Picaresque novel can simply refer to an episodic recounting of the adventures of an anti-hero on the road. Laurence Sterne's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" (1761-1767) and "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy" (1768) each have strong picaresque elements. Voltaire's French novel "Candide" (1759) contains elements of the picaresque. An interesting variation on the tradition of the picaresque is "The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan" (1824), a satirical view on early 19th-century Persia, written by a British diplomat, James Morier. Elements of the picaresque novel are found in Charles Dickens’s "The Pickwick Papers" (1836–37). Gogol occasionally used
Journal to Eliza 22 year old wife of an East India Company official and sister of Rawson Hart Boddam. Her husband had brought her over here to recuperate from illness. Given both parties were already married, the relationship was regarded as scandalous. The author adopts the pseudonym Parson Yorick, who previously appeared in his two best known novels, "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" and "A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy". In "Tristram Shandy" we are told that the parson is related to the famous, fictional jester Yorick whose skull is disinterred in Shakespeare’s "Hamlet:" "It has often come into