The Vicar of Wakefield (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By Oliver Goldsmith and David Murray

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.  Few novels portray good men, and far fewer allow them to tell their own stories. In Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, a flawed but good man tells the story of his moral regeneration through a series of Job-like trials. With prudence its theme, the novel is ultimately a harrowing story of redemption through suffering. Well received on its first publication in 1766, it averaged two editions a year throughout the nineteenth century and collected praise from writers such as Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781411467408

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THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

INTRODUCTION BY DAVID A. MURRAY

Introduction and Suggested Reading © 2007 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2012 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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INTRODUCTION

FEW NOVELS PORTRAY GOOD MEN, AND FAR FEWER ALLOW THEM TO tell their own stories. In Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, a flawed but good man tells the story of his moral regeneration through a series of Job-like trials. The novel’s themes of prudence, justice, and the feasibility of trusting in Providence unify a narrative that includes picaresque stories, sermons, satire, political commentary, and even ballads, but is ultimately a harrowing story of redemption through suffering. Well received on its first publication in 1766, it became ever more popular after Goldsmith’s death in 1774, averaging two editions a year throughout the nineteenth century and collecting praise from writers such as Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, William Thackeray, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and William James.

The Vicar of Wakefield’s plot, full of unlikely twists and turns, mirrors Goldsmith’s own tumultuous life. He went from impoverished student, to failed doctor and tutor, struggling hack writer, and finally acclaimed poet, novelist, playwright, and friend of the most prominent names in London’s literary and artistic worlds. Goldsmith once bragged he would leave no genre of writing untouched, and his most highly regarded works—besides The Vicar of Wakefield—were a poem, The Deserted Village, and a play, She Stoops to Conquer, which is still revived. Yet throughout his career, Goldsmith gambled, drank, spent or lost money carelessly, and alienated his friends through quarrels. Samuel Johnson, who became his friend and co-founded a famous literary club with him, said about Goldsmith: No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had.

Biographer James Boswell relates the famous story of how Johnson was responsible for rushing the manuscript of The Vicar of Wakefield to a bookseller in 1762 when he discovered Goldsmith arrested and confined to his room by his landlady for unpaid rent. The sixty pounds Johnson received enabled Goldsmith to pay off his most pressing debts. The bookseller, however, must not have thought much of his purchase, for the novel only appeared in 1766, after Goldsmith had achieved some success with his long poem The Traveller (the first work published under his own name) and a collection of his earlier anonymous newspaper essays.

Like The Vicar of Wakefield’s hero, Dr. Charles Primrose, Goldsmith’s father was an Anglican country vicar. Goldsmith was born in 1728 in County Longford, Ireland, and grew up in the town of Lis soy. His memories of a happy childhood there echo in the nostalgic (and idealized) descriptions of village life in The Vicar of Wakefield and The Deserted Village. However, a childhood bout of smallpox severely marked his already unusual face, and for the rest of his life Goldsmith tried to compensate for his looks and awkward manners by playing the clown in company. He once said he brought nothing from Ireland but his brogue and his blunders.

Supported by an uncle, Goldsmith attended Trinity College in Dublin in 1744 as a sizar, or poor student who had to wear a special robe to indicate his inferior status. He made few friends, was persecuted by an instructor, and was generally unhappy. After he graduated and his father died in 1749, Goldsmith spent several years, like George Primrose, as a philosophic vagabond. He studied for holy orders, but was rejected—according to one story, for appearing before the examining bishop in scarlet breeches. He tried tutoring for a family. He attempted to emigrate to America, but missed his ship. When his uncle again came to his rescue, he studied medicine at Edinburgh University, continuing his medical studies in Leiden in the Netherlands—perhaps to escape family surveillance. We don’t know whether he ever received his medical degree, though he always insisted he did and made periodic attempts to establish a medical practice. At the end of his Leiden studies, he took an extended walking tour of Europe, supporting himself (again like George) by playing his flute in exchange for lodging.

Returning penniless to England, Goldsmith tried to eke out a living as an usher at a boys’ school and an apothecary. When his attempt to open a doctor’s practice near London failed, he found work as a hack writer for a magazine publisher. For the rest of his life—even after his successes—he supported himself by churning out reviews, prefaces, translations, compilations, and essays to order, in the sub-literary milieu known as Grub Street.

By the mid-eighteenth century the English reading public had rapidly expanded and provided a booming market for pious tracts and biographies, improbable romances, sentimental novels, exotic travel books, commentaries, and collections of all kinds. Dozens of small newspapers, magazines, journals, and reviews addressed to both high and low readers came and went. In chapter 19 of The Vicar of Wakefield, a butler pretending to be lord of the manor tells Dr. Primrose, ". . . I read all the politics that come out: the Daily, the Public, the Ledger, the Chronicle, the London Evening, the Whitehall Evening, the seventeen Magazines, and the two Reviews; and, though they hate each other, I love them all." Prominent politicians and nobles sometimes took part in these heated culture wars, since writers often took colorful pseudonyms and personas. These could be classically derived, like Eusebius, Junius, Harpax, and Colonus; descriptive, like The Ambulator, The Detector, and Johnson’s Rambler; or humorous, such as Squire Gawky, Catcall, and Jack Maggot.

In this noisy and contentious world Goldsmith made his way, often in debt to the booksellers and publishers on whom he relied for work. In chapter 20, Goldsmith mocks the literary hack-work he was so often forced to do when he has George Primrose’s cousin tell him about Grub Street: At present, I’ll show you forty very dull fellows about town that live by it in opulence; all honest, jog-trot men, who go on smoothly and dully, and write history and politics, and are praised—men, sir, who, had they been bred cobblers, would all their lives have only mended shoes, but never made them.

In the decades before Goldsmith arrived in London, efforts had been under way to rescue readers from what cultural guardians saw as the mindless sensationalism, titillation, and improbable adventures of popular fiction and quickie biographies of notorious figures. One commentator complained in a preface: The lowest and most contemptible vagrants, parish-girls, chambermaids, pickpockets, and highwaymen find historians to record their praises, and readers to wonder at their exploits. Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding both wanted to redeem the novel for serious purposes, and each tried different types of realism. Richardson was especially concerned with the moral and spiritual education of young women. His epistolary novels, pretending to be collections of letters to and from the characters, focused on detailed descriptions of the intense interior lives of his middle-class female protagonists. Fielding presented commoners as heroes (Tom Jones is a foundling) and followed the example of Miguel Cervantes in Don Quixote by using humor and satire to burlesque the conventions of romance and epic, and by attacking contemporary abuses of law and justice.

Johnson explained the methods of the new fiction in The Rambler in March 1750: The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found . . . Its province is to bring about natural events by easy means and to keep up curiosity without the help of wonder. Even the proper name of what Johnson called the comedy of romance was argued over. The term novel, which originally referred to French romances, didn’t become settled in its current usage until the end of the century.

Whether Goldsmith is more indebted to Fielding’s irony or Richardson’s sentiment has been the subject of a long critical debate. In his plays, Goldsmith was known for reviving a satiric laughing comedy against the sentimental comedies of the 1750s. In The Vicar of Wakefield, he succeeds in harmonizing the concerns of Fielding and Richardson with the serious moral intentions of spiritual biography. As a narrator, Primrose owes something to Fielding’s ironic Cervantic novels. More than one critic has seen in Primrose a descendant of Parson Adams, a similar character in Fielding’s first serious novel, Joseph Andrews. But as the suffering hero of the second half, he is more like Richardson’s heroines. In prison, he uses exactly the same phrase that Richardson’s heroine Pamela does when he says he has been stripped of every comfort.

Although Goldsmith does include picaresque passages, such as George’s adventures, his irony is gentler than Fielding’s. He makes his vicar complex and sympathetic, allows the reader to identify with him gradually, and takes him by easy means through his stages of suffering and moral education—at least until the very end, when events pile thick and fast.

Of course, by deciding on the Job story as his narrative framework, Goldsmith has to forego a completely naturalistic plot, though his readers found it a morally satisfying one. Most of the events turn out to be manipulated by two opposing characters. Goldsmith shows a little uneasiness about the coincidences and chance meetings that drive the plot, when he has Primrose explain: Nor can I go on without a reflection on those accidental meetings, which, though they happen everyday, seldom excite our surprise but upon some extraordinary occasion. To what a fortuitous concurrence do we not owe every pleasure and convenience of our lives! How many seeming accidents must unite before we can be clothed or fed!

Despite, or perhaps because of, his own improvidence, Goldsmith makes prudence a key theme of the novel. A long Christian tradition considered prudence a cardinal virtue; Saint Thomas Aquinas rated it even above charity. The word goes through important changes. Primrose is comically imprudent in the beginning. He alienates Mr. Wilmot, the father of his son’s future bride, by vehemently arguing his belief in strict monogamy—in effect, calling the remarried Wilmot an adulterer. When the first of Primrose’s misfortunes occurs—the loss of his fortune due to a corrupt merchant—a friend argues, Your own prudence will enforce the necessity of dissembling, at least till your son has the young lady’s fortune secure. But Primrose insists on announcing it beforehand anyway. When Wilmot predictably calls off the wedding, Primrose remarks, . . . One virtue he had in perfection, which was prudence, too often the only one that is left us at seventy-two. He does not mean this as a compliment.

But Primrose is self-serving when he rationalizes to his family, You cannot be ignorant, my children, that no prudence of ours could have prevented our late misfortune; but prudence may do much in disappointing its effects. The word here has two meanings: worldly wisdom in looking out for oneself and one’s family, and the deeper prudence that focuses on resignation to God’s will.

Closely related to the prudence theme is the motif of disguise. Mr. Burchell is in disguise throughout most of the novel. Deborah Primrose and her two daughters attempt a kind of disguise by dressing above their station, and a comic incident in which they are taken in by two dressed-up prostitutes pretending to be ladies of taste is a comment by Goldsmith on where such dressing could lead. A story-within-a-story featuring a butler pretending to be lord of the manor allows Goldsmith to express his Tory conviction that monarchy was the best defense of the poor against the predatory rich. Even Primrose himself is, in a sense, comically disguised from (blind to) himself and his own faults in the novel’s first half. His gullibility in being tricked by Ephraim Jenkinson, a disguised confidence-man who had earlier tricked his son Moses, is presaged by his boast before starting out for the fair to sell a horse: Though this was one of the first mercantile transactions of my life, yet I had no doubt about acquitting myself with reputation. Squire Thornhill, too, is disguised in a way, since his birth and breeding keep others from seeing his true nature.

Since this is a comedy, worldly cunning provides only short-term and illusory benefits. Squire Thornhill’s schemes are undone. Jenkinson, the arch-trickster who fools most of the book’s other characters at one time or another, ruefully confesses, Yet still the honest man went forward without suspicion, and grew rich, while I still continued tricksy and cunning, and was poor, without the consolation of being honest. Primrose’s lack of worldly prudence may make him quixotically comic in the beginning, but the Cervantic sting is taken out of the satire by Goldsmith’s orthodox Christian belief that, unlike Don Quixote’s, Primrose’s other world is real—is, in fact, the only real thing. When Primrose can say, from the depths of prison, illness, and loss near the novel’s end, Heaven be praised, there is no pride left me now . . . and later, From this moment I break from my heart all the ties that held it down to earth, even forgiving the enemy responsible for most of his suffering, he can finally see himself and others as they really are.

The climactic prison scene invites comparison with similar scenes in several of Fielding’s novels. Judicial and penal reform was a central concern of Fielding, who became a judge and was responsible for important improvements in penal practice and police work. But Primrose is more interested in improving the prisoners than the prisons. He even comments that an effectively reformed prison system would encourage "repentance, if guilty, or new motives to virtue, if innocent. [Italics added] In having Primrose organize the prisoners into a civil society and making the jail a place of penance and solitude, Goldsmith anticipates the direction that actual prison reform would take in the nineteenth century: Thus in less than a fortnight I had formed them into something social and humane, and had the pleasure of regarding myself as a legislator, who had brought men from their native ferocity into friendship and obedience."

In the first half, Primrose’s boast that his family is the little republic to which I gave laws is belied and contradicted by his comic ineffectiveness. Primrose fails as a traditional patriarch. (He clearly influenced Jane Austen’s portrayal of the detached and ineffective Mr. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice.) But in prison he really does become a lawgiver, as he is resurrected as a new kind of authority figure, who wields a fatherly authority based on an interior identification of others with his sufferings.

The Vicar of Wakefield is a triumph of a humane, balanced sentimentalism that would prove increasingly popular throughout the nineteenth century. Judging by Samuel Johnson’s critical standard that great works are those that have pleased many and pleased long, The Vicar of Wakefield has a long life ahead of it still.

David A. Murray teaches writing, literature, and humanities at Maryville University in St. Louis. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis.

CONTENTS

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CHAPTER I - The Description of the Family of Wakefield, in which a kindred ...

CHAPTER II - Family Misfortunes. The Loss of Fortune only serves to increase ...

CHAPTER III - A migration. The fortunate Circumstances of our Lives are ...

CHAPTER IV - A Proof that even the humblest Fortune may grant Happiness, which ...

CHAPTER V - A new and great Acquaintance introduced. What we place most Hopes ...

CHAPTER VI - The Happiness of a Country Fireside.

CHAPTER VII - A Town Wit described. The dullest Fellows may learn to be comical ...

CHAPTER VIII - An Amour, which promises little good Fortune, yet may be ...

CHAPTER IX - Two Ladies of great Distinction introduced. Superior Finery ever ...

CHAPTER X - The Family endeavour to cope with their Betters. The Miseries of ...

CHAPTER XI - The Family still resolve to hold up their Heads.

CHAPTER XII - Fortune seems resolved to humble the Family of Wakefield. ...

CHAPTER XIII - Mr. Burchell is found to be an Enemy, for he has the Confidence ...

CHAPTER XIV - Fresh Mortifications, or a Demonstration that seeming Calamities ...

CHAPTER XV - All Mr. Burchell’s Villainy at once detected. The Folly of being overwise.

CHAPTER XVI - The Family use Art, which is opposed with still greater.

CHAPTER XVII - Scarcely any Virtue found to resist the Power of long and ...

CHAPTER XVIII - The Pursuit of a Father to reclaim a Lost Child to Virtue.

CHAPTER XIX - The Description of a Person discontented with the present ...

CHAPTER XX - The History of a philosophic Vagabond, pursuing Novelty, but ...

CHAPTER XXI - The short Continuance of Friendship amongst the Vicious, which is ...

CHAPTER XXII - Offences are easily pardoned, where there is Love at bottom.

CHAPTER XXIII - None but the Guilty can be long and completely miserable.

CHAPTER XXIV - Fresh Calamities.

CHAPTER XXV - No Situation, however wretched it seems, but has some sort of ...

CHAPTER XXVI - A Reformation in the Gaol: to make Laws complete, they should ...

CHAPTER XXVII - The same Subject continued.

CHAPTER XXVIII - Happiness and Misery rather the Result of Prudence than of ...

CHAPTER XXIX - The equal Dealings of Providence demonstrated with Regard to the ...

CHAPTER XXX - Happier Prospects begin to appear. Let us be inflexible, and ...

CHAPTER XXXI - Former Benevolence now repaid with unexpected Interest.

CHAPTER XXXII - The Conclusion.

ENDNOTES

SUGGESTED READING

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THERE ARE AN HUNDRED FAULTS IN THIS THING, AND AN HUNDRED things might be said to prove them beauties. But it is needless. A book may be amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity. The hero of this piece unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth; he is a priest, an husbandman, and the father of a family. He is drawn as ready to teach, and ready to obey; as simple in affluence, and majestic in adversity. In this age of opulence and refinement whom can such a character please? Such as are fond of high life, will turn with disdain from the simplicity of his country fire-side. Such as mistake ribaldry for humour, will find no wit in his harmless conversation; and such as have been taught to deride religion, will laugh at one whose chief stores of comfort are drawn from futurity.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

CHAPTER I

The Description of the Family of Wakefield,¹ in which a kindred Likeness prevails, as well of Minds as of Persons.

I WAS EVER OF OPINION, THAT THE HONEST MAN WHO MARRIED AND brought up a large family did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population. From this motive, I had scarce taken orders a year before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my wife, as she did her wedding-gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well. To do her justice, she was a good-natured, notable² woman; and as for breeding, there were few country ladies who could show more. She could read any English book without much spelling; but for pickling, preserving, and cookery, none could excel her. She prided herself also upon being an excellent contriver in housekeeping, though I could never find that we grew richer with all her contrivances.

However, we loved each other tenderly, and our fondness increased as we grew old. There was, in fact, nothing that could make us angry with the world or each other. We had an elegant house, situated in a fine country, and a good neighbourhood. The year was spent in a moral³ or rural amusement, in visiting our rich neighbours, and relieving such as were poor. We had no revolutions⁴ to fear, nor fatigues to undergo; all our adventures were by the fireside, and all our migrations from the blue bed to the brown.

As we lived near the road, we often had the traveller or stranger visit us to taste