Recommendations
Books Like The Vicar of Wakefield
Best books to read after The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
Oliver Goldsmith's warmly comic novel of providential misfortune (1766) is one of the strangest and most beloved in the English tradition — its unreliable, cheerfully oblivious narrator stumbling through disaster toward an improbable happy ending. These recommendations extend the experience through Goldsmith's other works, through the English comic novel tradition, and through the German literature that Goldsmith directly inspired.
- 1Buy
She Stoops to Conquer
by Oliver Goldsmith
Goldsmith's finest comedy — a play about romantic misunderstanding in which a young gentleman mistakes a country house for an inn and treats the family as servants; the same comic energy as The Vicar of Wakefield, in concentrated theatrical form, and the work that has kept Goldsmith most consistently in performance.
- 2Buy
Tom Jones
by Henry Fielding
The great comic novel of the generation before Goldsmith — Tom Jones's picaresque journey through English society and his eventual reunion with the woman he loves is the most immediate predecessor to The Vicar of Wakefield's providential comedy, and Fielding's intrusive, digressive narrator is the model for Goldsmith's cheerfully unreliable Vicar.
- 3Buy
The Sorrows of Young Werther
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Goethe read The Vicar of Wakefield as a young man and it shaped his first novel directly — Werther reads the Vicar's novel to Lotte early in their relationship, and the sentimental domestic world Goldsmith created is the world Werther is mourning as he loses access to it; the most direct German inheritor of Goldsmith's vision.
- 4Buy
Joseph Andrews
by Henry Fielding
Fielding's first novel, written as a parody of Richardson's Pamela and then expanded into an original picaresque comedy — Parson Adams, the novel's most beloved character, is a cousin of the Vicar Primrose in his bookish unworldliness and his cheerful incomprehension of the social world he moves through.
- 5Buy
The Pickwick Papers
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's first novel and the work that most directly inherits the picaresque comedy of The Vicar of Wakefield and Tom Jones — Mr. Pickwick's benevolent incomprehension of the world he passes through, his loyal companions, and the providential structure that eventually rescues him from the Fleet Prison all recall Goldsmith's template.
- 6Buy
Humphry Clinker
by Tobias Smollett
Smollett's final and finest novel, published in the same year as The Vicar of Wakefield (1771), deploys the same epistolary form to tell the story of a family traveling through Britain — the comedy of perspective (each letter-writer sees the same events completely differently) is a variation on the comedy of misperception that Goldsmith created in the Vicar's unreliable narration.
- 7Buy
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
by Anne Brontë
A later novel that inherits the tradition of the good-hearted narrator whose account of events is systematically skewed — Helen's husband's moral deterioration is described by a narrator who must piece together what happened from an incomplete record, creating the same gap between narration and event that Goldsmith exploited in the Vicar's comic memoir.
- 8Buy
Candide
by Voltaire
The French contemporary of The Vicar of Wakefield and its satirical inverse — where Goldsmith's Vicar stumbles through disasters while maintaining warm confidence in Providence, Voltaire's Candide stumbles through identical disasters while Pangloss insists they are for the best; together they define the range of responses to Leibnizian optimism available to 18th-century fiction.
More The Vicar of Wakefield Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.