The Vicar of Wakefield

Reading time: about 4.5 h
Length: 63,939 words · 239 pages
Structure: 28 chapters · 2 front-matter sections
Language: English
Era: Enlightenment

Dr Primrose has a good living, a wife with opinions about her daughters' prospects, six children and an easy conscience, and loses nearly all of it: his fortune goes with a merchant's bankruptcy on the eve of his eldest son's wedding, his daughter Olivia is carried off by the local squire, his house burns down, and he tells the last part of the story from a debtors' prison, where he is still preaching. Around him move the bluff, shabby Mr Burchell, who is more than he appears, and Squire Thornhill, who is rather less.

Oliver Goldsmith published the novel in 1766. The story that Samuel Johnson sold the manuscript to save Goldsmith from arrest for rent comes from Johnson's own account of it. Read as a comic idyll for most of the century after, it turns on a sustained irony — a narrator whose serene good sense is exactly what keeps failing to protect his family.

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The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.

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About the author

Oliver Goldsmith

1730–1774 · Enlightenment

Oliver Goldsmith (c. 1730–1774) was born in Ireland and educated at Trinity College Dublin; he later studied medicine, without taking a degree, at Edinburgh and Leiden, and wandered on foot through Europe before settling in London to write for hire. He became a close friend of Samuel Johnson and a founding member of Johnson’s “Club” in 1764. His novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) — sold by Johnson to save him from debtor’s prison — the poem The Deserted Village (1770), and the play She Stoops to Conquer (1773) are his best-remembered works. He died in London, heavily in debt.

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