54. A | Sentimental Journey | Through | France And Italy. | By | Mr. Yorick. | Vol. I. | London: | Printed for T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, | in the Strand. MDCCLXVIII.
The real journey immortalized in the story was made in October, 1765; in December, 1767, two volumes were completed, and on February 27, the work was published at five shillings for the two volumes. On the eighteenth of March, Sterne died.
Yorick, in Tristram Shandy, was represented as an Englishman, descended from the Yorick of Shakespeare, "a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy." Sterne also used the pseudonym in his Sermons by Mr. Yorick, published in 1760, so that the authorship of this book was probably never in doubt. "The lively, witty, sensitive and heedless parson," was, as Sir Walter Scott says, "the well-known personification of Sterne himself."
Fitzgerald tells us in his biography of Sterne, that it was the author's first thought to have the volume a stately quarto with handsome margins, costing a half-guinea, but that he finally decided to use the Shandy size, which had become a favorite with the public. The book, which is without ornament, except for an engraving on copper of a coat of arms (Sterne's book-plate), in the second volume, is a good specimen of the best typography of the period. Large paper copies also were issued. The first volume begins with a long list of "Subscribers," the names starred being down for "Imperial Paper."
Thomas Becket lived to be ninety-three years old, long enough, as Charles Knight remarks, to see many revolutions in literary taste; long enough, in fact, to see Sterne, his most successful author, go out of fashion. He was an assistant to Andrew Millar, before he became De Hondt's partner. It was he who published the famous anonymous book, The Pursuits of Literature by Mathias, which had the distinction of running into fourteen editions.
Duodecimo.
Collation: Two volumes. Volume I, xx, 203 pp. Volume II, 2 ll., 208 pp.