London: J. Wallis, [181-?]

Whilst Tristram Shandy has inspired numerous comic images, many artists have similarly detected the humorous qualities belonging to A sentimental journey in their illustrations of the novel. The late eighteenth-century caricaturist Richard Newton, better known for his subversive political satires, produced a series of book illustrations of A sentimental journey in the 1790s for the radical publisher William Holland; these were later reprinted in the early 1800s by John Wallis as a series of hand-coloured plates, a copy of which is held in the Oates Collection. Thomas Rowlandson modelled his illustrations of A sentimental journey on Newton’s plates; a range of scenes appear in different copies of Thomas Tegg’s edition of the novel, and in his anthology of touching extracts titled Beauties of Sterne, both published in 1809. An adjacent strand of comic illustrations of A sentimental journey, meanwhile, includes near-pornographic images that project the erotic subtext that some readers and imitators detected in the novel.
Oates.425, plate IX