In 1762, a few years before Laurence Sterne began to think about the ‘new work of four volumes’ in July 1766 (L 284) which was to become the two-volume Sentimental Journey within the following one-and-a-half years, Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his fourvolume Émile ou de l ‘éducation. Sterne, in Paris that year, failed to meet its author but bought and read the work in its first edition (LY 136, 163). In the fifth book of this treatise-cum-novel of education, he would have found an essay on the uses and abuses of travelling and travel writing. Here Rousseau categorizes various types of travelling and dismisses some of them: ‘To travel for travelling's sake is to wander aimlessly, to be a vagabond […]. I would instil into any young man embarking upon a journey a lively interest in educating himself.’ He also compares and contrasts the travelling habits of the various European nations, in particular the French and the English: ‘The English gentry and nobility travel, the French not at all; the French populace travels, the English not. […] The English have the prejudice of arrogance, the French that of vanity.’ Enumerating such cultural stereotypes and stereotypical differences, he hastens to add, however, that with the increasing numbers of travellers and the improved travel facilities in recent times the original characters of different peoples vanish from day to day and become for that reason ever more difficult to grasp. As races blend and peoples intermingle, those national differences which formerly struck the observer at first sight gradually disappear.

Sterne's Sentimental Journey shares many of the concerns of Rousseau's essay and stages them in the form of a fictional travelogue. For Yorick, ‘The Sentimental Traveller’ (SJ 11), as for Rousseau, the European countries are rapidly becoming less foreign and their peoples less strange or alien to each other. As he writes in his preface, commenting upon the present vogue of Continental and Grand Touring: ‘It is an age so full of light, that there is scarce a country or corner of Europe whose beams are not crossed and interchanged with each other’ (SJ 12).