Novel
The Vicar of Wakefield
Oliver Goldsmith · 1766
Synopsis
Dr Charles Primrose, a country clergyman, himself tells of his family's misfortunes. He lives comfortably with his wife Deborah and their children, George, Olivia and Sophia, when a merchant's bankruptcy takes his fortune from him, on the eve of George's marriage to Arabella Wilmot, which is broken off. The family moves to a humbler parish, on the lands of Squire Thornhill, a womaniser, and receives visits from a poor, eccentric friend, Mr Burchell.
Context
Written in 1761 and 1762, the novel owes its publication to Samuel Johnson, who sold the manuscript for sixty pounds to Francis Newbery; he kept it for nearly two years before having it published in 1766, in two volumes. It became one of the most widely read novels of the eighteenth-century British public. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe praised it, and Jane Austen and Charles Dickens both refer to it in their books. It was brought to the screen three times in the silent era, and Liza Lehmann made an opera from it in 1906.
Who it is for
A short novel, originally in two volumes, told in the first person; translated into French since the nineteenth century.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's masterpiece and counted among the best-known English novels of its century.
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