Goldsmith, Oliver | David Aaron Murray (essay date 1997)
David Aaron Murray (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: "From Patrimony to Paternity in The Vicar of Wakefield" in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 9, No. 3, April, 1997, pp. 327-36.
[In the following essay, Murray contends that ultimately The Vicar of Wakefield concerns the nature of authority and transformation.]
In his Advertisement to The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith declared that his hero, the Reverend Dr Primrose, "unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth; he is a priest, an husbandman, and the father of a family."1 He is also the narrator of a story, and in all four of these positions of authority, Primrose is quixotically ineffective. As a priest he pursues his "peculiar tenet" (p. 13) of strict monogamy to the point of alienating parishioners, even before the initial loss of fortune that precipitates the novel's action. As a husbandman he proves to be comically inept in managing his...
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