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Composite: Various kinds of Travellers
C. Jacque and Fussell.
J. Bastin and G. Nicholls.
1841
Engraving on wood
15 cm high by x 8.9 cm wide, vignetted
Eleventh illustration for A Sentimental Journey (1841), facing page 12 in "The Preface: In the Désobligeante."
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.].
Simple Travellers.
Thus the whole circle of travellers may be reduced to the following Heads:
Idle Travellers,
Inquisitive Travellers,
Lying Travellers,
Proud Travellers,
Vain Travellers,
Splenetic Travellers.
Then follow the Travellers of Necessity,
The delinquent and felonious Traveller,
The unfortunate and innocent Traveller,
The Simple Traveller,
And last of all (if you please) The Sentimental Traveller (meaning thereby myself) who have travell'd, and of which I am now sitting down to give an account — as much out of Necessity, and the besoin de Voyager, as any one in the class. ["Preface. In the Désobligeante," pp. 12-13]
The illustration in this case constitutes an extension as well as a visual elaboration of the text since the illustrators have converted the mere letter-press into captions for their eleven images, which wend their way down the page in a serpentine manner. The two largest vignettes shed some light upon how the Victorians read Sterne's book as a travelogue. In the third vignette, upper left, the inquisitive traveller attempts to decipher the inscription on a ruined pediment. In the fourth vignette, upper right, the story-telling traveller (exemplary of "Lying Travellers") entertains a peasant family seated on stools, supported by two duodecimo volumes at his back — a visual allusion to the first edition of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. By Mr. Yorick, published in London by T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt as two volumes in 1768. The passage demonstrates Yorick's scientific and rationalist manner of organizing reality by categorization and the creation of various types. Although he puts himself in a separate, fourteenth category, one suspects that Yorick has been these other types upon occasion. He is most severe in his assessment of the travel-guide writing and reading traveller whom he dubs "Smelfungus" in his effort to satirize his fellow novelist Tobias Smollett, whom he encountered in the summer of 1763 at Montpellier, France.
Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Illustrated with one hundred engravings on wood, by J. Bastin and G. Nicholls, from original designs by C. Jacque and Fussell. London: Joseph Thomas, 1841.
Last modified 11 September 2018