Fifteen Eighty Four

‘Read as one of the masterpieces by a person not acquainted with our literature, it might easily give an impression that this literature is not immense’. Henry James’s words in his introduction to a 1900 edition of Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield are a far cry from the unrestrained enthusiasm publishers expect from editors today. James’s restraint, though, does point to the paradoxical nature of the appeal of Goldsmith’s work. The Vicar of Wakefield is the tale of an English country vicar and his unfortunate family, victims of the machinations of the libidinous local squire, whose tribulations are finally ended only by Providence, with the help of the squire’s benevolent uncle.

Published in two slim volumes in 1766, the work immediately puzzled even those critics who most admired it. The Critical Review described it as ‘very singular’ while a writer in The Monthly Review went further, admitting that: ‘Through the whole course of our travels in the wild regions of romance, we never met with any thing more difficult to characterize, than the Vicar of Wakefield’.  In the early nineteenth century, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, indefatigable compiler of the 50-volume The British Novelists (1810), declared the tale ‘full of improbabilities and absurdities’ while Sir Walter Scott, introducing the work in Ballantyne’s English Novelists (1821-4) preferred to note the tale’s ‘impossibilities’.

And yet …. By the time Scott was writing, The Vicar of Wakefield had established itself with common readers as one of the most popular and frequently reprinted works of English Literature. There were three London editions in the year of publication and three Irish editions, two published in Dublin, another in Cork, while the first American edition appeared in Boston in 1767. The work rapidly appeared in translation: in French and German (1767), Dutch (1768), Danish (1779), Italian (1809-10) and in a Spanish translation published in New York in 1825. Translations into many European and non-European languages followed and today tutorials on The Vicar are to be found on YouTube in various languages of the Indian subcontinent including Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada.

Early readers delighted with Goldsmith’s tale included the fourteen-year old Katy Byles in Boston and the sixteen-year old future novelist Frances Burney who enjoyed the work’s mix of comedy and sentiment, eventually surrendering to the latter, and admitting that she was ‘surprised into Tears’. She would not be alone. The Irish poet Thomas Moore read The Vicar aloud to his wife in 1818: ‘we both cried over it’. A writer in  Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine might enquire portentously in 1843: ‘Who has not shed precious and heart-improving tears over it?’. The tale, however, was prized as much for its humour as its pathetic qualities. Among the many artists who provided illustrations – and The Vicar of Wakefield is one of the most extensively illustrated works of world literature – were Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank, both hugely admired caricaturists, in editions published in 1817 and 1832. Among other artists of undisputed stature who illustrated the tale or painted ambitious canvases of individual episodes are Niklaus Chodowiecki (1776), Thomas Stothard (1792), Tony Johannot (1838), William Mulready (1843), Daniel Maclise (1838, 1841), Hugh Thomson (1890), Arthur Rackham (1929) and John Austen (1939).

By the early-nineteenth century, The Vicar of Wakefield had been read, admired, and often loved by great writers of very different temperaments. In 1829, Goethe wrote privately to a friend of ‘all that I have owed to [Goldsmith], for the last seventy years,’ while in the same decade Byron declared The Vicar to be the most exquisite of ‘all romances in miniature’. Intriguingly, Goldsmith’s tale became a literary touchstone. In Jane Austen’s Emma, Harriet Smyth’s admirer, Mr Martin, is placed by having read the morally unexceptional Vicar but not the extravagant Gothic works of Ann Radcliffe or Regina Maria Roche. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), Mary Garth wittily asserts that she ‘never liked any clergyman except the Vicar of Wakefield and Mr Farebrother’, indicating both her assertive personality and Eliot’s assumption that the reference will be understood by all her readers. By 1879, Trollope declared that The Vicar of Wakefield ‘has taken a hold on our national literature equalled perhaps by no other novel’.   

The classic status of Goldsmith’s tale made fine editions suitable for Christmas or Year gifts, as well as school prizes.  Yet The Vicar of Wakefield was also truly popular. Cheap reprints had begun in the previous century in such works as The Novelist’s Magazine (1779); chapbook editions with crude but lively illustrations appeared in both Great Britain and in the United States; and, as Henry Mayhew reported, Goldsmith’s tale sold well from second-hand bookstalls in the expanding industrial towns of nineteenth-century England.

Often viewed as a quintessentially English book, The Vicar of Wakefield enjoyed marked popularity in the United States. Washington Irving, who authored three biographical works on Goldsmith between 1825 and 1849, often seemed happy to conflate the Irish writer’s character with that of the Vicar of his tale. William Dean Howells, Joel Chandler Harris, and Walt Whitman were other admirers, the last writing that he ‘had read The Vicar of Wakefield more times than I can count’.

The continuing appeal of Goldsmith’s fiction in the century and a half after its first appearance is indicated by adaptations for the stage, the opera house, and the infant film industry. Thomas Dibdin’s The Vicar of Wakefield: a melo-dramatic burletta (1817) started the fashion. In 1850, two separate dramatizations, by Sterling Coyne and Tom Taylor, were staged. Olivia (1878), by the Irish playwright W. G. Wills, took its title from the name of the Vicar’s elder daughter, with the title role played by Ellen Terry and the Vicar by Sir Henry Irving. In the same year, David Belasco, best known for stage work that would become Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904), presented a version of The Vicar in San Francisco. The composer Liza Lehmann wrote her light opera, The Vicar of Wakefield, in 1906 and extracts from it were played in the London Promenade concerts for some years. For a still more popular audience, Goldsmith’s tale appeared in no fewer than six film versions between 1910 and 1917.

Through the proliferation of many hundreds of editions; illustration; translation; and adaptation, The Vicar of Wakefield gained a world-wide fame, often as a work, in the words of Walter Scott, ‘truly English’. The author of this work, however, was not English but Irish. The son of a modest clergyman of the Church of Ireland in the Irish midlands, Goldsmith was educated at Trinity College Dublin, where a nineteenth-century statue of him stands before the College’s Front Gate. Like many contemporaries, Goldsmith emigrated, seeking his fortune in London’s Grub Street. As a result, his Irish identity sometimes proved an embarrassment to his fellow-countrymen and women as the question of what constituted a ‘national’ literature was fiercely disputed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The nineteenth-century nationalist politician Isaac Butt, founder of the Home Rule League, praised Goldsmith warmly in ‘Past and Present State of Literature in Ireland’, Thomas MacDonagh, however, a lecturer in English at University College Dublin, excluded Goldsmith, along with other eighteenth-century Irish-born writers, from his Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish, published in the same year as MacDonagh was shot by the British for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising. Attitudes hardened in the succeeding years as such critics as Daniel Corkery pressed for an understanding of the national literature as both Gaelic and Irish-speaking. In 1931, Goldsmith’s tale belatedly received a translation into Irish, as Viocáire Wakefield, by Seán Ó Ciosáin. More recent, pluralist criticism, including the Cambridge History of Irish Literature (2006), has been happy to encompass Goldsmith within the complex contexts of eighteenth-century Ireland and Irish identity.

This openness, characteristic of The Cambridge Edition of the Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, reflects the general tendencies of late-twentieth and twenty-first century criticism. So, The Vicar of Wakefield, whose blend of comedy and sentiment early critics found difficult to characterize, has been, variously, read as satire (hard and soft); the product of consistent irony; and as an eighteenth-century typological reading of the Old Testament story of Job’s suffering and redemption. The tale has attracted feminist readings that stress the patriarchal nature of the Vicar’s attempt to manage his family’s affairs; renewed biographical, religious and political readings, both historically and theoretically nuanced; and gender criticism offering ‘queer’ readings of the uneasy depiction of marriage within the tale.

Henry James resolved his puzzlement in respect of The Vicar of Wakefield – that ‘spoiled child of our literature’ – in two ways. First, by recourse to a characteristic insistence on ‘the old, old miracle of style’ and, secondly, by noting the ‘incomparable amenity’ of Goldsmith’s tale. What even the briefest examination of the reception of The Vicar of Wakefield surely reveals is an amenity, an agreeableness, that offers the elusive pleasure of allowing readers of very different kinds the possibility of understanding the tale as they prefer.