Oxford University Press, Amen House, London E.C.4 GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI KUALA LUMPUR CAPE TOWN IBADAN NAIROBI ACCRA A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH FRANCE AND ITALY BY LAURENCE STERNE WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY VIRGINIA WOOLF LONDON LAURENCE STERNE Born, Clonmel, Ireland Died, London. 24 November 1713 18 March 1768 A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy was to have filled four small volumes. Only the first two were completed, and published in, 1768. In The World's Classics the work was first published in 1928 and reprinted in 1935, 1942, 1948, 1951, 1957, and 1960. PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN INTRODUCTION Tristram Shandy, though it is Sterne's first novel, was written at a time when many have written their twentieth, that is, when he was forty-five years old. But it bears every sign of maturity. No young writer could have dared to take such liberties with grammar and syntax and sense and propriety and the long-standing tradition of how a novel should be written. It needed a strong dose of the assurance of middle age and its indifference to censure to run such risks of shocking the lettered by the unconventionality of one's style, and the respectable by the irregularity of one's morals. But the risk was run and the success was prodigious. All the great, all the fastidious were enchanted. Sterne became the idol of the town. Only in the babble of laughter and applause which greeted the book, the voice of the simple-minded public at large was to be heard protesting that it was a scandal coming from a clergyman and that the Archbishop of York ought to administer, to say the least of it, a scolding. The Archbishop, it seems, did nothing. But Sterne, however little he let it show on the surface, laid the criticism to heart. That |