The Vicar of Wakefield Study Guide

Oliver Goldsmith was born in Ireland in 1728, where his father worked as a curate, an assistant to the parish priest. After studying at Trinity College in Dublin, Goldsmith was rejected from the Church of Ireland. He went on to travel through Europe, studying, tutoring, and simply wandering. Goldsmith then settled in London, eking out a difficult living as a Grub-street hack writer and translator. He began to grow in fame through his works An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe and The Citizen of the World, the latter written by a Chinese alter ego named Lien Chi Altangi. The Vicar of Wakefield, published in 1766, is his only novel and most acclaimed work, but his 1773 play She Stoops to Conquer also brought him significant success. Goldsmith lived extravagantly and was often in debt, and he was known for his erratic temper and behavior. He died prematurely in 1774, possibly of kidney failure.

Europe in the late 18th century was in a state of constant upheaval, one that Goldsmith was especially well positioned to witness as a result of his many travels. The British Empire had rapidly expanded over the course of the century despite its involvement in numerous wars, and this together with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution lead to a total transformation of British society. Despite the explosion of economic activity and the global, cosmopolitan society of London and other large cities, the British countryside of Goldsmith’s childhood continued on much as ever, providing a clear reference point to the pastoral idyll he anchors his moral philosophy to in The Vicar of Wakefield. In response to this state of flux, aesthetic debates of the time were heavily charged with moral and political significance, leading to vicious arguments over the merits of classicism, theater, and all other manners of “taste,” many of which Goldsmith reproduces in his fiction.

The Vicar of Wakefield is one of the preeminent examples of the sentimental novel, an 18th-century genre that focused on the emotional responses—or sentiments—of both characters and readers to their circumstances. Largely concentrated in the latter half of the 18th century, the sentimental novel was a direct reaction to the rationalism of the earlier part of the century and paved the way for both Gothicism and Romanticism. Other important sentimental novels include Samuel Ricardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy. The Vicar of Wakefield, however, much like Tristram Shandy, is also very much a satire of the sentimental novel and its cliches, troubling the stability of the genre and its moral universe while laying the foundations for it. This satire would come to be more fully developed in the 19th century, most notably in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, which is far more sharply critical in its critique of sentimentalism than Goldsmith’s novel.