SOURCE: "Charlotte's 'Vicar' and Goethe's Eighteenth-Century Tale about Werther" in Narrative Ironies, edited by A. Prier and Gerald Gillespie, Rodopi, 1997, pp. 283-97.

In the essay below, Prier argues that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Die Leiden des jungends Werther was influenced by Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield.

"Indeed, pappa," replied Olivia, "… I have read a great deal of controversy. I have read the disputes between Thwackum and Square; the controversy between Robinson Crusoe and Friday the savage, and I am now employed in reading the controversy in Religious courtship."

The Vicar of Wakefield'

Olivia reads books, and the Vicar, seemingly satisfied with his daughter's intellectual qualifications in this instance, sends her off to help his wife concoct a "gooseberry-pye" (45), an act perhaps a bit more culinary than Charlotte's cutting bread and butter, but just as ironically amusing if one takes the position of early nineteenth-century English wags. Goethe...