The Vicar of Wakefield

The Vicar of Wakefield--------------------------------------------------He loved all mankind, for fortune prevented him from knowing therewere rascals.' Oliver Goldsmith's hugely successful novel of 1766 remainedfor generations one of the most highly regarded and beloved works ofeighteenth-century fiction. It depicts the fall and rise of the Primrosefamily, presided over by the benevolent vicar, the narrator of a fairy-taleplot of impersonation and deception, the abduction of a beautiful heroineand the machinations of an aristocratic villain. By turns comic andsentimental, the novel's popularity owes much to its recognizable depictionof domestic life and loving family relationships. Regarded by someas a straightforward and well-intentioned novel of sentiment, and byothers as a satire on the very literary conventions and morality itseems to embody, The Vicar of Wakefield contains, in the figure ofthe vicar himself, one of the most harmlessly simply and unsophisticatedyet also ironically complex narrators ever to appear in English fiction.