The Vicar of Wakefield—Oliver Goldsmith’s only novel—was first published on 27 March 1766. A second edition, in which Goldsmith made a great many stylistic revisions to the text, appeared on 31 May of that same year. Three further editions of the novel were to be published in the author’s own lifetime, the last of which was dated 2 April 1774—just two days before Goldsmith’s death.
The manner in which the manuscript of Goldsmith’s novel first found its way into the hands of booksellers has become the stuff of literary legend. The most famous account first appeared in James Boswell’s monumental Life of Johnson in 1791. Boswell reports Johnson as having recollected,
I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was drest, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it, and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return, and having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.1
Boswell was not alone in considering the anecdote worth preserving. Both Hester Lynch (Thrale) Piozzi and Sir John Hawkins had included similar accounts in their own memoirs relating to Johnson (which appeared in 1786 and 1787, respectively), and still further details regarding the origin and history of Goldsmith’s novel were to be forthcoming.2 The inevitable contradictions between these several versions would extend to comprehend a wide range of disagreements regarding the actual date on which the transaction took place, the identity of the bookseller(s) involved, the precise amount of money that changed hands, and speculation as to where and when the work had been written or, indeed, if the novel had even been completed at the time of the sale. In whatever form one first encounters the story, however, its most striking feature remains the simple revelation that The Vicar of Wakefield is clearly among those works that finally reached the public only as a result of immediate financial need. Like Johnson’s own Rasselas (1759)—said to have been written ‘in the evenings of one week’, and under the awful pressure of his mother’s grave illness—The Vicar of Wakefield, for all its polite reputation as a genial and light-hearted work, was in actual fact the product of financial exigency.3 In a manner similar to so many noteworthy novels of the period (among them not only the works of professional authors such as Eliza Haywood and Clara Reeve, but also the fictions of Frances Sheridan, Elizabeth Inchbald, and the later novels of Fanny Burney), Goldsmith’s volume was written under conditions of considerable economic, emotional, and even physical stress. As an actual text, The Vicar of Wakefield was made available to a wider audience only as an impromptu means of last resort.
Goldsmith had already, even at this relatively early stage of his career in London, gained some reputation as one of the most prolific of the so-called ‘Grub Street hacks’—that growing breed of writers-for-hire whose work was to fill the pages of an ever-increasing number of newspapers, journals, and magazines throughout the period. Since 1757 he had been turning out enormous amounts of material—translations, book reviews, short tales, and essays—writing at first for Ralph Griffiths’s Monthly Review, and later for (among others) the Critical Review, the British Magazine, and the Public Ledger. He also found the time to see his own short-lived periodical—The Bee (1759)—through the press, and to publish his extended Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759).
Given the rather chaotic circumstances under which the manuscript of Goldsmith’s novel was sold in the autumn of 1762 and the difficult conditions under which it was written, it is all the more intriguing that his tale betrays in its telling what can only be described as a narrative pace of hasty leisure. In terms of its fictional stride, The Vicar of Wakefield falls somewhere between the ordered wanderings of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and the more casual pilgrimage of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752). The Vicar of Wakefield remains a peculiarly odd generic hybrid that participates in modes as diverse as the picaresque novel, the French philosophical conte, the periodical essay, domestic conduct books, and the traditions of classical fabulists such as Aesop, while at the same time invoking the formal structures and arguments of everything from sermons and political pamphlets to the lyrics of the pleasure gardens and the popular ballads of the city streets. Assimilating such a wide variety of narrative voices, the novel moves at an expository speed that is at once both recognizable and unique; it is a notably short work possessed, if not of epic tropes and epic rhetoric, then at least of a certain degree of epic depth and resonance. An intimate, family story of fewer than two hundred pages that confines itself to what one chapter heading describes as ‘The happiness of a country fire-side’ (p. 27), Goldsmith’s work has, nevertheless, routinely if paradoxically been regarded as little less than an iconic depiction of national identity. As the Victorian reader George Lillie Craik observed in 1845, The Vicar of Wakefield stands for many English readers as the ‘first genuine novel of domestic life’, and would continue for some considerable time to be looked upon as an achievement which—unlike the work of, say, Fielding or Sterne—furnished a balanced and historically specific ‘representation of the common national mind and manners’ and ‘the broad general course of our English thinking and living’.4 The character of an entire cultural point of view, in other words, was thought for generations to have been distilled in its pages to a perfect quintessence. Within the structural framework of what many would argue remains, essentially, little more than an extended fairy tale, The Vicar of Wakefield reaches towards—and at its most successful moments comes very near to articulating—the defining qualities normally to be found only in the most venerated of secular scriptures. Goldsmith’s otherwise modest novel was a little book that had managed somehow to capture some very big ideas indeed.
At the time of the novel’s first publication, Goldsmith himself, of course, had been far more anxious that his work prove an immediate financial success. If the text of the novel had in fact, as scholars now generally agree, been set down on paper sometime towards the middle of 1762, then Goldsmith would also have been looking to take full advantage of the vogue established by the recent popularity of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. The earliest volumes of Sterne’s masterpiece had begun appearing to great acclaim in December 1759. Although he raged against Sterne both as a churchman and as a writer, Goldsmith would remain deeply envious of the tremendous financial success enjoyed by Tristram Shandy. His primary reason for writing an extended narrative fiction of his own in a vaguely similar manner was, in the straightforward words of one modern biographer, ‘in the first place monetary’; Hester Piozzi shrewdly observed that Goldsmith ‘fretted over the novel’ because ‘when done, [it was] to be his whole fortune’.5 And although he clearly wrote the novel as a marketable property with the anxious dispatch of a working journalist, he had obviously been revolving certain elements of its plot and characterization over in his mind for many years. As matters so turned out, Goldsmith’s publishers—John Newbery and his nephew, Francis—held on to the manuscript for a further three and a half years before seeing it into print. The reasons behind this delay remain unclear. Johnson himself suspected that the booksellers simply left the manuscript unpublished until Goldsmith had established a more financially viable reputation as a poet. Newbery, he noted practically, ‘did not publish it till after the Traveller had appeared’. ‘Then to be sure,’ he added of the manuscript, ‘it was actually worth some money’.6
Or so one would have thought. Despite Goldsmith’s growing fame (in addition to the success of The Traveller (1764), referred to by Johnson above, the author had scored a series of hits with his ‘Chinese Letters’ of 1760–1 and a Life of Richard Nash in 1762, and had begun to make his mark as a writer of popular histories), The Vicar of Wakefield was surprisingly slow to find its audience. They may politely have admitted the broad and ‘homely’ appeal of his narrative, certainly, but none of Goldsmith’s contemporaries could have foreseen that the work would in time assume its enviable position as one of the most genuinely beloved of our so-called English ‘classics’. Though the novel had by 1774 passed through five authorized London editions, its sales were good yet by no means sensational; ‘it seems doubtful’, one biographer has speculated, ‘if more than two thousand copies were sold in Goldsmith’s lifetime’.7 Only in the decades following its author’s death, when it was championed by the likes of Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Schlegel, and Goethe, was The Vicar of Wakefield to demonstrate its peculiarly catholic appeal. William Hazlitt’s 1821 judgement that ‘if Goldsmith had never written anything but the two or three first chapters of The Vicar of Wakefield … they would have stamped him a genius’ speaks for an entire generation of readers steeped in the conventions and expectations of European Romanticism, and singles out precisely those sorts of Rousseau-esque moments in the narrative they admired most. The editor William Spalding was to comment later in the century that Goldsmith’s novel had ‘been read, and liked, oftener than any other novel in any other European language’.8 Influential readers throughout the Regency and early Victorian period—George Craik, Leigh Hunt, George Eliot, William Thackeray, and Thomas De Quincey among them—would repeatedly (if unvaryingly) echo such praise. Goldsmith’s twentieth-century editor Arthur Friedman calculated that in the roughly twenty-five years after its author’s death, twenty-three more London editions of the novel were published, and a further twenty-one editions in English were published elsewhere.9 Throughout the nineteenth century—the early and middle decades of which saw the novel at the height of its popularity—Goldsmith’s volume averaged two new editions each year in English alone. Figures for French and German translations were comparable. The Vicar of Wakefield is to this day one of only a small handful of English novels that can honestly lay a claim never to have passed out of print. It has even, to some extent, 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 is specifically cited in that work over seventy-five times. Readers are referred to the novel for illustrations of the usage of possibly unfamiliar expressions (e.g. ‘blarney’, ‘monogamist’, ‘mouthed’, ‘muck’, ‘nightfall’, ‘overcivility’), as well as for those more specifically redolent of the eighteenth century (‘elegist’, ‘entre nous’, ‘masquerade’, ‘necklace’, ‘palpitate’), and even for some of the most common words in the language (‘may’, ‘mind’, ‘nicely’).
The story that Goldsmith decided to tell in his novel strikes one even in its barest outlines deliberately to have been singled out for its potential mythic resonance. Even readers unaware of the circumstances under which the novel was actually written, as we have seen, might well be forgiven for supposing that the author had made a shrewd and calculated decision to write in a particular vein—and with an eye towards a very precise audience—purely in the interest of driving up sales. Narrated throughout by its central character, the Revd Dr Charles Primrose, the novel opens on a note of prelapsarian 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 parish himself. He claims to have made it his business to become well acquainted with every man within his care. He exhorts the married members of his flock to temperance, and urges those who are yet bachelors to marry and establish households of their own. He confesses to derive a secret pleasure from having earned Wakefield its reputation as a town most noteworthy for three things: ‘a parson wanting pride, young men wanting wives, and ale-houses wanting customers’. The even tenor of the Primrose household is troubled only occasionally by the Vicar’s own obsession with a particularly obscure matter of church doctrine. One of his ‘favourite topics’, he tells us, is matrimony, further explaining that he values himself on being a ‘strict monogamist’ (p. 12); he has published several tracts arguing that it is illegal for any ordained minister of the Church of England to remarry after the death of his wife. The Vicar himself has for many years been happily married to the faithful if still independently minded Deborah Primrose. The couple’s eldest son, George—the first of their six children—has just completed his studies at Oxford, and is about to be married to Miss Arabella Wilmot, the daughter of a neighbouring clergyman.
Within the space of only a few pages, however, the pastoral placidity of the Vicar’s world is shattered. A series of misfortunes—precipitated by his own financial misjudgement in having placed the entire source of his private income in the hands of a local merchant, and further fuelled by his tactless adherence to his cherished doctrinal ‘principles’ in the face of a violent disagreement with the neighbour who was to be his son’s father-in-law—soon compels the family to leave Wakefield altogether. The Vicar accepts a poorly paid curacy some seventy miles away. His prospects for marriage ruined, young George Primrose sets out alone to establish himself in a professional career, and hopefully to redeem the family’s fortunes. As the rest of the family travels to the Vicar’s new living, a fortuitous accident finds them introduced and indebted to Mr Burchell, a well-spoken and still youthful gentleman who, despite his handsome manners and appearance, seems currently to be possessed of little if any fortune himself. Happily familiar with the neighbourhood to which the Vicar is journeying, Burchell warns Primrose against the notorious reputation of the local Squire, a young man who, he confides, has been allowed to assume his current position though still dependent on his reclusive uncle, Sir William Thornhill. Young Squire Thornhill’s libertine behaviour is all the more surprising because his uncle, who has withdrawn from the public eye, is known even to Primrose by reputation as an individual once widely praised throughout the kingdom for his highly developed sense of sympathy and benevolence.
No sooner has the family begun to establish itself with some degree of comfort in their newly reduced circumstances, but they receive a visit from the Squire himself. They find Thornhill to be quite unlike the haughty and disreputable figure Burchell’s description had led them to expect, and decide that the latter was speaking merely and for some private motive out of envy or dislike. They look upon the Squire as a charming and quite dashing young man, and are flattered that he thinks nothing of condescending to pass much time with his new tenants. Primrose’s two marriageable daughters—Olivia and Sophia—are overawed by the fact that the Squire should even think of spending his evenings in their humble company, and are soon caught up in their mother’s ambitious vision of the possibilities of unlikely matches and wildly prosperous futures for either or both her girls. The Squire’s further introduction of two apparently sophisticated London ladies to the company, and their proposal that the Primrose girls accompany them back to town to experience the smartening effect of a proper social season, is greeted ecstatically in the Primrose household, although the Vicar professes still to have some reservations regarding such a scheme. Primrose is content to offer a generally rosy picture of their new way of life, however, and narrates with a wry amusement the several, harmless follies of his various family members. He wryly notes their attempts to ape the behaviour of their social betters, while at the same time looking down their noses on—and taking every possible opportunity themselves to impress—those near neighbours whose more suitable company the presence of the Squire and his retinue has instantly rendered beneath them.
Although throughout the first half of the novel the family thus appears to be adjusting to their situation with a minimum amount of dissatisfaction, the catastrophic second part of Goldsmith’s tale reveals every one of the decisions taken up to that point to have been a disastrous mistake. The Vicar in particular, it turns out, has thoroughly misjudged the characters of the family’s supposed friends and neighbours, to say nothing of their insidious and truly dangerous enemies. As a result, he has jeopardized their happiness, and remains generally ineffectual as they are each successively brought to the brink of tragedy. In a passage that was subsequently to become one of the best-known episodes in the novel, his young and pedantically affected son Moses is sent to the local market to sell one of the family’s horses, only to be duped into swapping the animal for a gross of worthless green spectacles; the Vicar’s attempts to remedy the situation by heading off to the market himself to sell their remaining horse find him similarly hoodwinked by the same man. Deborah, Olivia, and Sophia are so blinded by status and so hungry for social recognition that they ignore the warnings of Mr Burchell regarding the Squire’s motives; indeed, they suspect Burchell himself of spreading false reports and slandering their reputation throughout the neighbourhood. When Olivia is glimpsed being driven away in a carriage in the company of two men, Primrose immediately suspects Burchell to be behind the abduction, and sets off in pursuit.
The narrative of his wanderings initiates a further catalogue of disasters. Primrose has no sooner begun to make progress in tracing his daughter’s path, than he falls ill with a fever, and finds himself confined to his bed in a roadside alehouse for nearly three weeks. His return journey is interrupted by an encounter with a group of strolling players, in whose company he is fooled into being entertained at the home of a neighbourhood man, whom he takes to be—by his manners and bearing—nothing less than the local Member 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 the house, and who reveals to those assembled around his table that their supposed ‘host’ was no better than his own butler, who ‘in his master’s absence, had a mind to cut a figure, and be for a while the gentleman himself’ (p. 89). Primrose is further nonplussed to discover that this very same gentleman is the uncle to that same Miss Arabella Wilmot who was to have been married to his son George. He is even more shocked to find George himself—whom he thought to be making a respectable name for himself elsewhere in the world—revealed to be a member of the company of players.
The Vicar’s own narrative is at this point interrupted by his son’s account of his chequered fortunes as a ‘philosophical vagabond’ in and around the metropolis. Both father and son are surprised to learn that Arabella Wilmot has since their own departure from Wakefield become engaged to marry Squire Thornhill; Primrose is yet again taken aback when he stumbles upon Olivia herself on his way home, and discovers that it was the Squire and not Burchell who had run off with her and seduced her under the pretence of a false marriage. Realizing that she was to be treated as a common mistress, however, Olivia escaped and was also making her way home as best she could when accidentally discovered by her father. Only now does the Vicar realize that the Squire’s recent and seemingly generous purchase of an army commission for his son George has merely served as an efficient means of getting him out of the country—and out of the way of his bride-to-be Arabella Wilmot—and so removing him from the picture altogether.
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 human behaviour that grotesquely resembles a universe not operating on any principles of benevolence, generosity, or fellow feeling, but motivated rather by a degree of selfish hypocrisy and a rank fetishism of power that would in all likelihood have driven even the likes of Thomas Hobbes to despair. The final ten chapters of The Vicar of Wakefield constitute the dark wonderland of Goldsmith’s novel. We move increasingly in these pages within a night world of pain, penury, chains, and prisons—a world apparently abandoned by justice, and lit only sporadically by the fires of destruction.
The obvious narrative precedent for the headlong spectacle in these chapters of a righteous man confronted against his own will with the problem of evil and injustice in the world—a precedent for the presentation of the hero as ‘victim’, even—is the ancient legend that achieved its finest expression in the biblical Book of Job. It concerns a pious man of great virtue and integrity who is suddenly and without warning deprived of all the rewards of his labour and forced to undergo unspeakable trials. Despite the fact that he is subjected to great suffering and further loss, Job refuses, against the pressing advice of his friends and family, to renounce his God, but remains steadfast in his allegiance, and blesses his Lord even as before. His wife is among the first who fails to comprehend the depth of his enduring loyalty. ‘Dost thou still retain thine integrity?’, she asks scornfully, before advising him succinctly: ‘curse God, and die’ (Job 2: 9). Thanks in large part to the New Testament reminder in James 5: 11, to possess ‘the patience of Job’ has passed into our language as a proverbial expression applied to one who can with equanimity endure that which for any other individual would prove unendurable. The Job of the Old Testament, however, is far from passively ‘patient’ in the book that bears his name. He is angry, often furious, and decidedly im patient with a cosmos in which the wicked seem not only to go free but to flourish, and with a deity that remains unresponsive to his human demand for justice.
Goldsmith’s Vicar recalls his biblical prototype in several important respects, but perhaps the strongest characteristic that links Dr Primrose to Job is the corresponding degree to which both tend to regard their own ‘goodness’—their own practice of virtue and due deference—as ‘money in the bank’, as Stephen Mitchell puts it.10 Fewer things, certainly, are likely to strike the reader upon repeated encounters with the eighteenth-century novel as forcefully as the underlying if deeply repressed anxiety of Dr Primrose himself with regard to the radical instability of this world. The rapid acceleration of catastrophes and events as the novel moves towards its conclusion in some respects represents nothing so accurately as the Vicar’s escalating panic; his earlier attempts to present to his family—and to his readers—a face of serene acceptance when confronted with changes and disruptions are weakened to the point of absolute collapse with each devastating blow of fate. And the novel is to some extent a mere catalogue of instability—a recitation of catastrophes, many of them if not of biblical proportions, then at least of a biblical nature: marriages, promises, and trusts are broken, loyalties are betrayed, identities are disguised or thoroughly misapprehended, currency itself and ‘values’ of all kinds are in a constant state of flux, and the physical world of the novel is one that is visited without warning by outbreaks of fire and flood. The city may be the most obvious haunt of criminals and con men, but the natural world is hospitable only when tamed by the hand of man; even then it is subject always to whims of a seemingly amoral deity. Even the Vicar’s obsession with the doctrines of William Whiston regarding the marriage of clergymen in certain circumstances can be read as a manifestation of his own fear that—should he ever find himself in such a position—he would be incapable of handling the disruption of any such change in circumstance. Primrose’s repeated advocacy of his pet theories is an attempt to fortify himself against his own sense of weakness and inadequacy in the face of possible chaos.
Yet to whatever extent Goldsmith desired in his novel to recall to the minds of his readers the tribulations that beset even God’s favourite, he is careful to avoid the most sombre aspects of his Old Testament model. Although The Vicar of Wakefield does arguably tackle a subject no less impressive than the ability and the moral strength of mankind to transcend human suffering, the author does not push his hero in any unconvincing way towards an achievement of bold and enlightened spiritual insight. Toward the end of his trials, Job regrets all that has been taken from him, and wishes only that he could exchange his present state for his past:
Oh that I were as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me;
When his candle shined upon my head, and when by his light I walked through darkness;
As I was in the days of my youth, when the secret of God was upon my tabernacle;
When the Almighty was yet with me, when my children were about me;…
When the ear heard me, then it blessed me; and when the eye saw me, it gave witness to me (Job 29: 2–5, 11)
Job’s outburst markedly anticipates the words of Goldsmith’s Vicar in his extremity. Yet whereas the lament of Job builds towards the end of his narrative to a bewildered cry of outrage against the comprehensive fact of human misery, the Vicar’s more hysterical apostrophes are invariably thumped violently back to ground by the interruption of someone close to him who tells him essentially that he, of all people, ought to know better. As Dr Primrose approaches his lowest point, in prison and believing his daughter Olivia already to be dead, he is informed by his wife—who is herself nearly incoherent with grief and on the edge of collapse—that his younger daughter, Sophia, has also just been forcibly abducted by a ‘well drest man’ in a passing post-chaise. ‘Now’, the Vicar cries aloud to the prison cell,
‘the sum of my misery is made up, nor is it in the power of any thing on earth to give me another pang. What! not one left! not to leave me one! the monster! the child that was next my heart! she had the beauty of an angel, and almost the wisdom of an angel. But support that woman [i.e., his wife, Deborah], nor let her fall. Not to leave me one!’ (p. 139)
Deborah Primrose, however, unlike the wife of Job, is the one who more successfully resists the pressures of the moment, and serves herself as a model for her husband:
‘Alas! my husband,’ said my wife, ‘you seem to want comfort even more than I. Our distresses are great; but I could bear this and more, if I saw you but easy. They may take away my children and all the world, if they leave me but you.’ (pp. 139–40)
The Vicar manages to pull himself together and to regain some degree of composure, but the arrival of his son, George, bloody, wounded, and in fetters just two pages later proves to be too much for him. He is once again transformed into the accusing picture of angry despair. ‘I tried to restrain my passions for a few minutes in silence,’ he writes,
but I thought I should have died with the effort—‘O my boy, my heart weeps to behold thee thus, and I cannot, cannot help it. In the moment that I thought thee blest, and prayed for thy safety, to behold thee thus again! Chained, wounded. And yet the death of the youthful is happy. But I am old, a very old man, and have lived to see this day. To see my children all untimely falling about me, while I continue a wretched survivor in the midst of ruin! May all the curses that ever sunk a soul fall heavy upon the murderer of my children. May he live, like me, to see—’ (p. 142)
The Vicar is at this moment of mounting denunciation interrupted by no one other than his wounded, bloody son himself, who cries:
‘Hold, Sir, … or I shall blush for thee. How, Sir, forgetful of your age, your holy calling, thus to arrogate the justice of heaven, and fling those curses upward that must soon descend to crush thy own grey head with destruction! No, Sir, let it be your care now to fit me for that vile death I must shortly suffer, to arm me with hope and resolution, to give me courage to drink of that bitterness which must shortly be my portion.’ (p. 142)
The first-person account of Dr Primrose—a narrative voice that is throughout the novel skilfully interrupted and varied by what might be described as his own rhetorical ‘encounters’ with other forms of storytelling, versification, narration, sermonizing, representation, and debate—manages always to serve the same function that dramatic techniques such as discrepant awareness (whereby the audience can be reassured early in the action of a comedy that everything will, indeed, end happily) facilitate in the theatre. The narrative of Dr Primrose and his family is everywhere lightened by Goldsmith’s own instinct for the sort of deft repetition that will come in time to characterize the comedy of the absurd.
Dr Primrose and his faith, by the end of the novel, may have been sorely tried, but at no point does the Vicar, like his Old Testament predecessor, achieve the sublime insight that leads to a gesture of wholehearted surrender or submission. Whereas the tone of Job’s final words in the face of the Unnameable—the Voice that speaks to him from the Whirlwind—voices the serene transformation of bitterness to awe, that of the Vicar is merely, if appropriately, content. ‘I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee’, Job acknowledges before his God; ‘Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes’ (Job 42: 2, 6). Dr Primrose finds final comfort not so much in any genuine repentance or comprehension of his own mortality, but in the renewal of familiar and comforting ‘ceremonies’. The shadows that are increasingly visible throughout the thematic landscapes of Goldsmith’s novel are shades cast only by momentary obstructions against a relatively constant background of light, however variable its intensity. If the first half of the novel had been bathed in the pastoral optimism and the possible attainment of a frugal, rural contentment, the second is a nightmare of cumulative disasters that is redeemed by an ending reminiscent of nothing so much as a late Shakespearian romance. The Vicar’s pronouncement at the end of the novel seems in fact almost explicitly to recall the words not of the awe-stricken Job, but of Shakespeare’s own Prospero, in the final moments of The Tempest. ‘I had nothing now on this side of the grave to wish for,’ runs the Vicar’s concluding sentence in the novel, ‘all my cares were over, my pleasure was unspeakable. It now only remained that my gratitude in good fortune should exceed my former submission in adversity’ (p. 170).
For many years the simple phenomenon of The Vicar of Wake-fieli’s sustained popularity appeared to be the main talking point for most criticism. The story itself—and Goldsmith’s handling of it—seemed somehow beyond commentary. It is a testament not so much to any inherent excellence, but simply to the longstanding enigma of Goldsmith’s novel, that Thomas Babington Macaulay’s entry on the author, originally included in the 1856 (8th) edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, was to remain in print until as late as 1961. Some few critics paused to comment on what they thought to be the peculiarly arbitrary sequence of the novel’s narrative ‘incidents’, but most were compelled merely to accept the work for the humorous and vaguely ‘delightful’ quality that formed the basis of its continued wide appeal.
Henry James best articulated the odd combination of approval and frustration the novel provoked within any individual determined to say something consequential or objective about its aesthetic achievement. He was driven to the point of distraction by Goldsmith’s novel, memorably christening it ‘the spoiled child of our literature’, able to ‘[convert] everything it contains into a happy case of exemption and fascination. … One admits the particulars [of The Vicar of Wakefield] with the sense that, as regards the place the thing has taken, it remains, by a strange little law of its own, quite undamaged—simply stands there smiling with impunity.’11
In his final assessment of Goldsmith’s work, James went as far as to suggest that—although singular—the novel so stretched the ‘indulgence’ of its readers, that it must on some level be judged a failure. ‘Read as one of the masterpieces by a person not acquainted with our Literature,’ he wrote, ‘it might easily give the impression that this literature is not immense.’ While tentatively suggesting that, in terms of Goldsmith’s style, ‘the frankness of his sweetness and the beautiful ease of his speech’ is the quality that first appeals to Goldsmith’s readers, confronted with its larger achievement, James concedes defeat: ‘I am afraid I cannot go further than this in the way of speculation as to how a classic is grown,’ he decides, wearily; ‘In the open air is perhaps the most we can say. Goldsmith’s style is the flower of what I have called its amenity, and [Goldsmith’s own] amenity the making of that independence of almost everything by which The Vicar has triumphed.’
He concludes of the novel: ‘the thing has succeeded by terms of its incomparable amenity’, which reduces us to a point of critical helplessness, so that ‘under its charm we resist the irritation of having to define [its] character’.
‘Charm’ and ‘amenity’ are not exactly the kinds of words that one is likely to find in any contemporary dictionary of critical terms. Yet until the most recent critics of Goldsmith’s novel felt themselves free to pursue those apparently fragmented elements of the text that might be used as keys to unlock its relevance to specific issues of class, power, and politics, any more traditional interpretive approaches to the work seemed doomed to certain failure. Attempts to analyse Goldsmith’s ‘plot’ invariably reached the same conclusions: the Vicar’s narrative was poorly constructed, at once both dense and highly complicated, yet also stuttering in pace and lacking in proportion. Those few episodes in the first half of the novel that might with a more patient exposition have been developed into successful set pieces remained too confused and hurried; there was simply no excuse for the frenzied pace and unlikely reversals of the latter part of the work. Similarly, the ‘calamities’ that might otherwise have carried some emotional weight were so clumsily clustered together, and each followed so hard upon the next, that any impact they might otherwise have possessed was altogether dissipated. As for the ‘realism’ or sense of verisimilitude that one might with reason expect even from the simplest fairy story, the reader could only search in vain. Any comments on Goldsmith’s plot, in other words, were invariably little more than echoes of Macaulay’s observations of 1856, in which he dismissed the novel’s ‘fable’ as not merely faulty, but ‘one of the worst that ever was constructed’. ‘It wants’, Macaulay had sniffed, ‘not merely the probability that ought to be found in a tale of common English life, but that consistency which ought to be found even in the wildest fiction about witches, giants, and fairies.’12
Hopeful suggestions that the novel was intended to be a spontaneous and self-consciously innovative attempt to break free from the increasing strictures imposed on novelistic fictions were no less quickly dispatched by the assertion that those very same aspects that struck new readers as unusual or at least well accomplished had simply been freely borrowed from existing works. Almost every narrative episode in the Vicar’s account took its cue from or otherwise found its model not in lived human experience or behaviour, but had been drawn straight from the work of a contemporary or immediate predecessor. The narratives of seduction drew in almost every detail from novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740–1) and Clarissa (1747–8); the prison scenes had already been ‘done’—and to far better effect—by Henry Fielding in his Amelia (1751), and the picaresque adventures of Dr Primrose and his son owed more than a little of their colour to those of that same author’s Joseph Andrews (1742); in tone, Goldsmith had failed in his obvious attempts to imitate the successful ‘sensibility’ of which Sterne continued to demonstrate himself a master, to capture the epigrammatic brilliance that Johnson had displayed to such fine effect in his Rasselas, or even to reproduce some of the anecdotal appeal of which he had demonstrated himself capable in his own ‘Chinese Letters’. His ‘characters’, such as they were, amounted to little more than static, two-dimensional cut-outs of little if any emotional depth, and admitted no development.
The only quality for which The Vicar of Wakefield was likely to garner any positive critical attention at all, in fact, was its successfully modest description—limited almost entirely to its earliest chapters—of an ideal of pastoral retirement and domestic harmony that was thought to be worthy of imitation. It was only when he limited himself to depictions of this nature, critics also suggested, that Goldsmith’s style came close to 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 our labour soon finished, we usually sate together, to enjoy an extensive landschape [sic], in the calm of the evening. Here too we drank tea, which now was become an occasional banquet; and as we had it but seldom, it diffused a new joy, the preparations for it being made with no small share of bustle and ceremony. On these occasions, our two little ones always read for us, and they were regularly served after we had done. Sometimes, to give a variety to our amusements, the girls sung to the guitar; and while they thus formed a little concert, my wife and I would stroll down the sloping field, that was embellished with blue bells and centaury, talk of our children with rapture, and enjoy the breeze that wafted both health and harmony (pp. 24–5)
Goldsmith was among those writers who, until recently, was often referred to as being in some way ‘pre-Romantic’. The winning strengths of passages such as this, however, are those more accurately associated with the ethos of Augustan poetics; the Vicar’s new home and pastimes are similar to those praised by poets earlier in the century (one thinks specifically of the ethos of John Pomfret’s ‘The Choice’ (1700), for example, or the restrained environments and behaviour described in Alexander Pope’s moral epistles). The language here is as cool and calm as 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. To whatever extent readers as sympathetic as Johnson may have disparaged the technical achievement of Goldsmith’s novel when he dismissed it as ‘a mere fanciful performance’ that contained ‘nothing of real life … and very little of nature’, for a great many members of Goldsmith’s audience The Vicar of Wakefield seemed absolutely to insist on being read for its morality and for its reassuring spiritual message.13 An early, unsigned notice that appeared in Hugh Kelly’s Babler shortly after the novel’s publication simply took for granted that Goldsmith’s primary reason for presenting his readers with such a variety of calamitous circumstances was to provide ‘a masterly vindication of that exterior disparity in the dispensations of providence, at which our modern infidels seem to triumph with so unceasing a satisfaction’. ‘And’, the reviewer continued, ‘it must undoubtedly yield a 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 to amount to a vindication of the terminal justice and equity of the divine plan. Another early reviewer, whose notice on the novel appeared in the Monthly Review in May 1766, effaced any reservations he may have had regarding the book’s stylistic oddities to conclude:
In brief, with all its faults, there is much rational entertainment to be met with in this very singular tale; but it deserves our warmer approbation for its moral tendency; particularly for the exemplary manner in which it recommends and enforces, the great obligations of universal BENEVOLENCE; the most amiable quality that can possibly distinguish and adorn the WORTHY MAN and the GOOD CHRISTIAN!15
Well over a generation later, Goldsmith’s biographer John Forster felt no need to apologize for similarly reading The Vicar of Wakefield as an attempt to justify the ways of God to man. Forster thought the novel had sprung from the ‘sweet emotion’ of Goldsmith’s own ‘chequered life’, and concluded that the author’s own experiences had merely been re-presented to the public so as ‘to show us that patience in suffering, that persevering reliance on the providence of God … are the easy and certain means of pleasure in this world, and of turning pain to noble uses’.16
Despite the dramatic shift in critical perspective within the last fifty years or more that has looked generally to separate the ‘life’ from the ‘work’, and which in its most extreme forms attempted to dispense with the role of the author in the task of textual interpretation altogether, biographically based readings of The Vicar of Wakefield have remained stubbornly popular well into the twenty-first century. Washington Irving’s observation that Goldsmith’s novel had simply offered readers its scenes and characters ‘as seen through the medium of his own indulgent eye, and set … forth with the colourings of his good head and heart’ is in all likelihood liable to be no less acceptable a sentiment to the vast majority of today’s readers than it would have been to those who first encountered it in 1825.17 ‘Any biographer who refused to read the family life of the Goldsmiths into the account of the Primrose family’, as John Ginger confessed, ‘would have to be made of stern stuff.’18 George Rousseau was rather less understanding when he countered: ‘At the heart of the problem—and it is a problem—lies Goldsmith’s life.’ ‘Goldsmith-the-man’, Rousseau with reason lamented, ‘has interested critics more than Goldsmith-the-writer.’19
Both Ginger and Rousseau, it must be conceded, make legitimate points; the briefest outline of Goldsmith’s life does seem to read like something straight out of his novel. Born into a modest clerical family in rural Ireland, Goldsmith would often in his work reimagine the fields and streams around his childhood home of Lissoy to have constituted a veritable paradise; in the face of all the economic and social realities of the time, for Goldsmith the parsonage in which he had been raised, and the activities he was always to associate with his young and relatively carefree existence there, were effortlessly resituated in his adult writing and viewed through a haze that transformed them into a lost golden age. Even his time at Trinity College Dublin, to which Goldsmith was admitted in June 1745, emerges in most biographical accounts as a challenging but by no means overstressful period in his life. The only things most readers tend to remember about Goldsmith’s career as an undergraduate is that he was publicly admonished and temporarily sent down for taking part in a student riot in 1747 (in which others were actually killed), became addicted to gambling and other vices associated with ‘low company’, and began to display those traits what were eventually to develop into lifelong habits of personal irresponsibility; Goldsmith held the dubious distinction of actually having been punched in his face by his own tutor. His wild misadventures upon returning briefly to his mother’s home (he attempted unsuccessfully to be ordained into the Anglican Church, served as a private tutor to a family in County Roscommon, and claimed accidentally to have missed the boat that was to have carried him as an emigrant to America), though matter enough for most men, served only as a kind of comic prelude to the more wide-ranging adventures he claimed to have experienced as a wandering traveller throughout Germany, Switzerland, France, and northern Italy some few years later, in 1755. His sporadic attempts to find a suitable occupation invariably led nowhere, although his time spent at Edinburgh University and then at Leyden from 1752 to 1754 would leave him with just enough knowledge later in life so as to pass himself off as a medical doctor. Prior to his first real success as a writer in his early thirties, Goldsmith lived a hand-to-mouth existence that resembled nothing so much as a series of Hogarth prints brought to life. He tried his hand at being an apothecary, an ad hoc physician, a proofreader, and an usher at a boys’ school in Peckham; in 1758 he even applied (unsuccessfully) for a civilian position within the East India Company. He produced hundreds of pages of reviews and essays before the success of his verse-epistle The Traveller in December 1764 finally brought him some acclaim as 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 and personal stability than he died—of kidney disease—in April 1774, at the relatively young age of 43.
It is little wonder that readers have felt there to be important links between the story of Goldsmith’s life and that of his novel. Almost all the elements that were to characterize his peculiar narrative romance are already present in his own personal history; many features needed hardly even to be transformed in any serious way. The pastoral settings within which the Revd Primrose and his family find themselves throughout much of the first half of the novel seem for many readers unequivocally to have been based on his own earliest experiences in Ireland (the area around Lissoy is today marketed to tourists as ‘Goldsmith Country’, despite the fact that the author was, after the age of 21, never again even to set foot in Ireland); the character of Primrose himself is routinely thought to embody the virtues of Goldsmith’s own clergyman father; perhaps most significantly, entire extended sections in the second half of the novel relating to the adventures both of Primrose and of his son George were so inextricably linked to the author’s own personal anecdotes and Continental adventures by Goldsmith’s earliest biographers that it remains even today impossible to disentangle what is ‘true’ from what is purely fictitious.
Yet for a modern reader convincingly to maintain that in order to understand Goldsmith’s novel, we must first gain a full appreciation of Goldsmith the man, is not merely unsustainable, but deeply misleading. Many critics, by contrast, treat The Vicar of Wakefield as an uncomplicated example of that peculiarly eighteenth-century literary kind, the ‘sentimental novel’. Such novels were a narrative manifestation of the period’s ‘cult of feeling’. They gave expression to the new emphasis being placed on the significance of subjective 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 as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa simply paved the way for later works containing even more provocative displays of (usually female) suffering, all designed to draw forth from readers as highly sensitized and as actively sympathetic a response as possible. The period’s obsession with such concepts as ‘sentiment’, ‘sensibility’, and ‘melancholia’ was thought to be witnessed everywhere in the literature of the era.
In order to read Goldsmith’s novel in such a manner, readers must place no small degree of faith in the author’s manipulation of the vicar himself as an effective narrator—one who is at once both dispassionate in the control he maintains over potentially disturbing emotions, yet also demurely impudent—and who manages successfully to record the events of the novel, as John Butt put it, ‘briefly, even briskly, without being fundamentally unsettled by any of them’.20 In presenting his tale through such an amiable and coherent figure, it might be argued, Goldsmith avoided those tendencies that 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 display a feverish intensity and an ‘uncontrolled vehemence’ in his attempts to reconcile a world controlled by divine providence to the plight of helpless characters in positions of extreme distress in a hostile world. What some critics would argue to be the ‘controlled spontaneity’ of Goldsmith’s narrator in The Vicar of Wakefield was complemented by the corresponding guidance he maintained over the structure of his narrative—a structure that modern readers are less likely to notice. Commentators have pointed out that the Vicar’s story is perfectly divided into two halves—the first half being essentially a comedy, its episodes (apart from the initial expulsion from Wakefield) relatively minor and even comfortably domestic in nature. The second half of the novel, by contrast, is a quasi-tragedy rich in the pathos of multiple misfortunes and catastrophes. Goldsmith thrusts his characters into the world in a dramatic and distressing way—we move within the space of a few pages from financial discomfiture and minor mishaps to abductions, penury, destruction by fire, imprisonment, and a tone of near apocalyptic catastrophe. Whereas Goldsmith’s narrative technique in the first part of the novel had been relatively limited, the second prominently includes a diversity of novelistic modes and voices, including traveller’s tales, politics, discussions on philosophy and aesthetics, digressions on subjects including penal reform and the state of urban depravity, and even sermons. The symmetry of the entire novel is precise, and neatly reverses the sentiment of the novel’s epigraph: the happy family of the first part of the novel should take heed in their felicity, much in the manner that they should be sustained throughout the calamities of the second half by the promise of Christian hope. The thirty-two chapters are divided neatly into two halves of sixteen chapters each; further divisions can then be drawn that discern subsets of a pair of eight chapters apiece. The three poems included in the novel in each case punctuate crucial turning points of the narrative action, contributing to subliminally perceived design that further underscores the symmetrical effect of the novel as a whole.21
If a great many readers of Goldsmith’s work are still inclined to look upon The Vicar of Wakefield primarily as a relatively straightforward domestic fiction or sentimental romance of this sort, professional critics have tended increasingly to agree that the novel’s seeming artlessness is in fact nothing more than a self-conscious pose that has been assumed by the author—part of a disingenuous attempt deliberately to trick his readers and to raise false generic and narrative expectations. According to such a view, Goldsmith superficially invokes various literary genres and modes in the course of his tale only to subvert them. His apparently earnest narrative of sentiment is in fact an extended exercise in irony. Such fundamental disagreements in approach have ensured that certain passages in the novel thought by some to be deeply felt and sincere are no less likely to be read by others as rich with elements of parody and satire, and have raised a series of critical questions that have yet to be fully answered. Just how far, exactly, are we meant to trust the Revd Primrose’s own narration of his ‘tale’ when, even from the opening pages of the volume, he reveals himself to be wildly inconsistent, illogical, and, at worst, completely hypocritical? To what extent could readers ever accept Goldsmith’s fiction as somehow true to life or at least relevant to their lived experience, much less autobiographical, when it is so clearly a work that on every page—and increasingly throughout the text—bears the traces of its deliberate confusion of almost every literary ‘type’ that flourished in the period? Did Goldsmith in fact set out actually to write a satire on the vogue for sentimental fiction or ‘sensibility’ in general (as he was more obviously to do in his theatrical comedies), yet allow his narrative in this instance to spin so wildly out of control as to lose all authority over his own plot and characters? As the critic Ricardo Quintana sometime ago observed, for all its apparent simplicity and innocence, The Vicar of Wakefield has given rise to ‘more questions and presents greater difficulties of interpretation than any of Goldsmith’s other compositions’.22
Those novels that participate most successfully in the traditions of satire in English tend usually to alert their audiences from the very outset 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 questions for generations of readers. Upon closer examination, we soon discover that nothing about The Vicar of Wakefield is ever as simple as it first appears to be. The text of the novel—indeed, even the language with which the work introduces itself to its audience and announces its supposed intentions—initiates a complicated and occasionally coy strategy of linguistic play. The novel also contains an astounding number of characters who disguise themselves or participate in some sort of ‘masquerade’. Many tend effortlessly to assume different identities and to ‘play’ the roles of others in a romantic or dramatic manner.
The Vicar of Wakefield even begins, like some vexed and impish Hamlet, not by answering questions, but by asking them. The original title page pointedly characterizes the narrative as ‘a Tale, supposed to have been written by himself’.23 Modern readers are unfortunately unlikely to pay much if any attention to the specific designation of the fiction they hold in their hands as a ‘Tale’. The extended subtitles of most eighteenth-century novels, however, alerted readers to important claims of authenticity and provenance—they called attention to the balance of tradition and innovation, of authority and licence. Narratives designated to be tales tended to feature an intrusive and slightly wayward narrative persona, and were often marked by a tendency towards digression and generic inclusivity. Goldsmith’s further qualification that his is a tale ‘supposed to have been written by [the Vicar of Wakefield]’ is perhaps even more peculiar—particularly in his use of that troubling ‘supposed’. Is Goldsmith (or an otherwise unnamed and unidentified ‘editor’) asking us here to believe that the Vicar’s narrative is true? Is the subtitle working to highlight the nature of the Vicar’s story as fiction? Or is it merely an assumption on the part of an ‘editor’? At the very least, the uncertainty reflected in this seemingly straightforward phrase anticipates Goldsmith’s manipulation of what will remain an enigmatic and at times even wildly inconsistent narrative voice throughout the novel itself.
It is further typical of The Vicar of Wakefield that even the central title of the novel is deliberately misleading. How many of Goldsmith’s readers over the years must have wondered why it is that the Vicar is so prominently described as being ‘of Wakefield’, when he in fact leaves Wakefield for ever in the opening pages of his story (Dr Primrose inhabits the village of the novel’s title for less than ten pages of a narrative that remains in any modern edition close to 190 pages long)? Why, for that matter, does Goldsmith allow the location 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 awareness that are supposed to filter the story first from the original teller of the tale to any assumed listeners, and only thence from an editor to the printer or bookseller, further obscure the veracity of the final product.
In any event, the unnamed community depicted in the novel to which the Vicar and his family remove is emphatically not the idyllic, pastoral ‘Wakefield’ that has established itself in the popular imagination, but rather, as the Vicar himself describes it, an isolated living in a ‘little neighbourhood’ of farmers attached to a nearby town that is a straggling place consisting of ‘a few mean houses, having lost all its former opulence, and retaining no marks of its ancient superiority but the gaol’. This same ‘ancient superiority’ yet attaches itself to the town in a lingering manner primarily because of its fortress-like prison—a building, we are informed, that had ‘formerly been built for the purposes of war’ (p. 124). The Vicar imagined by so many readers as inhabiting a bucolic world of easy contentment that is disrupted by the unexpected intrusion of the kinds of external forces more typically confined to the city and the urban environment, in actual fact lives near the run-down and economically depressed remnant of a military community—a town the only distinction of which remains the fortress that serves simultaneously as a monument to its foundation as a bulwark against the bellicose instability of its former inhabitants and near-neighbours, and a living testimony, as a prison, to the ineradicable poverty and depravity of human nature.
Not merely ‘Wakefield’ but all the names in the novel would appear carefully to have been designed just to provoke confusion. Goldsmith’s specific designation of the town of Wakefield has prompted many readers to wonder how it came about that he should ever have desired to associate his novel with the actual town of Wakefield, in Yorkshire (to which Goldsmith’s fictional community bears little if any resemblance) or perhaps to another, smaller village of that same name closer to London. The fact that the author pointedly draws attention to the connotations of names and naming throughout the work would seem to encourage readers to pursue such matters; proper names do carry significant connotations in the work. The Vicar’s speculation early in the novel, for example, that the naming of his daughters was influenced by his wife’s weakness for romantic fiction may itself be the stuff of old wives’ tales, yet the names finally chosen for the two girls do indeed carry appropriately ‘romantic’ and classical connotations. Olivia, deriving from Latin and related to the masculine Oliver, literally means ‘of the olive tree’, and so, metaphorically, ‘peace’; it entered English after it was prominently used by Shakespeare in his Twelfth Night (1601), where it was associated with misguided romantic infatuation. Sophia is from the Greek, and means ‘wisdom’ (often traditionally connoting ‘holy wisdom’). In the Christian tradition, the name is associated with the mythical saint who is said to have died of grief after witnessing the martyrdom of her three daughters. Both names are consequently of ancient origin, and both would be appropriate designations for the heroines of popular—and, in the eyes of the Vicar, unfortunately ‘feminine’—romantic fictions; both are likewise obscurely related to the perceived feminine activities of loss and suffering. In stark contrast, the female name most favoured by the Vicar, ‘Grissel’, is suitably mundane and emphatically Anglo-Saxon, being derived from the Germanic gris or ‘grey’, and hild, meaning ‘battle’. In contrast to the names chosen by Deborah Primrose, Griselda, for example, is the name given to a patient wife in one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1400).
Goldsmith’s novel of course includes names that are ‘realistic’ (e.g. ‘Wilmot’, ‘Cripse’); yet it does so alongside names that are in some way descriptive or potentially symbolic (‘Primrose’, ‘Grogram’, ‘Pinwire’), or that are resonant of other literary characters (‘Burchell’, ‘Arnold’), as well as those that quite specifically call to mind recent and contemporary political figures (‘Wilkinson’, ‘Thornhill’). The Vicar of Wakefield, in other words, appears to combine a number of converging trends in this area, much in the manner that it brings together related, developing trends in genre and literary modes. Returning to the village named in the novel’s title, it is more than possible that an eighteenth-century audience would still have been aware of the origins of such a place name to designate, quite literally, the field in which the rural parish community held its annual ‘wake’ or festival—a celebration that originally fell on a Sunday or the feast day of a saint, and was an occasional holiday that featured dancing, village sports, and other amusements. In a very real sense, Dr Primrose is following in the footsteps of his island forebears no less clearly than he is being subjected to the trials of the biblical Job—ranging from Piers Plowman and Colin Cloute to John Bunyan’s Christian in his Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). As Oswald Doughty observed some time ago, ‘the Vicar of Wakefield is Christian in the mid-eighteenth century’.24
If Goldsmith’s novel is to be read as a satire rather than a sincere work of ‘sentimental fiction’, one needs to remain very much alive to the subtle inconsistencies and illogicalities of the Vicar’s narration. Critics such as Robert Hopkins have convincingly demonstrated the intricate manner in which Goldsmith manipulates Primrose’s voice throughout the text to reveal his own shortcomings, and his manifestations of often petty vindictiveness and pride. The several instances of bathos in the novel—moments when an attempt at the sublime is suddenly undercut by the revelation of the questionable perceptions and judgements of a deeply flawed humanity—simply must be taken into account in any coherent reading of the novel. Whether or not one would wish to go so far as Hopkins himself in arguing that the novel is not merely a playful parody, but an intense and calculated satire, is another question altogether. Henry James may himself, finally, have been not so far from articulating a certain kind of truth when he confronted what he characterized as the novel’s unfailing ‘charm’ and ‘amenity’. John Trusler, writing on the meaning of specific words and terminology shortly after The Vicar of Wakefield was published,25 emphasized the notion that charm—much like any related spell or enchantment—is a quality only naturally averse to reason; ‘charm’ is an attribute or feature, as dictionary definitions tend to stress even to this day, that exerts some kind of fascinating or attractive influence that excites admiration or love despite its being contrary to all the more sensible arguments against it. For all the sophistication of the analyses that have subsequently been brought to bear on the novel, James’s suggestion that the enduring qualities of The Vicar of Wakefield are rooted firmly in its ability continually to charm its readers suggests no small achievement on Goldsmith’s part after all.