A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

Sterne's Parson Yorick announces early that he is writing a different kind of travel book: not the antiquities, customs duties, or scenic set pieces that filled every prior account of the Grand Tour, but the small transactions of feeling between strangers, a monk asking for alms, a dead donkey's owner, a glove seller's shop. A Sentimental Journey treats sensibility itself, the capacity to be moved and to notice being moved, as the real subject worth touring for, and Yorick's attention keeps snagging on beggars, servants, and shopkeepers that a Grand Tourist of Sterne's day was trained to look straight through.

Yorick's sentiment is never quite disinterested, and Sterne lets the reader see the self-congratulation underneath the tenderness: he weeps over a caged starling that cannot get out, gives money to a monk he had just resolved to snub, and each act of feeling doubles as a small performance staged as much for Yorick's own satisfaction as for its object. Sterne is satirizing the cult of sensibility even while indulging it, which is why the book reads as sincere and knowing at once, never quite letting either reading win.

The travelogue's episodic looseness, Calais, then barely past it before the book runs out, mirrors Tristram Shandy's refusal to move in a straight line, except here the digressions are erotic rather than intellectual: near misses, hands that linger too long, doors left conveniently ajar. Sterne turns travel writing's promise of new territory into a running joke about how little actual geography a sufficiently distractible narrator needs to cover.

The title promises France and Italy, but Sterne died in March 1768, weeks after publication, having written only the French leg. Two further volumes were rumored but never appeared. The book's incompleteness turns out to suit its method: a text this committed to interruption, to being derailed mid-anecdote by the next stranger who catches Yorick's attention, ends up literalizing its own digressiveness by simply running out of author before it runs out of road.