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.
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The Vicar of Wakefield’s plot full of unlikely twists and turns mirrors
Oliver Goldsmith’s own tumultuous life. Born in 1728 in County Longford, Ireland, to an Anglican country vicar, Goldsmith succumbed to smallpox that severely marked his already unusual face. He 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, and then studied medicine at Edinburgh University. When his landlady had him arrested for not paying rent, Samuel Johnson rushed the manuscript of
The Vicar of Wakefield to a bookseller in 1762, securing Goldsmith’s status as acclaimed writer.
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