Since the publication in 1974 of R. F. Brissenden's Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade, there has been considerable interest in sentimental philosophy and authors. Critics have analysed Sterne and Richardson in terms of their sentimentalism, and recent years have seen numerous full-length studies of the genre. Janet Todd has located the rise of sentimentalism in a European cultural tradition, while John Mullan's study of Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century deploys a critical approach that could be described as ‘New Biographicalism’. In tracing the efforts of David Hume, Samuel Richardson and Laurence Sterne to ‘live out models of social being’, Mullan posits a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between the lives and narratives of sentimental writers. The philosophical origins of sentimentalism are located in John Locke, David Hume and Francis Hutcheson, while the physiological roots are also stressed, with an analysis of the work of physicians such as Richard Blackmore and George Cheyne. This emphasis on the scientific basis of sentimentalism has been developed by Ann Van Sant, who has interpreted fictional representations of the body in the context of the rhetoric of physiology, psychology and the epistemology of touch. In this study, however, the focus will not be on the sentimental philosophy or physiology, which have been admirably covered in the aforementioned works, but rather on the relationship between the sentimental individual and a world which is portrayed as devoid of, or opposed to, sentimental values.