SOURCE: "The Novel of Manners" in Modern Critical Views: Oliver Goldsmith, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House, 1987, pp. 7-14.

In the following essay, first published in 1967 and reprinted in 1987, Paulson argues that Goldsmith creates a new style of novel of manners in the first seventeen chapters of The Vicar of Wakefield.

The scene of the novel of manners … draws on both the satiric touchstone scene in which guilt is diffused and the satiro-sentimental scene of sexual threat and tears. Both the ironic observer of the Fielding novel and the Smollettian observer of delicate sensibility—one a controlling intelligence, the other a character—contribute to the heroine of the novel of manners. Those assistant satirists who surround the dumb man of feeling are as important as the spectra of different points of view in the Spectator Club and Humphrey Clinker. The essential elements, however, are the controlling and analytic...