Goldsmith on Authorship in The Vicar of Wakefield

Goldsmith on Authorship in The Vicar ofWakefield Maureen Harkin Such as are fond of high life, will turn with disdain from the simplicity of his country fire-side. Such as mistake ribaldry for humour, will find no wit in his harmless conversation; and such as have been taught to deride religion, will laugh at one whose chief stores of comfort are drawn from futurity.1 Goldsmith, "Advertisement" to The Vicar of Wakefield Since its first generation ofreaders, The Vicar ofWakefieldhz.s given rise to a remarkable amount of critical uncertainty about how, precisely, we are to take it. The beleaguered tone of its "Advertisement " notwithstanding, Goldsmith's novel received a warm reception and went through numerous editions in the decades after its publication—suggesting an appeal and a coherence for his eighteenth and nineteenth-century readers that seems to have been largely lost in the twentieth century.2 This loss may in part reflect 1 Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 4:14. References to Goldsmith's works are to this edition. 2 For the early reviews in the Monthly Review and Critical Review, and the praise bestowed on the novel by Goethe, George Eliot, and Henry James, see Goldsmith: The Critical Heritage , ed. G.S. Rousseau (London: Routledge, 1974), pp. 44-46, 63-69, 277-78. For an interpretation of the text as heavily ironic rather than didactic, see Robert Hopkins, The True Genius of Oliver Goldsmith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969); and Ricardo Quintana, Oliver Goldsmith: A Georgian Study (New York: Macmillan, 1967). Among the most significant recent criticism on Goldsmith are John Bender's Foucauldian reading in "Prison Reform and the Sentence of Narration in The Vicar of Wakefield," The New Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987); Marshall Brown's discussion of technical aspects and problems of the text as part of the evolution of the novel genre in Preromanlicism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Frank Donoghue's study of Goldsmith as shrewd literary professional in The Fame MaEIGHTEENTH -CENTURY FICTION, Volume 14, Numbers 3-4, April-July 2002 326EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION a declining interest in the book's "moral tendency," its attempt to recuperate for its contemporaries the suspect genre of the novel for moral instruction. However, the gap between readings of Goldsmith 's first critics and more recent responses indicates an elusiveness that is also partly the result of Goldsmith's characteristic ambivalence about what as author he is suggesting in The VicarofWakefield. For all the attack of the opening "Advertisement," Goldsmith's own argument—that in an age of decline the author has a responsibility to act as reformer—undergoes many challenges and deformations in the course of the novel. I am interested here in tracking this ambivalence, demonstrating Goldsmith's uncertainties about what the character and possibilities of his age are, especially for the writer and literary intellectual. Goldsmith's career, as he rose from Grub Street hack in the 1750s to respected man of letters of the 1760s, is a notable instance of the kinds of professional rewards and advances newly attainable, though rarely achieved, by eighteenth-century authors. Goldsmith himself was quite conscious of this, and took the nature of modern literary culture in general and the position of the writer in particular as a frequent topic for his essays and journalism, and for his two longer critical works, the compilation of The Citizen of the World and An Enquiry into the Present State ofPolite Learning in Europe. The Vicar of Wakefield, written in the early 1760s, emerges from this matrix, and correspondingly focuses much of its attention on questions of how writing affects its readers and what the role or power of the writer in polite society might be. Goldsmith constructs the investigation of the writer's importance on a fairly thorough condemnation ofhis age—a context which gives his questions about the capacity of authors to reform their readers a certain urgency and, as it turns out, melancholy. His criticism takes two forms, turning on two different conceptions of modernity . The first attack is on the...