The Vicar of Wakefield

The Vicar of Wakefield is the 1766 novel by Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), the Anglo-Irish writer whose career produced verse, drama, journalism, and one short novel that became a Georgian and Victorian classic. The book tells the story of the Reverend Dr. Charles Primrose, a country clergyman who loses his fortune through a banking failure and watches his family endure a chain of disasters including the seduction of his elder daughter and his own imprisonment. The novel ends with the restoration of fortune and the punishment of the villain. The Vicar of Wakefield was one of the most-translated English novels of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was read across Europe by writers including Goethe, who praised it warmly in Dichtung und Wahrheit. The book remains the most widely-read work by Goldsmith. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.