Description: Parson Primrose and his wife, Deborah, must manage the lives of their children--scholars George and Moses, the attractive and sensual Olivia and Sophia, as well as two younger sons. Betrothals, betrayals, loss and gain of fortune, catastrophe, vanity, pretension, and providence pepper this novel that Henry James called "the spoiled child of our literature." Originally perceived as a sentimental pastoral account, it is now regarded as a satire on that very type of novel.Reviews...
Woolf, Virginia "...Goldsmith not only believed in blackness and whiteness: he believed--perhaps one belief depends upon the other--that goodness will be rewarded, and vice punished. It is a doctrine, it may strike us when we read `The Vicar of Wakefield`, which imposes some restrictions on the novelist."
Orwell, George "The charm [of `The Vicar of Wakefield`] is in its manner--in the story, which for all its absurdity is beautifully put together, in the simple and yet elegant language, in the poems that are thrown in here and there, and in certain minor incidents....Most people who read at all have read this book once, and it repays a second reading. It is one of those books which you can enjoy in one way as a child and in another as an adult, and which do not seem any the worse because you are frequently inclined to laugh in the wrong places."
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von "The delineation of this character [Primrose] on his course of life through joys and sorrows, the ever-increasing interest of the story, by the combination of the entirely natural with the strange and the singular, make this novel one of the best which has ever been written; besides this, it has the great advantage that it is quite moral, nay, in a pure sense Christian--represents the reward of a good will and perseverance in the right, strengthens an unconditional confidence in God and attests the final triumph of good over evil; and all this without a trace of cant or pedantry."
Scott, Walter "It was probably soon after this first acquaintance [between Samuel Johnson and Goldsmith] that necessity, the parent of so many works of genius, gave birth to the `Vicar of Wakefield`...one of the most delicious morsels of fictitious composition on which the human mind was ever employed."
Monthly Review (London)(May 1766) "Through the whole course of our travels in the wild regions of romance, we never met with anything more difficult to characterize, than `The Vicar of Wakefield`; a performance which contains beauties sufficient to entitle it to almost the highest applause, and defects enough to put the discerning reader all out of patience with an author capable of so strangely under-writing himself."
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