NOTE ON THE TEXT

Most writers on Goldsmith would today agree that The Vicar of Wakefield was probably written at Goldsmith’s lodgings in Wine Office Court in late 1761 or in 1762. Internal evidence supports the supposition that the manuscript was sold sometime near the end of 1762. For reasons that have not been satisfactorily explained the novel was not published until some three and a half years later, on 27 March 1766, when it appeared in two volumes with the imprint: ‘SALISBURY: Printed by B. COLLINS, For F. Newbery in Pater-Noster-Row, London’. Two other authorized editions appeared in 1766, the second edition (with many stylistic revisions) on 31 May, and the third on 27 August. The fourth authorized edition, dated 1770, was published on 9 December 1769 and the fifth, dated 1773, on 2 April 1774, two days before Goldsmith’s death. By 1820, at least 111 editions had appeared.

The text of the present edition is substantially that established for Arthur Friedman’s Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith (Oxford, 1966), volume iv. It is the text of the first edition modified by the new readings of the second edition for which Goldsmith appears to have been responsible. Friedman accepted as authoritative no new readings from editions after the second; verbal variants from the third, fourth, and fifth editions can be found in Collected Works, iv. 185.