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 to the morality of dancing schools. Much of the singularity of "Tristram Shandy's" characters is drawn from Burton. Burton indulges himself in a Utopian sketch of a perfect government in his introductory address to the reader, and this forms the basis of the notions of "Tristram Shandy" on the subject. And Sterne parodies Burton's use of weighty quotations. The first four chapters of "Tristram Shandy" are founded on some passages in Burton. In Chapter 3, Volume 5, Sterne parodies the genre of "consolatio", mixing and reworking passages from three "widely separated sections" of Burton's "Anatomy", including a parody of Burton's