Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield is one of those books you told yourself in college to read but never quite got around to it. It is Goldsmith's only novel and includes several of his poems. The book might be termed "The Book of Job as written by Jane Austen," in that it tells of the toils and troubles that beset an English vicar and his family, while at the same time being concerned with the love affairs of young people. The family Wakefield consists of the vicar, his wife and six children, two older boys, two girls of marriageable age and two small boys. The family is forced by circumstances to leave their good, middle class life in Wakefield and move to a lesser, but still tolerable existence in the countryside. There they encounter a variety of characters, some good and some bad and some seemingly good, but bad and some seemingly bad, but good--it all gets sorted out in the end.



Much of what happens in the book is improbable, but the idea is not to present a factual account as much as a story about morality. As time goes by we see the foibles of the vicar and his family, but at the same time we see their natural goodness as well. But their problems mount and the book descends into what seems like unrelieved misery. We keep waiting for the negatives to turn into positives--after all this is not Thomas Hardy--but they are slow in coming and then are crammed into an implausible ending. One advantage of the book is that it is relatively short (less than 200 pages), thus we are not forced to wade through 500 pages of drudgery to find an alls well that ends well ending.



I rate it at four stars because it is an excellent example of classical English writing with a story line that gives some insights into the life and values of English people at a time when England was growing in influence and power in the world.

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