The eighteenth-century sentimentalist was expected to be a skilled interpreter of nonverbal communication. Sensitive to the nuances of facial expression or physical gesture, the ‘man of feeling’ was an expert reader of physiognomy, a translator of signs who could turn a look into a sentence, the slightest movement into an assertion, a question, or an invitation:

At especially sentimental moments Laurence Sterne's narrators translate a character's eloquent gestures for us, whether it is Yorick exchanging silent courtesies with the old French officer in the box at the Opéra Comique (‘the French officer might as well have said it all aloud’, p. 171), or the concupiscible Widow Wadman waiting for Uncle Toby to reveal where he received his war wound:

This kind of sentimental translation has been well analysed by John Mullan, who notes how sentimental narrative ‘has to translate, has to make “plain words” mediate the natural articulacy of feeling’, and in so doing establishes a sociable relationship between narrator and reader (‘those who are to benefit by the habit and art of his translation’).

My concern in this essay is to look behind the difficulties of sentimental translation to what I take to be an underlying problem—one that remains crucial for eighteenth-century notions of Sensibility.