The Vicar of Wakefield in Classics and the Western Canon

Sep 16, 2016 Clif Hostetler rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: novel

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Much like the Biblical story of Job but in a nineteenth century English setting, this tale of extreme misfortune suffered by an English vicar—followed in the end by the restoration of his former life—is a model for living through such extremes with exemplary alacrity. The vicar is described as a natural born preacher who takes every opportunity to pontificate—first to his family and later to his fellow debtor's prison inmates—on the virtues of faithful patience when dealing with the calamities o Much like the Biblical story of Job but in a nineteenth century English setting, this tale of extreme misfortune suffered by an English vicar—followed in the end by the restoration of his former life—is a model for living through such extremes with exemplary alacrity. The vicar is described as a natural born preacher who takes every opportunity to pontificate—first to his family and later to his fellow debtor's prison inmates—on the virtues of faithful patience when dealing with the calamities of life. These exhortations are included in the text of this book which allows the reader to also be the recipient of these sermons.

One can take the novel's plot at face value and consider it to be a sentimental work containing a moral lesson. However, more cynical critics have suggested that it is be a satire on such sentimentality and that it shows the uselessness of the vicar's pious values when dealing with the real "sinful" world.

In either case the highs and lows of this story are so extreme as to be only that which can happen in fictional literature. Nevertheless, it makes for a good story. If you want a thorough description of this book's plot I suggest the following website:
http://www.gradesaver.com/the-vicar-o...

The main virtue of this book is its antiquity. It was written from 1761 to 1762 and published in 1766. It was one of the most popular and widely read 18th-century novels among Victorians. The novel claims the distinction of being referenced in the writings of many other nineteenth century writers. The following quote is taken from Wikipedia.

The novel is mentioned in George Eliot's Middlemarch, Stendhal's The Life of Henry Brulard, Arthur Schopenhauer's "The Art of Controversy", Jane Austen's Emma, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins, Charlotte Brontë's The Professor and Villette, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, as well as his Dichtung und Wahrheit.

I think these references show how widely this book was read during the nineteenth century. It is still remembered today, but its fame has not continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries at that level.

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May 13, 2014 Laurel Hicks rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2015-01, audible, 0-kindle, books-read-in-2015, 2015-8

Strange little book—half melodrama, half sermon.

I like it better the second time around. A lot of literature has grown from this book.

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Jul 09, 2015 Dree rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2015-reads, blooms-western-canon, the-novel-project, 1001-read, england-uk-ireland

What a struggle. I did not enjoy this at all, and even though it is under 200 pages it took me 2 full weeks to read.

The vicar is not a nice man (he dumps out his daughters' beauty concoctions, and finds it funny; he mocks the other prisoners as bad men--yet he is a prisoner too). The notes in my edition were great, and point out the many instances in the book where Goldsmith has reused key phrases from his past essays, etc. So he reused his own nonfiction writing, and cobbled it together with a ...more

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