The Reverend Dr. Primrose, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, is, like Parson Adams and Parson Yorick, a Christian hero. He "unites in himself," says the author in the advertisement to his tale, "the three greatest characters upon earth; he is a priest, an husbandman, and the father of a family." He is moreover the embodiment of some of the principal sentimental virtues. He is charitable, humane, optimistic and in general readier to think well rather than ill of his fellow men. All his family, he tells us, "had but one character, that of being all equally generous, credulous, simple, and inoffensive." Since his moral assessments of the situations in which he finds himself are spontaneous and unselfish, he could be described as a man of feeling, but feelings in his case are always grounded in a coherent set of Christian principles, and they are always vigorously implemented in positive action. He is a man of sentiment, of sense rather than sensibility; and his determination to govern his behaviour according to principle often gets him into comic trouble with the world. When his son George is about to marry Miss Arabella Wilmot, Primrose endangers the whole scheme by refusing to compromise his beliefs on the subject of monogamy which he discovers to be diametrically opposed to those held by Miss Wilmot's father. Principle again carries the day a short while later when, learning that he has suddenly lost his fortune, Primrose refuses to let the marriage proceed under false pretences.

The purpose of the action in the novel is to display the Vicar of Wakefield in a number of testing situations. "He is drawn," Goldsmith tells us, "as ready to teach, and ready to obey, as simple in affluence, and majestic in adversity." Like Job, he loses his fortune and practically loses his family. At the nadir of his adventures he is presented to us ill, injured, penniless and in prison. His house has been burned down, one of his daughters appears to have been ruined by the local nobleman, Squire Thornhill, and his eldest son George is also in prison, chained and under sentence of death for having sent a challenge to the man who has wronged his sister.

But Primrose never loses his faith nor his moral energy. He preaches to the other prisoners, and once he has got them to listen to him persuades them to spend their time in useful work—i.e, in making small articles which they can sell. "Thus in less than a fortnight I had formed them into something social and humane, and had … brought [them] from their native ferocity into friendship and obedience." At the same time he consoles his fellow sufferers with the promise that although the rich man may be happy on earth the poor and the wretched who believe in God will be rewarded with an eternity of bliss—a reward which they are much more likely to attain since poverty and imprisonment cut them off from so many dangerous temptations.

But Primrose's virtue is rewarded in a much more immediate and tangible manner. A good fairy arrives in the shape of the cheerful vagabond Mr Burchell, whom Primrose has befriended earlier on in the story. "Former benevolence [is] now repaid with unexpected interest," as the heading to chapter 12, volume 2 puts it. Mr Burchell turns out to be Sir William Thornhill in disguise, the philanthropic uncle of the wicked young Squire Thomhill. Sir William marries one of Primose's daughters, he provides a dowry for the other (who turns out to be genuinely married to his nephew), George's fetters are struck off, Primrose's fortunes are restored, and all's well that ends well. When Primrose, at the beginning of the novel, sends his son out into the world to seek his fortune he urges him to make the following text his consolation: "I have been young, and now am old; yet never saw I the righteous man forsaken, or his seed begging their bread." The happy denouement would seem to be meant to demonstrate the validity of this hopeful statement.

But the whole process of the action of the story has been to negate it. The more virtuously Primrose and his family behave the more cruelly they are made to suffer at the hands of fortune and their fellow men. A synopsis of the plot up to, but not including, the happy reversal with which it is rounded off would make The Vicar of Wakefield sound like an episode in Sade's Justine—it seems to demonstrate not only that the practice of virtue is not rewarded in this world but also that it is likely to attract the most outrageously bad luck. The burning down of Primrose's house is like the final destruction and violation of Justine by a bolt of lightning—a gratuitous kick in the teeth delivered by the malevolent universe in which we have to live. The structure of The Vicar of Wakefield, regarded as a whole, is thus profoundly sentimental, in the modern sense of the term.

Its sentimentality for the most part, however, is not disturbing, and it is interesting to speculate as to why this should be so (the one distasteful element in the fortunate conclusion is the transformation of Squire Thornhill into a suitable husband for Olivia—he is a much nastier character in fact than Richardson's Mr B.). The Vicar of Wakefield remains a genuinely charming and delightful book. One of the main reasons for this is that the classically comic plot is so obviously artificial. It has the happy air of a deliberately contrived, almost magical ritual—a charm enacted against wicked men and evil days in which we are cordially invited to take part. Moreover Goldsmith's picture of life in the country is at once realistic and idyllic: the framework may be artificial, but the domestic rural world of the Primroses which it encompasses is rendered with remarkable fidelity, liveliness and good humour. The catastrophes which overtake the family are kept in perspective by the gentle comedy—Primrose slyly tipping the face-wash in the fire, or Mr Burchell, with his chorus of "Fudge!," undercutting the high-flown sophisticated chatter of the London whores. It is easy to understand how the young Goethe, embarked on his own idyllic holiday with the family at Sesenheim, could feel, as he tells us in Dichtung und Wahrheit, that he had walked into the Primrose household itself.

Nonetheless in the final assessment there is something worrying about the novel, a discordant note which all Goldsmith's charm cannot completely disguise. And the source of the discord can be located not so much in the Vicar of Wakefield himself as in his guardian angel, the man who saves him and his family from destruction, Mr Burchell, or Sir William Thomhill in disguise. Sir William Thornhill, as he presents himself through the mask of Burchell to the Primroses, is a melancholy man of feeling. The conversation between him and the Vicar is of unusual interest, and deserves to be quoted at length:

"What!" cried 1, "is my young landlord then the nephew of a man whose virtues, generosity, and singularities are so universally known? I have heard of Sir William Thomhill represented as one of the most generous, yet whimsical, men in the kingdom; a man of consummate benevolence"—"Something, perhaps, too much so," replied Mr. Burchell, "at least he carried benevolence to an excess when young; for his passions were then strong, and as they were all upon the side of virtue, they led it up to a romantic extreme.… He loved all mankind; for fortune prevented him from knowing that there were rascals. Physicians tell us of a disorder in which the whole body is so exquisitely sensible, that the slightest touch gives pain: what some have thus suffered in their persons, this gentleman felt in his mind. The slightest distress, whether real or fictitious, touched him to the quick, and his soul laboured under a sickly sensibility of the miseries of others. Thus disposed to relieve, it will be easily conjectured, he found numbers disposed to solicit; his profusions began to impair his fortune, but not his good-nature; that, indeed, was seen to encrease as the other seemed to decay: he grew improvident as he grew poor; and though he talked like a man of sense, his actions were those of a fool."

In short he began to dissipate his fortune, and also to lose confidence in his ability to assess the characters and motives of his fellow men. In order to repair the damage both to himself and his finances "he travelled through Europe on foot." This left him (for some inexplicable reason) "more affluent than ever." And now, therefore, "his bounties are more rational and moderate than before; but still he preserves the character of an humourist, and finds most pleasure in eccentric virtues." Since Sir William Thornhill is so important in the moral scheme of Goldsmith's fable it is interesting to note the terms in which he describes himself. He has a "sickly sensibility," he has behaved more like a fool than a man of sense, "he preserves the character of an humourist," i.e., an oddity, and he "finds most pleasure in eccentric virtues." "Eccentric" is perhaps the key word: Thomhill is able to preserve his integrity and also to operate effectively if erratically as a moral agent only by functioning outside the society to which he belongs. He does not live on his estates, he moves amongst his tenants in disguise, he is utterly incapable because of his exquisite sensibility of playing a normal part in the community. Yet he represents in their most highly developed form the moral ideals of this society from which he is in a sense excluded. Primrose, the "normal" man, occupies a central place in this same society—husbandman, priest, and father—but it destroys him. Burchell / Thornhill is thus not merely a Harounel-Rashid figure, the romantic "someone in disguise" who turns up in the nick of time to set things right. He is a symbol of alienation, the dispossessed conscience of a sick society. And although like George Primrose (and presumably like Goldsmith in his happier moments) he recalls his travels on the Continent cheerfully enough, his motive for undertaking them was despair. Against the carefree image of the happy wanderer playing his flute to the simple peasants one should set the opening lines of The Traveller, which Goldsmith published in 1765 (a year before the appearance of The Vicar of Wakefield) and which bears the subtitle, A Prospect of Society:

Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,
Or by the lazy Scheld, or wandering Po;
Or onward, where the rude Carinthian boor
Against the houseless stranger shuts the door;
Or where Campania's plain forsaken lies,
A weary waste expanded to the skies,
Where'er I roam, whatever realms to see,
My heart untravell'd fondly turns to thee;
Still to my brother turns, with ceaseless pain,
And drags at each remove a lengthening chain.

The implications of The Vicar of Wakefield, ostensibly a sentimental comedy, are thus at bottom as pessimistic and as elegiac as those of The Deserted Village and The Traveller. One feels that for Goldsmith society appears to be so irrational, so cruel, and so economically inefficient and inequitable, that it is extremely difficult if not impossible for the ordinary, well-intentioned, morally responsible man to live the good life. For Dr Primrose to survive he needs the magical assistance of Sir William Thornhill. It could be said that Tom Jones similarly needs the magical assistance of Squire Allworthy—but he does not need it nearly so desperately. Allworthy in the end merely represents the good luck which Tom in a sense deserves: it is easy to believe that he would have had more than a fighting chance of winning through somehow on his own resources. But one cannot feel this about the Primrose family. The structure of The Vicar of Wakefield, and in particular the division of moral responsibility between the Vicar himself and Sir William Thornhill, reflects a radical disquiet with the nature of man and society, a disquiet which forces Goldsmith into sentimentality.