London: J. Cundee, 1803

The majority of images based on or inspired by A sentimental journey testify to the novel’s considerable appeal to sensibility. Favourite subjects repeatedly appear in paintings; Angelica Kauffman’s ‘Maria – Moulines’ of 1777 was particularly influential for subsequent artists, and provided a template for book illustrations depicting this melancholy maiden. Even scenes in which some readers had detected a bawdy sub-text, such as when Yorick measures the heart-beat of an attractive young Parisian woman, are unequivocally presented as moments of touching simplicity by artists who stress the ‘sentimental’ reading of Sterne’s novel. William Craig’s illustration of ‘The Pulse’, published in an edition of A sentimental journey of 1803, shows Yorick and ‘a beautiful Grisset’ innocently engaged in a moment of intense sympathy, which touches the heart more than the body. The suspicions that surround the sentimental ‘man of feeling’ for some readers are supplanted here in a scene which shows the simple pleasures of Yorick’s proclaimed objective of travelling ‘for the heart’.
8000.d.481, plate opposite p. 84