Study Guide to The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Dexterity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645423614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, one of the most beloved and widely read novels of the Victorian era.

As a novel of family endurance set in eighteenth-century England, The Vicar of Wakefield 's strong moral tone and depiction of resilience has resounded with readers for more than 200 years. Moreover, the work is considered a model example of the sentimental novel, one of the era's most popular literary genres. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Goldsmith's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:

- Introductions to the Author and the Work

- Character Summaries

- Plot Guides

- Section and Chapter Overviews

- Test Essay and Study Q&As

The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO OLIVER GOLDSMITH

 

GOLDSMITH’S EARLY LIFE

Oliver Goldsmith’s family was of English origin, but had long been settled in Ireland, where the writer was born on November 10, 1728. His father was a clergyman who also worked as a farmer, and Oliver was one of a large family. A good sketch of his father’s character is given in Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World. It was said that the whole family was “generous, credulous, simple” and lacking in foresight or thrift. The writer spent a great part of his boyhood in the village of Lissoy where he received a sound though somewhat irregular education. In 1744 he entered Trinity College, Dublin, as a poor scholar – called in those days a “sizar” - and this poverty-stricken position caused the sensitive youth considerable humiliation. His unhappiness at college was increased by the fact that his tutor, who happened to be rather a brutal person, insisted on teaching logic and mathematics, both of which Goldsmith hated. The young man had a serious handicap in his appearance. He was gawky, awkward, and ungainly. He also continually broke college rules, which by no means helped his academic career. Despite these drawbacks, however, Goldsmith succeeded in obtaining a B. A. in 1749. His family had been pressing him for some time to become a clergyman, and he even prepared himself for this profession. When he went for his first interview with Bishop Synge of Elphin, however, he wore a pair of flaming scarlet breeches and was rejected as being a positive risk. He then spent some time looking around for a suitable career, but Goldsmith in this period showed himself to be an irresponsible spendthrift, squandering money which his relatives and widowed mother badly needed.

GOLDSMITH’S LATER LIFE

Early in 1753 he went to Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, to study medicine. He was not a very industrious student, however, and attended only a few lectures before proceeding to Leyden, in Holland, where he continued his studies. From there he set out to do a walking tour of Europe “with one shirt in his pocket and a devout reliance on Providence,” as Sir Walter Scott said. He crossed Flanders, France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy on foot, earning his keep at odd jobs as he went. During his travels he picked up considerable information which he later used in his books. He also claimed to have earned a medical degree at either Louvain or Padua. (One of Goldsmith’s friends said later that he was forced to leave the Continent, since he killed more patients than he cured.) He returned to London early in 1756, where he lived a wretched, poverty-stricken existence, making ends meet by working at various menial occupations. By 1760 he had started hack-writing for booksellers, and in his Present State of Polite Learning in Europe he makes the following comments on this way of life: “The author, when unpatronized by the Great, has naturally recourse to the bookseller. There cannot be, perhaps, imagined a combination more prejudicial to taste than this. It is the interest of one to allow as little for writings, and of the other to write as much, as possible; accordingly, tedious compilations, and periodical magazines, are the result of their joint endeavors. In these circumstances, the author bids adieu to fame, writes for bread, and for that only. Imagination is seldom called in; he sits down to address the venal muse with the most phlegmatic apathy.” This soul-destroying, penny-pinching existence, helped along by Goldsmith’s reckless generosity and taste for extravagant clothes, led to a complete breakdown in his health. He died, wretchedly impoverished, on April 4, 1774, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

GOLDSMITH’S MINOR WORKS

Much that Goldsmith wrote was hack work of no lasting literary merit and has naturally perished with his age. Yet the booksellers of his day found him a profitable writer, since he was industrious and wrote with an easy, flowing style. In fact, his natural talent as a stylist prompted the great Dr. Samuel Johnson to write in his epitaph that Goldsmith adorned every branch of literature that he touched. Among his lesser known works, he wrote histories of Rome, Greece and England, an English grammar, A History of the Earth and Animated Nature, a History of Mecklenburgh, and many other pieces which are no longer available. Dr. Johnson said of his Animated Nature: “He is now writing a Natural History, and will make it as interesting as a Persian tale.” Goldsmith himself was acutely aware of the menial nature of his work, and admitted that in compiling one work called Selections of English Poetry, for example, he merely marked his selected passages with a red pencil. He counteracted his guilty feelings about accepting 200 pounds for this by claiming that “a man shows his judgment in these selections, and he may be often twenty years of his life cultivating that judgment.” In the last years of his life, Goldsmith actually made good money - as much as 800 pounds a year - but he could never control his extravagance. His debts rose in proportion to his income, and at the time of his death he owed more than 2,000 pounds. Regarding Goldsmith’s spending habits, Dr. Johnson remarked once: “Was ever poet so trusted before?”

GOLDSMITH’S MAJOR WORKS

Goldsmith is remembered for having written a variety of important works, including a book of essays (The Citizen of the World, 1760-61); a novel (The Vicar of Wakefield, 1766); and two plays (The Good-Natured Man, 1768, and She Stoops to Conquer, 1773). Of all the art forms he dealt with, he took greatest care with his poems, and we know for a fact that he took painstaking care with their composition and revision. He never revised The Vicar of Wakefield, however, although it was not published until a few years after he wrote it. Goldsmith said that there was no need to take further care with it, since he had already been paid for it. It is interesting to note that he never thought that he would enjoy a good reputation with posterity, and was continually depressed during his lifetime about lack of recognition. He need not have worried, however, since his works have enjoyed universal popularity right to the present day. He was uncouth personally, and wrote everything with a struggle. His resultant inferiority complex caused him to remark once that “the public will never do me justice; whenever I write anything, they make a point to know nothing about it.” Yet his self-debasing attitude was really unjustified. He counted among his closest friends such eminent 18th Century figures as Dr. Samuel Johnson, the “Great Lexicographer”; Sir Joshua Reynolds, the painter; Edmund Burke, the orator; and David Garrick, the actor. He was also a privileged member of the exclusive Literary Club which used to meet every Monday night at a place called the Turk’s Head in Soho, London. Also, most of his major works were hailed as soon as they were made public. The Traveller, for example, was described by Dr. Johnson as the finest poem written since the death of Alexander Pope. Within a mere five months, The Vicar of Wakefield, after a bad start, went into several editions. The Deserted Village and She Stoops to Conquer made him as renowned as Dr. Johnson himself. Since his death as well, Goldsmith has on the whole enjoyed a good reputation, mainly because people do not consider his works as shallow and superficial as those of many other writers of the 18th Century. His works have warmth, a sense of humanity and charm, which are qualities not often associated with other great writers of the age, such as Johnson, Fielding or Pope. But before proceeding to analyze Goldsmith’s literary merit, with particular reference to The Vicar of Wakefield, some comments should be made on the social, historical, and literary background of that period, which is generally referred to as the Augustan Age.

INTRODUCTION: LITERARY TRENDS AND PERSONALITIES OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

THE AUGUSTAN AGE: SOCIAL BACKGROUND

Goldsmith’s works can best be judged and enjoyed if we understand something about the background of the 18th Century. This is often called the Augustan Age after the period of Latin literature which prevailed during the reign of the Emperor Augustus. This age roughly spans the years between about 1660 and 1780, but for the sake of convenience we usually refer to it as the “18th Century.” It is an interesting time, particularly since it bridged the gap between the 17th Century, which was noted for its strict scholarship, and the 19th Century, which was marked by religious and scientific skepticism. In the Augustan Age there was a growing interest in man and his society, and in the self, which was an integral part of that society. The age has often been attacked, somewhat unfairly, as one in which only glossy decoration and shallow elegance were admired. Yet it must be said in its defense that all different aspects of life were examined and analyzed by Augustan writers, and that these writers regarded the whole of society as its audience. It should also be noted that this society was often satirized - as in Alexander Pope’s great poem, The Rape of the Lock - and even attacked with some genuine bitterness, as in Oliver Goldsmith’s social poem, The Deserted Village. When we compare such poems to works written previous to the 18th Century, such as Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene or John Milton’s Paradise Lost, we get the impression that these earlier poets wrote exclusively for a very limited, scholarly audience. One very bad feature of the Augustan Age, however, was the fact that a writer often had to rely on the generous influence and financial support of a private patron in order to survive. Finding a patron usually meant that an author had to degrade himself; and the famous 18th Century literary giant, Dr. Samuel Johnson, wrote a magnificent letter decrying the patronage system, to a certain Lord Chesterfield who had humiliated Johnson. On the other hand, one good aspect of patronage was the fact that the patron’s interests were often wide, ranging from contemporary politics to classical literature. This afforded the writer a wider range of topics to deal with than he might have had otherwise. The printing press also gained prominence in this age; and the tremendous financial success of the publication of Alexander Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey proved that a writer could survive comfortably without the support of a private patron. England in the 18th Century also enjoyed a healthy, expanding economy, and it was at this time that Lloyd’s famous shipping agency and the Bank of England were founded. London, of course, was the home of civilized society in the Augustan Age, although exotic places and tastes were also admired, as is shown in Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World and The Traveller. In this period, truth, superior taste, good sense, elegance, and the moral law were all held in high esteem. It was the age of “neoclassicism,” by which writers judged contemporary man in the light of the ancient classics; and of “humanism,” whereby man had to fashioned himself according to the best of past cultures. All this was expressed in the literary tradition of the age.

AUGUSTAN LITERARY TRADITION

The main rule of this tradition was that man should “follow Nature.” This meant that he had to obey the strict rules of literary judgment and cultural taste by which he could fulfill himself. To achieve this, a writer had to have a thorough knowledge of classical literature, and was obliged to follow a strict set of rules and regulations. For example, everything had to be written with “wit,” which in those days meant a lucid, clever way of expressing ideas. In poetry, this was done by the technique of rhyming “heroic couplets,” which received the name from the fact that it seemed the neatest method of voicing a lofty opinion with clarity, control, and ease. Goldsmith himself perfected this technique, and one of the best examples of the heroic couplet is found in his description of the parson in The Deserted Village:

A man he was to all the country dear,

And passing rich on forty pounds a year.

To the Augustans, art had to be subservient to Nature, but according to Alexander Pope, Nature had to be “methodized.” The result of this was that something which seems artificial to us was perfectly “natural” to the 18th Century mind. A study of the picnic scene in Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, for example, shows how this process of methodizing Nature affected scenic descriptions. In the 18th Century, society had to be examined according to the rules of Reason and Common Sense, and this led to the writing of such critical and satirical works as Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village. Some great prose was also written at this time, in the form of both essays and novels. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele were the leading essayists, and their contributions to the periodicals The Tatler and The Spectator established a tone and quality of style which are hard to equal. It was the age in which prose in general and the novel in particular came into their own as art forms, and we shall shortly discuss the works of such prose writers as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne. Then we will examine Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield in great detail. Because of the accentuation on classical rules and regulations, however, there was a tendency toward too much stifling formalism in 18th Century writing, and this led in turn to a certain monotonous conformity. Yet to counteract this drawback, the strict literary demands made on an author led to a remarkably high degree of technical skill and disciplined clarity. Before embarking on a detailed examination of the novel, however, it is necessary to discuss briefly the social and literary club of which Goldsmith was a member, and which was led by the giant of the Augustan Age, Dr. Samuel Johnson.

DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

Born on September 18, 1709, at Lichfield, Johnson was the precocious son of a bookseller in that small cathedral town. He was of little use to his father, however, since he spent most of his time reading books rather than selling them, until he eventually was admitted to Pembroke College, Oxford, as a Commoner. He then found employment as a journalist in Birmingham, but in 1737 he went to London to embark on his literary career. In 1744 he established his reputation with his Life of Richard Savage, and in 1749 his poem The Vanity of Human Wishes appeared. At this time he started his greatest project, the Dictionary of the English Language, which appeared on April 15, 1755, in two folio volumes. He also wrote many essays for the periodical the Rambler; but although his biographer James Boswell said that in these he showed himself to be “a majestick teacher of moral and religious wisdom,” Johnson was in fact heavy-handed and dull as an essayist. Of his prose works, his allegorical story Rasselas, written in 1759, and his Lives of the Poets, written in 1777, are those which are still most widely read. We owe a great deal of our knowledge of Johnson to Boswell, whose writings bring to life not only the personality of the grea...