A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy Writings of Mr. Sterne". In the 1880s, American writer Elizabeth Robins Pennell and her artist husband Joseph Pennell undertook a journey following Sterne's route. Their travels by tandem bicycle were turned into the book "Our sentimental journey through France and Italy" (1888). Viktor Shklovsky considered Sterne one of his most important precursors as a writer, and his own "A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922" was indebted to both Sterne's own "Sentimental Journey" and "Tristram Shandy". A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy is a novel by Laurence Sterne, written and first published in 1768,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman crushed by Dr. Slop's forceps. Thirdly, another of his father's theories was that a person's name exerted enormous influence over that person's nature and fortunes, with the worst possible name being Tristram. In view of the previous accidents, Tristram's father decreed that the boy would receive an especially auspicious name, Trismegistus. Susannah mangled the name in conveying it to the curate, and the child was christened Tristram. According to his father's theory, his name, being a conflation of "Trismegistus" (after the esoteric mystic Hermes Trismegistus) and "Tristan" (whose connotation bore the influence through folk etymology of Latin "tristis", "sorrowful"), doomed