[...]... harmony The Vicar of the novel’s title, Dr Primrose, lives with his family in a state of modest comfort in the Edenic village of Wakefield Benefiting from the income provided by the investment of a ‘sufficient’ private fortune, the Vicar is free to devote the profits of his living to the orphans and widows of the neighbourhood clergy He keeps no curate, preferring to attend to all the necessary duties of the. .. curacy in the gift of Sir William Thornhill that the Vicar subsequently takes on the setting for most the novel’s action—itself to remain nameless? Some readers may not even notice that the man who is ‘supposed’ to be relating the autobiographical ‘tale’ of the designated Vicar of Wakefield’ is, oddly, for the better part of the narrative technically not the Vicar of Wakefield at all The levels of narrative... out of the way of his bride-to-be Arabella Wilmot—and so removing him from the picture altogether Introduction xvii The tremendous events that greet the hopeful return of Primrose and Olivia to the family home initiate the final series of catastrophes in the novel, the mounting severity of which draw Primrose and his family further and further into a slough of misery and—for most readers—a vision of. .. would have rendered the work less successful in the hands of other contemporary practitioners in the form of the sentimental novel Frances Sheridan, whose Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph appeared in 1761, would have savoured the destitution of the characters Similarly Henry Brooke, whose immensely popular The Fool of Quality (1766–72) first appeared in the same year as The Vicar of Wakefield, tended to... that they will need always to be vigilant; they insist that their readers be aware of the fragile seam of irony that divides the perceived appearance of things from the fictional ‘reality’ of the novelistic world The Vicar of Wakefield may not fail completely to alert readers to its possible parodic or satiric agendas Yet Goldsmith’s particular blend of irony and sincerity in the novel has posed no end of. .. experience Readers—many of them women—were throughout the century increasingly drawn to works of fiction that exhibited the moving spectacle of ‘virtue in distress’; one’s own ability to empathize with the misfortunes of fictional others was looked upon as a measure of the strength of one’s own ‘heart’ and of the vigour of those moral principles that in turn dictate the behaviour of our lives Novels such... suiting his subject The opening lines of Chapter V provide an ideal example of such scenes The Vicar is here describing the situation of his new living, and the manner in which the members of his family accommodated themselves to their fortunes: At a small distance from the house my predecessors had made a seat, overshadowed by an hedge of hawthorn and honeysuckle Here, when the weather was fine, and... xxvi Introduction the activities are temperate; this is a landscape characterized by the ideals of the beautiful and picturesque, not the vertiginous ecstasy of the sublime, or the fantastic primitivism of any Rousseau-esque ‘natural world’ The Vicar of Wakefield also owed much of its continued popularity—though it earned the respect of few critics—to its perceived value as a work of religious consolation... sublime consolation to the bosom of wretchedness to think, that if the opulent are blessed with a continual round of temporal felicity, they shall at least experience some moments of so superior a rapture in the immediate presence of their God, as will fully compensate for the seeming severity of their former situations.’14 The spectacular series of denouements that closes the novel, in other words, was thought... an author of genuine merit For a brief period, he enjoyed the intimate company of some of the period’s finest writers, artists, and political thinkers The further successes of The Vicar of Wakefield and of his 1770 poem The Deserted Village—along with his two comedies for the stage, The Good-Natured Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1773)— were no sooner to set him on a path to some degree of financial . of Parliament. Their evening debate on the subject of politics and the best form of social order is interrupted by the unexpected return of the gentleman who turns out to be the true master of. become a part of our everyday lives. Goldsmith’s language is used to illustrate the meanings of hundreds of words in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1992); The Vicar of Wakefield. state of modest comfort in the Edenic village of Wakefield. Benefiting from the income provided by the investment of a ‘sufficient’ private fortune, the Vicar is free to devote the profits of his