Books

The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) by Oliver Goldsmith: Delightful and restorative

The novel radiates goodness and a sense that the human spirit can withstand all assaults

Oliver Goldsmith, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1769-70. Photograph: The Print Collector/Getty

Brian Maye
Sat May 22 2021 - 00:00

Co Longford-born Oliver Goldsmith was a prolific writer. Most of what he produced was mundane, as his penury meant the drudgery of constant output, but The Deserted Village is one of the greatest poems in the English language and this, his only novel, has delighted generations of readers.

The eponymous vicar, Dr Primrose, lives contentedly with his wife and six children until the loss of his fortune, caused by a merchant company going bankrupt, leads to various bad experiences befalling him and his family. The villainous Squire Thornhill does the family many wrongs, while the kind-hearted but apparently poor Mr Burchell seeks to help them in any way he can. He turns out to be Sir William Thornhill, the evil squire’s uncle, and his deus-ex-machina role helps to restore the Primrose family’s fortunes.

The Vicar of Wakefield is the most famous novel published in the period between Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen. It has been translated into many languages and has hardly been out of print since its publication.

Its success is difficult to assess. It is sentimental with lots of unlikely and unexpected happenings. In his classic The English Novel, literary critic Walter Allen said it reads “like a fairy-tale, an idealised picture of rural life, with a delightfully Quixotic comic character as the centre and with Burchell as an awkward good fairy to contrive a happy ending”. But no less a novelist than Walter Scott said that “we return to it again and again, and bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature”.

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Scott, I believe, pinpointed the novel’s main attraction, which may also explain its enduring appeal: it suffuses conventional morality with kind and gentle humour and displays an elevated sense of the potential goodness of human nature. In fact, it radiates goodness and a sense that the human spirit can withstand all assaults.

Goldsmith counted among his friends the great Samuel Johnson, who wrote the beautiful epitaph for Goldsmith’s monument in Westminster Abbey. It reads “Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit” which translates as “[He] touched nothing that he did not adorn”.