The Vicar of Wakefield Reading Order

The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) by Oliver Goldsmith is one of the most widely read novels of the eighteenth century and one of the strangest — a story about the Primrose family, who suffer a series of misfortunes (loss of fortune, seduction of a daughter, fire, imprisonment) and are eventually rescued through the revelation of a providential plot, told in the first person by the cheerfully oblivious Vicar himself. The novel's peculiarity is that its narrator is consistently wrong about almost everything he reports — he misjudges people, misses villains, is easily deceived — and yet his narration is never tragic but warmly comic, even in the scenes of deepest suffering. Goldsmith was a friend of Samuel Johnson's literary circle (Johnson is said to have sold the manuscript for Goldsmith to pay his rent) and the novel shows the influence of Richardson and Fielding while being unlike either. It was enormously popular throughout the nineteenth century — admired by Goethe (who modeled Wilhelm Meister partly on it), by Thackeray, by Dickens — and is now less read than it deserves, partly because its comedy resists easy description.