A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

Overview

About a hundred and twenty pages, Laurence Sterne’s last work, published in 1768 weeks before his death. Parson Yorick, a character from Tristram Shandy, travels through France without ever reaching Italy, recording not sights but encounters, with a monk in Calais, a lady whose hand he holds, a grisette, a caged starling that cannot get out, and a peasant family at supper.

The book is a comedy of feeling that parodies the grand tour and Smollett’s ill-tempered travels, and ends mid-sentence in a shared inn bedroom.

What happens

Yorick’s journey through France. Parson Yorick, a character carried over from Tristram Shandy, travels through France without ever actually reaching Italy, his intended but ultimately unrealized destination.

The monk in Calais. Yorick’s first significant encounter involves a monk in Calais, establishing the book’s characteristic method of recording personal interaction rather than sightseeing itinerary.

The lady whose hand he holds. Yorick encounters a lady whose hand he holds, a moment of cultivated sentiment typical of the book’s sustained interest in feeling over conventional travel documentation.

The grisette and the caged starling. Yorick’s encounters continue with a grisette and a caged starling that cannot get out, each brief episode developing the book’s recurring concern with confinement, freedom and genuine feeling.

The peasant family at supper. Yorick shares a meal with a peasant family at supper, extending his encounters across social classes and demonstrating sentiment’s capacity to connect genuinely different kinds of people.

The unfinished ending. The book ends mid-sentence in a shared inn bedroom, Sterne’s own death interrupting composition and leaving his final work permanently, poignantly incomplete.

How to read it

Read Yorick’s journey through France without ever actually reaching Italy as inverting travel writing’s conventional expectation of comprehensive geographical coverage, prioritizing intensity of individual encounter over any completed itinerary.

Pay close attention to how recording encounters rather than sights stages sentiment and feeling as travel’s genuine object, cultivated sensibility replacing landscape and monument as the primary content worth recording for readers.

Notice how the book’s explicit parody of the grand tour and Smollett’s own ill-tempered travels positions Sterne’s approach as deliberate corrective, substituting cultivated feeling for aristocratic cataloguing or irritable complaint.

Consider how ending mid-sentence in a shared inn bedroom, Sterne’s own death interrupting composition, gives the book’s already fragmentary form an additional layer of genuine biographical poignancy inseparable from the author’s actual unfinished life.

Read this book alongside Boswell’s own London Journal to compare two very different eighteenth-century approaches to recording personal experience, one a sustained fictional travel narrative built from encounter, the other an unguarded private diary of daily urban life.

Questions it raises

• Does Yorick’s journey through France without reaching Italy successfully convey travel’s genuine emotional value over mere geographical completion, or does this deliberate incompleteness feel like an evasion of the more substantial content a completed journey might have offered?
• How does recording encounters rather than sights shape your understanding of what travel writing can actually accomplish? Does this sentimental approach reveal something conventional travel documentation misses, or does it risk becoming self-indulgent focus on the traveler’s own feelings?
• What does the book’s explicit parody of Smollett’s ill-tempered travels accomplish as literary strategy? Does positioning Sterne’s approach against this rival travel writing convention strengthen the book’s own distinctive achievement?
• How should a reader weigh the book’s unfinished ending, mid-sentence in a shared inn bedroom, against its considerable earlier accumulated content? Does this incompleteness feel like genuine loss, or does it somehow fit the book’s already digressive, fragmentary sensibility?
• Given that Yorick is a character carried over from Tristram Shandy, how does this intertextual connection shape a reader’s approach to this later, shorter work? Does familiarity with the earlier novel enrich understanding of Yorick’s particular sensibility here?
• What does this book’s continued influence on the genre of sentimental travel writing suggest about the durability of Sterne’s specific innovation? Does prioritizing feeling and encounter over comprehensive documentation remain a viable and valuable approach to travel narrative today?