In the eighteenth century, a major cultural shift occurred in Britain with the rise of sensibility, referred to rather famously by G. J. Barker-Benfield as ‘the cult of sensibility’. Due to this social shift, the word ‘sentiment’ itself underwent a transition: where it once meant moral judgement, during its evolution it would come to be understood as the connection or combination of head and heart, and eventually it became a melding of the two faculties. While not limited to the literature of the period, Janet Todd nevertheless believes that this ‘cult’ was largely defined by the fiction written between the 1740s and 1770s. With this in mind, the tracing of this cultural turn may be accomplished by examining the literature of the period. And, arguably, Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768) provides the zenith of sentimental fiction and supplies some of the richest material to plumb; as Jean Hagstrum claims, ‘In one sense [Sterne] can be said to have brought a great eighteenth-century movement, the cult of feeling, to its climax’. Morality permeates sentimental fiction to varying degrees, yet any assurance that there is an underlying moral message in Sterne's novel is complicated by the text itself. On the one hand, Sterne offers a theory of moral behaviour that privileges the powerful and elevating properties of sentiment.