Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) was a highly influential novelist, remembered for The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-67), which broke new ground by setting aside conventional narrative fiction and presenting the reader with a memoir of what he called ‘progressive digressions’, in which the narrator’s own feelings and impulses played a key role, and chronological sequence was overthrown. Sterne, who was born in Ireland, was by profession a Church of England clergyman. Ordained in 1737, he was appointed prebendary at York in 1741 and curate of Coxwold, North Yorkshire, in 1760. His church background is reflected in The Sermons of Mr Yorick (1760-69) and Yorick is the narrator of his final novel, A sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, which drew on Sterne’s own travels. However, one of his most famous publications was a simple letter, written to Ignatius Sancho, in which Sterne roundly condemned slavery and significantly empowered the abolition movement. After his death in 1768, Sterne’s grave was violated by body snatchers, but his remains were recovered after they were identified during a Cambridge University anatomy lecture.
In the opening lines of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, the narrator explains the perverse whim that led him to leave his home shores behind.
Laurence Sterne published A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy in 1768, only a few weeks before his death. Sterne had recently toured the Continent himself, determined to be less fractious and curmudgeonly than fellow writer and tourist Tobias Smollett. The story begins with the narrator, the Revd Mr Yorick, feeling challenged to back up his rosy view of life on the near Continent by actually paying it a visit.