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The Works of Oliver Goldsmith: Life. Vicar of Wakefield. Essays. Letters
The Works of Oliver Goldsmith Life Vicar of Wakefield Essays Letters Author:Oliver Goldsmith Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD: A TALE. Sperate miseri, cavete feliccs. ['The Vicar of Wakefield' was first published on March the 27th, 1766. The second and t... more »hird editions followed in the same year, and the sixth was issued in the year of the author's death, 1774. Up to 1792 the publishers had sent forth twenty-two editions ; and by that time several translations had also been published in France and Germany. For the story of the sale of the work to its first publisher, Francis Nevv- bery, by Dr. Johnson, when its author was under a species of arrest for debt by his landlady, see the' Life of Goldsmith,' ante, p. 20. Our text is mainly that of the fifth edition, which is the last Goldsmith might have revised. He seems, however, to have made very few alterations after the second edition. We give the chief variations of text in the early editions in our Appendix, p. 236. A passage in the ' Memoirs ' of Goldsmith's friend Cradock (1828, v. iv. p. 279), suggests that the real scene of the story of the ' Vicar of Wakeh'eld' was the neighbourhood of Wakefield, in Yorkshire, Goldsmith having been, so Cradock seems to assert, in that part of the country when the tale was written or finished. This passage, however, is very vague. We notice it further in the Appendix, p. 237, and in a note to the ' Letters' at the end of the present volume.—Ed. An objection has been made to the latter part of the story, by the Edinburgh Review (art. on Standard Novels, Feb. 1815), viz. that it is " an almost entire plagiarism from Wilson's account of himself, and Adams's domestic history," in Fielding's ' Joseph Andrews.' This,however, is an idle charge. A similarity may indeed be traced in some of the incidents ; and the character of the Vicar may have been suggested, indeed probably was, by that of ...« less