London: T. Becket and P.A. de Hondt, 1768

A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy incorporates the unusual typographic features and imaginative use of spatial layout that would have been familiar to Tristram Shandy’s readers. Sterne’s narrator is Parson Yorick, the character whose ‘death’ is announced in volume 1 of Tristram Shandy. In this record of his continental travels, Yorick includes an illustration of his coat of arms. The starling sitting at its head refers to what would become one of the novel’s most famous episodes, in which Yorick is deeply moved by coming across a caged starling, whose plaintive cry ‘I can’t get out’ summons up the unimaginable horror of captivity. This story resonated with many readers; political prisoners in Robespierre’s France echoed the starling’s refrain in their ‘sentimental’ imitations of Sterne’s text, whilst for Jane Austen it voices Maria Bertram’s entrapment in Mansfield Park. The starling episode also effectively captures the newly-emerging taste for the sympathetic powers of sensibility that Sterne’s readers, and especially his continental admirers, avidly promoted. Countless ‘sentimental journeys’ appeared in Britain and the continent, with Sterne’s novel upheld as a pre-eminent exemplar of the ‘pathetic manner’.
Oates.266, p.38