Barnes & Noble Digital Library

Few novels portray good men, and far fewer allow them to tell their own stories. In Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, a flawed but good man tells the story of his moral regeneration through a series of Job-like trials. With prudence its theme, the novel is ultimately a harrowing story of redemption through suffering. Well received on its first publication in 1766, it averaged two editions a year throughout the nineteenth century and collected praise from writers such as Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.