SOURCE: "Goldsmith's First Vicar" in Review of English Studies, N.s., Vol. XLI, No. 162, May, 1990, pp. 191-9.

In the essay below, Taylor discusses the relation of Goldsmith's earlier work "The History of Miss Stanton" with The Vicar of Wakefield.

Recent studies of Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield have focused on a question still unanswered, despite the efforts of W. O. S. Sutherland, Robert Hopkins, David Durant, and others: how do we account for the apparent sentimentality and implausibility of a novel written by an impassioned critic of 'romance' fiction? One obvious solution is that Goldsmith's novel is a satiric undermining of romance conventions. Sutherland sees The Vicar as a 'kindly satire' on the sentimental novel,¹ and Hopkins finds it a sustained, sophisticated burlesque of sentimentalist and trite fiction.² David Durant argues that the novel's sub-text demonstrates the impotency of didactic fiction.³ Attempting to revive flagging interest in...