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
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman even approached his publisher F.A. Brockhaus offering to translate it into German (an offer which Brockhaus rejected). Samuel Johnson in 1776 commented, "Nothing odd will do long. "Tristram Shandy" did not last." Schopenhauer privately rebutted Samuel Johnson, saying: "The man Sterne is worth 1,000 Pedants and commonplace-fellows like Dr.J." The young Karl Marx was a devotee of "Tristram Shandy", and wrote a still-unpublished short humorous novel, "Scorpion and Felix", that was obviously influenced by Sterne's work. Goethe praised Sterne in "Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years", which in turn influenced Nietzsche. "Tristram Shandy" has also been seen by formalists and other literary