Goldfarb has a Ph.D. in English and has published two books on the Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray. In the following essay, Goldfarb discusses the interaction of the themes in "Wandering Willie's Tale" and the connection of the tale to the novel in which it appears.

At first glance, "Wandering Willie's Tale" seems like an odd combination of the supernatural and the mundane. On the one hand, it is the story of a visit to what seems like hell. On the other hand, the point of the visit is to obtain a rent receipt. This odd combination may be what led one commentator (A. O. J. Cockshut in his book The Achievement of Walter Scott) to deny that the story is a tale of the supernatural. And it may be what led another commentator, David Daiches, in his essay on Redgauntlet in From Jane Austen to...