The Vicar of Wakefield (Oxford World's Classics)
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oxford world’s classics THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD Oliver Goldsmith was born in 1730(?), the second son of Charles Goldsmith, curate of the parish of Kilkenny West in West Meath in Ireland. In 1745 he was admitted to Trinity College Dublin. He quickly dissipated his savings by gambling, which was to become an abiding interest. After periods at the Universities of Edinburgh and Leyden he spent 1755–6 travelling in Europe, where he is reputed to have eked out a living by playing the flute and disputing doctrinal points at monasteries and universities. Before embarking on a writing career he worked in London as an apothecary’s assistant, a doctor, and a school usher. A combination of overwork, worry, and poor self-treatment hastened his death in 1774. Goldsmith’s ability and range as a professional writer were considerable. Best known perhaps for The Vicar of Wakefield, he was also the author of biographies, anthologies, translations, poems (The Traveller, 1764, and The Deserted Village, 1770), plays (She Stoops to Conquer, 1773), as well as numerous reviews and essays. Arthur Friedman is the late distinguished Professor of English at the University of Chicago and editor of Goldsmith’s Collected Works. Robert L. Mack is a lecturer in the School of English at the University of Exeter. He has previously taught at Princeton University and Vanderbilt University, and is the editor of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments and Oriental Tales for Oxford World’s Classics. His biog- raphy of the poet Thomas Gray was published by Yale University Press in 2000. oxford world’s classics For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles—from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels—the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing. The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS OLIVER GOLDSMITH The Vicar of Wakefield Edited by ARTHUR FRIEDMAN With an Introduction and Notes by ROBERT L. MACK 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Editorial matter © Robert L. Mack 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1981 Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1999 New edition 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset in Ehrhardt by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St. Ives plc. ISBN 0–19–280512–6 978–0–19–280512–6 1 CONTENTS Introduction vii Note on the Text xxxix Select Bibliography xl A Chronology of Oliver Goldsmith xlv THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD 1 Explanatory Notes 171 This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION Composition, Publication, and Reception The Vicar of Wakefield—Oliver Goldsmith’s only novel—was first published on 27 March 1766. A second edition, in which Goldsmith made a great many stylistic revisions to the text, appeared on 31 May of that same year. Three further editions of the novel were to be published in the author’s own lifetime, the last of which was dated 2 April 1774—just two days before Goldsmith’s death. The manner in which the manuscript of Goldsmith’s novel first found its way into the hands of booksellers has become the stuff of literary legend. The most famous account first appeared in James Boswell’s monumental Life of Johnson in 1791. Boswell reports Johnson as having recollected, I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was drest, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he pro- duced to me. I looked into it, and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return, and having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.1 Boswell was not alone in considering the anecdote worth preserv- ing. Both Hester Lynch (Thrale) Piozzi and Sir John Hawkins 1 James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 294. viii Introduction had included similar accounts in their own memoirs relating to Johnson (which appeared in 1786 and 1787, respectively), and still further details regarding the origin and history of Gold- smith’s novel were to be forthcoming.2 The inevitable contradic- tions between these several versions would extend to comprehend a wide range of disagreements regarding the actual date on which the transaction took place, the identity of the bookseller(s) involved, the precise amount of money that changed hands, and speculation as to where and when the work had been written or, indeed, if the novel had even been completed at the time of the sale. In whatever form one first encounters the story, however, its most striking feature remains the simple revelation that The Vicar of Wakefield is clearly among those works that finally reached the public only as a result of immediate financial need. Like John- son’s own Rasselas (1759)—said to have been written ‘in the even- ings of one week’, and under the awful pressure of his mother’s grave illness—The Vicar of Wakefield, for all its polite reputation as a genial and light-hearted work, was in actual fact the product of financial exigency.3 In a manner similar to so many noteworthy novels of the period (among them not only the works of profes- sional authors such as Eliza Haywood and Clara Reeve, but also the fictions of Frances Sheridan, Elizabeth Inchbald, and the later novels of Fanny Burney), Goldsmith’s volume was written under conditions of considerable economic, emotional, and even physical stress. As an actual text, The Vicar of Wakefield was made available to a wider audience only as an impromptu means of last resort. Goldsmith had already, even at this relatively early stage of his career in London, gained some reputation as one of the most prolific of the so-called ‘Grub Street hacks’—that growing breed of writers-for-hire whose work was to fill the pages of an 2 The accounts of Hawkins and Piozzi are included in E. H. Mikhail (ed.), Goldsmith: Interviews and Recollections (London: St Martin’s Press, 1993), 30–4, 53–5; other versions of events can be found in several of the passages brought together in G. S. Rousseau (ed.), Goldsmith: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974). 3 Boswell, Life of Johnson, 240. Introduction ix ever-increasing number of newspapers, journals, and magazines throughout the period. Since 1757 he had been turning out enormous amounts of material—translations, book reviews, short tales, and essays—writing at first for Ralph Griffiths’s Monthly Review, and later for (among others) the Critical Review, the British Magazine, and the Public Ledger. He also found the time to see his own short-lived periodical—The Bee (1759)—through the press, and to publish his extended Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759). Given the rather chaotic circumstances under which the manuscript of Goldsmith’s novel was sold in the autumn of 1762 and the difficult conditions under which it was written, it is all the more intriguing that his tale betrays in its telling what can only be described as a narrative pace of hasty leisure.