Journey. Mr. Yorick is Sterne's alter ego, which means the character is based on Sterne himself. Sterne planned to write four volumes, but he died in 1768 with only the first two volumes published. Because of this, even though the novel is called A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, Mr. Yorick never goes to Italy.
The book is a picaresque novel, a kind of novel that doesn't usually have an overall "plot", and just follows the main character from one loosely connected event to the next. The main character in this kind of novel does not usually experience character development (they do not learn or change because of what happens to them in the story). Instead, the author uses them to say something about the events that happen to the character. Often, the author uses satire to do this. This can make it hard to guess whether the author is serious or not. In A Sentimental Journey, the characters have very big feelings all the time. People who study the novel are not sure if these feelings are supposed to be "real", or if Yorick is an unreliable narrator (a main character you can't really believe) making fun of the eighteenth-century idea of "sensibility".
One of the main themes in the book is that sympathy and sexual desire are connected. When it was first published, readers said they liked it better than Tristram Shandy because it made them feel more feelings and it didn't talk about sex as much. After Sterne died, A Sentimental Journey was his most popular book. But Victorian readers thought it was still too sexy, and it became less popular. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, more people became interested in Sterne, and they started reading the book again, but Tristram Shandy is now more popular than A Sentimental Journey.
Plot summary
[change | change source]Yorick starts in Calais, where he meets a monk who ask for money for his monastery. Yorick doesn't give him anything, and later feels bad about this. He and the monk become friends and give each other their snuff-boxes (little boxes for holding snuff, a kind of tobacco). He sees a woman, Madame L—, and thinks she is very interesting. He will see her many more times in the story. Yorick buys a chaise, a kind of carriage, to continue his journey. He then adds a preface to the novel, describing different kinds of travellers.
After some time in Calais, the next town he visits is Montreuil, where he hires a servant, a young man named La Fleur, to go with him on his journey. Along the way, they pass a man who is sad because his donkey has died. Yorick feels sorry for 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 told that the police asked for his passport at his hotel. England is at war with France, so he might be locked up in the Bastille for not having a passport. He sees a starling in a cage, which seems to be saying "I can't get out" over and over. He is unable to free the bird and, thinking a lot about how it is locked up, becomes very sad imagining how bad it would be to be locked in the Bastille.
Yorick travels to Versailles to get a passport, and visits the Count de B****. When Yorick sees the count reading Hamlet, he points with his finger at Yorick's name in the book, saying that his own name is Yorick. The count thinks Yorick is the king's jester and quickly gets him a passport. Yorick tries to correct the count, but the count is not corrected. Yorick is happy to have gotten a passport so quickly.
Yorick goes back to Paris and stays a few more days before leaving to go to Italy. He visits Maria—a character from Sterne's previous novel, Tristram Shandy—in Moulins. Maria's mother tells Yorick that Maria has been very, very sad since her husband died. Yorick tries to make Maria feel better, and then leaves.
Yorick passes Lyon and spends the night in a roadside inn. The novel ends in the middle of a scene.