Oliver Goldsmith: the Vicar of Wakefield

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CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Jun 11, 2010 - Fiction - 140 pages
One of the most popular novels of its time, The Vicar of Wakefield tells the story of Dr. Primrose, a wealthy man who enjoys a seemingly perfect life with his family in a quaint Irish village. However, when the vicar's wealth is usurped by a treacherous merchant investor, his family undergoes tremendous hardship and turmoil. The good nature of the Primroses contrasting sharply with the iniquitous characters around them, The Vicar of Wakefield is a sentimental novel that explores what happens when idyllic lives are no longer insulated from the evils of the world and how good people still manage to persevere.

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About the author (2010)

As Samuel Johnson said in his famous epitaph on his Irish-born and educated friend, Goldsmith ornamented whatever he touched with his pen. A professional writer who died in his prime, Goldsmith wrote the best comedy of his day, She Stoops to Conquer (1773). Amongst a plethora of other fine works, he also wrote The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), which, despite major plot inconsistencies and the intrusion of poems, essays, tales, and lectures apparently foreign to its central concerns, remains one of the most engaging fictional works in English. One reason for its appeal is the character of the narrator, Dr. Primrose, who is at once a slightly absurd pedant, an impatient traditional father of teenagers, a Job-like figure heroically facing life's blows, and an alertly curious, helpful, loving person. Another reason is Goldsmith's own mixture of delight and amused condescension (analogous to, though not identical with, Laurence Sterne's in Tristram Shandy and Johnson's in Rasselas, both contemporaneous) as he looks at the vicar and his domestic group, fit representatives of a ludicrous but workable world. Never married and always facing financial problems, he died in London and was buried in Temple Churchyard.

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