The quintessential novel of sentiment, A Sentimental Journey masquerades as the fragmentary travel journal of Parson Yorick, a whimsical and amorous Englishman abroad. Accompanied through Paris and the provinces by his loyal French valet, Yorick enjoys a variety of sentimental and often comic encounters with a lively range of French characters. The novel is also punctuated by passages of self-conscious reflection on questions of personal and national identity, slavery and freedom, poverty and inequality.

Appendices include material on sensibility in philosophy and literature and on eighteenth-century travel writing, as well as excerpts from Sterne's other writings and examples of the novel's critical reception, imitation, and illustration.