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Yorick at the grave of Father Lorenzo, Calais.
Jacque and Fussell
Bastin and G. Nichols
1841
Engraving on wood
9.3 cm high by 7.9 cm wide, vignetted
Fortieth illustration for A Sentimental Journey (1841 edition), page 29.
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Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
I feel a damp upon my spirits, as I am going to add, that in my last return through Calais, upon enquiring after Father Lorenzo, I heard he had been dead near three months, and was buried, not in his convent, but, according to his desire, in a little cemetery belonging to it, about two leagues off: I had a strong desire to see where they had laid him — when, upon pulling out his little horn box, as I sat by his grave, and plucking up a nettle or two at the head of it, which had no business to grow there, they all struck together so forcibly upon my affections, that I burst into a flood of tears: but I am as weak as a woman; and I beg the world not to smile, but to pity me. ["The Snuff Box. Calais," pp. 28-29]
The illustration embodies the essential feeling of the Sentimental Movement, namely that tenderness and indulging in a gentle melancholy often associated with ione's being cut off from the past and the loved ones no longer among the living. In the Sterne novella, Yorick's expending such emotion upon a mere acquaintance may seem excessive to modern readers, but the incident in which the English clergyman exchanged his expensive snuff-box for the old monk's inferior horn model is a turning point in Mr. Yorick's sentimental journey. Ironically, Sterne never lived to write about Yorick's adventures in Italy or his returning to England through Calais.
Pre-Victorian illustrators such as Archer (1794) and Thomas Stothard (1792) clearly felt that the sentimental interaction between the Franciscan friar, Father Lorenzo, and Mr. Yorick, should be a subject for illustration, the standard scene bearing such titles as The Snuff-box and Yorick and the Monk Exchanging Snuff Boxes. The scene involving the exchange of the English traveller's expensive tortoise-shell snuff-box for the Franciscan's humble horn container marks the turning point in Yorick's determining to become a better traveller — less callous, more sensitive, kinder, and more sentimental.
Left: Stothard's original interpretation of thew scene in which Yorick and the Monk exchange snuff-boxes as tokens of amity, compensating for Yorick's brusque behaviour earlier: Yorick, the Lady, and the Monk (1792). Centre: Jacque and Fussell's small-scale wood-engraving of Yorick's making the celebrated exchange, Yorick, The Monk and the Lady (1841). Right: J ohannot's depiction of the meeting of the Monk, the Lady, and Yorick, misentitled Sterne and The Monk. — The Snuff-Box (1857).
Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Illustrated with one hundred engravings on wood, by Bastin and G. Nichols, from original designs by Jacque and Fussell. London: Joseph Thomas, 1841.
Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. With 100 illustrations by Tony Johannot. London: Willoughby, 1857.
Turner, Katherine. "Notes." Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2010.
Last modified 30 September 2018