COM P LET E

CLASSIC S
UNABRIDGED

Oliver Goldsmith

Vicar of
The
Wakefield
Read by Nicholas Farrell
1 The Vicar of Wakefield 9:58
2 Chapter 2 8:38
3 Chapter 3 8:28
4 The next morning we all set forward together... 7:19
5 Chapter 4 7:54
6 Chapter 5 8:22
7 Chapter 6 7:55
8 Chapter 7 9:58
9 Chapter 8 3:18
10 A Ballad 9:33
11 Chapter 9 7:44
12 Chapter 10 9:41
13 Chapter 11 10:49
14 Chapter 12 11:16
15 Chapter 13 7:46
16 Chapter 14 6:24
17 I here interrupted what he was going to say... 7:49
18 Chapter 15 4:17
19 We saw him approach... 6:56
20 Chapter 16 6:59

2
21 We once again therefore entered into a consultation... 5:13
22 Chapter 17 6:35
23 An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog 10:47
24 Chapter 18 9:55
25 Chapter 19 9:32
26 In such a state, therefore, all that the middle order has left... 10:00
27 Chapter 20 6:11
28 ‘Sir,’ replied my son... 6:18
29 In this honourable post, however, I was not without a rival. 10:26
30 ‘This scheme thus blown up, I had some thoughts of fairly shipping...’ 10:35
31 Chapter 21 10:02
32 I instantly knew the voice of my poor ruined child Olivia. 9:02
33 Chapter 22 9:07
34 Chapter 23 10:25
35 Chapter 24 10:46
36 Chapter 25 10:15
37 Chapter 26 11:47
38 Chapter 27 9:22
39 Chapter 28 7:34
40 Mr Jenkinson interupted their harmless prattle... 8:47

3
41 Honoured Sir, - I have called off my imagination... 6:48
42 Chapter 29 10:41
43 Chapter 30 9:19
44 My son seemed all this while regardless of what I said... 8:52
45 Chapter 31 8:48
46 ‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed the Baronet... 9:44
47 Mr Wilmot now entering, he seemed not a little pleased... 7:51
48 Happiness was expanded upon every face... 7:51
49 Chapter 32 7:11

Total time: 7:01:20

4
 Oliver Goldsmith
(1728–1774)

Vicar of
The
Wakefield
We think of eighteenth-century England Astonishingly, we can find all these
as an age of elegance, an age of reason competing Englands – bright and dark,
and of rational religion, an age of elegant and vile – portrayed in one brief
moral reflection, an age of privileged novel published in 1776 by that erratic
aristocrats in their fine country houses, genius, Oliver Goldsmith. The Vicar
an age reflected back to us in its neo- of Wakefield is a charming, baffling,
classical architecture and the paintings unclassifiable novel of manners and
of Gainsborough, Reynolds, Zoffany and morals, which quickly became a classic
Stubbs. But of course it was also an age of that has not been out of print since the
squalor, poverty and blatant injustice, an day of its publication. Not the least among
age of teeming cities, brutality and public its claims to fame is the celebrated story of
hangings, an age of disease when infant its publication. The great Doctor Johnson,
mortality was astronomical and the poor a close friend of Goldsmith, received an
had to live on the crumbs from the rich urgent message one day, asking him to
man’s table, and an age ruled by political come at once to Goldsmith’s lodging. On
bribery and corruption. This was the arrival, Johnson found that Goldsmith was
England of Hogarth, whose bitter satires penniless and was about to be thrown out
showed the underside of the nation’s life. of his lodgings. Johnson asked Goldsmith
5
if he had any possessions that might be novelists: the picaresque adventures of the
turned into ready money, and Goldsmith road and the inn from Fielding and Smollett;
showed him the manuscript of The Vicar of the seduction of innocent girlhood from
Wakefield. Leaving Goldsmith to console Richardson’s moral sagas; the sentimental
himself with a bottle, Johnson hurried off reflections from Sterne; and the idea of
to a nearby bookseller and sold the novel the philosophical novel from Johnson’s
for £60, thus solving Goldsmith’s crisis – Rasselas. All these elements are packed
for the present. into a tale of less than 200 pages, whose
The novel’s fame is demonstrated by sudden changes of pace and tone suggest
the fact that even those who have never Goldsmith’s haste and stress as he wrote
read it know what it is about. It is a moral it, as if he were pouring it out as fast as
tale concerning a benign and saintly he could, with little care for structure or
clergyman, Doctor Charles Primrose, realism. The main story-line is interrupted
whose tranquil life is shattered by a series more than once by long, personal flash-
of cruel reversals, blows of fate, which back narratives, notably that of Doctor
deprive him of his fortune, his position, Primrose’s eldest son, George. He tells of
his family and his liberty. Throughout his adventures while travelling in Europe,
this ordeal, he maintains his dignity, his chasing a variety of ways to earn his living,
philosophical demeanour and his faith in among them hack writer, Greek scholar,
God. Finally, having reached the depths art dealer, and actor, all attempted and
of destitution, the wheel of fortune turns, abandoned in the dramatic swings of
and he is restored to liberty and happiness. fortune.
This is a Book of Job transferred to This headlong quality in the
eighteenth-century bourgeois England, narrative suggests another parallel that
in what is one of the first purely domestic is somewhat surprising, namely Voltaire’s
novels in our literature. great satire, Candide. Whether Goldsmith
Goldsmith has evidently taken had read Candide we do not know, but
elements from other eighteenth-century it is likely, for he certainly knew Voltaire’s
6
works in general and wrote a biography eighteenth-century life? Are we supposed
of him. Travel, adventure, seduction, to believe in the successive blows of fate
sudden flashes of good fortune and that strike the good vicar, and in his angelic
equally sudden disasters, characters who patience? It seems that generations of
disappear and return later, even when readers from the 1770s onwards did
they are supposed to be dead – all these indeed take the story at face value, and
things turn up in both novels. And both they loved its portrayal of this sincere,
novels are fundamentally theodicies: they dignified, philosophical Englishman, his
explore the question of divine providence, knockabout adventures and his final
and why God permits evil to triumph in vindication. But the more cynical modern
the world, although in neither book is reader will scarcely get past the first two
an answer produced. Candide examines or three chapters without the feeling that
this question in the violent, surreal world his leg is being pulled. Surely, he will say,
created by Voltaire’s imagination, in we are reading a satirical tragicomedy in
outlandish settings such as the Lisbon prose, paralleling Hogarth’s visual satire of
earthquake, the jungles of South America, the grand, pretentious, bizarre, squalid,
and the slave markets of Turkey. Goldsmith hypocritical, anarchic society in which they
works out his vision in the more down-to- both lived. Yet no one can demonstrate
earth setting of Georgian England. beyond all doubt which view of the novel
The echoes of Candide take us is the true one – it is all a matter of personal
further however, because the great critical perception and response. It is a critical
question in understanding The Vicar of puzzle that has resisted all solutions, and
Wakefield is simply this: is it serious or it is somehow appropriate to Goldsmith’s
satirical? Are we supposed to read it as odd, enigmatic and unstable character.
a straightforward moral tale of fortitude Goldsmith was a troubled and
in adversity, or is Goldsmith mocking the troublesome youth whose life proceeded
complex, random social forces that lay in a series of periodic upheavals and
not far beneath the surface of elegant crises. Irish by birth, he first studied for the
7
Church in Dublin, then for the profession success, and it has never dropped out of
of medicine at Edinburgh and Leyden. He the repertoire. There are many stories
spent some years in European travel, then about Goldsmith’s odd character, many of
for some time he seems to have practised which represent him as awkward, naïve,
as a doctor and also as a schoolteacher melancholy, accident-prone and always in
in London. He turned to journalism and debt, but also as a generous and simple-
hack writing in London’s Grub Street, and hearted friend. He never married, but
kept poverty at bay by producing a great was in some sense adopted for a time by
stream of works on a variety of subjects. the Horneck family, with whose young
His long philosophical poem The Traveller daughter Mary he was probably in love.
attracted attention and praise, and gave He died in 1774, greatly mourned by his
him the entrée into elite literary circles. friends, eight years after the publication of
His next poem, The Deserted Village, The Vicar of Wakefield, which was his only
became a popular classic. Among his novel.
plays, She Stoops to Conquer was a huge
Notes by Peter Whitfield

8
 Nicholas Farrell has worked extensively on both stage and
screen. His film credits include Chariots of Fire, Pearl Harbor,
Amazing Grace and The Iron Lady. He also features as Horatio
in Kenneth Branagh’s film of Hamlet and can be seen in Trevor
Nunn’s Twelfth Night as Antonio. At the RSC and elsewhere in
London he has appeared frequently in classical drama, including
Cymbeline, The Merchant of Venice and Julius Caesar, as well as
Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters. On television
he is best known for his roles in The Jury, Spooks, The Riff Raff
Element, Folye’s War, Torchwood and The Jewel in the Crown.
For Naxos AudioBooks he has read Plutarch: Greek Lives and
has played the part of Buckingham in King Richard III; he can be
heard regularly on radio.

Credits

Produced by Neville Jason

Edited and mastered by Thomas Goose
© Booklet: Naxos AudioBooks Ltd 2014

Cover design by Hannah Whale, Fruition – Creative Concepts

Cover image: The Vicar sells his Horse, Frederick Warne; courtesy of The Bridgeman
Art Library

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. UNAUTHORISED PUBLIC PERFORMANCE,

BROADCASTING AND COPYING OF THESE COMPACT DISCS PROHIBITED.

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Oliver Goldsmith
© 2014 Naxos
AudioBooks Ltd.
Made in England.

The Vicar COM PLETE

CLASSIC S
Total time
7:01:20
of Wakefield UNABRIDGED
NA0152D
Read by Nicholas Farrell CD ISBN:
9781843797777
The Vicar of Wakefield is a delightful tragicomedy of character and manners set
in 18th-century England. The sufferings and fortitude of Doctor Primrose and
his family at the hands of evil fortune make this a Book of Job transferred to the
domestic stage. This is a classic novel that has baffled the critics, because no one
is certain if it was intended as a sincere moral tale, or a sly satire on the chaotic,
Hogarthian world in which Goldsmith, despite his brilliance, struggled in vain to
survive.

Nicholas Farrell has worked extensively on both stage and screen.

His film credits include Chariots of Fire, Pearl Harbor, Amazing Grace
and The Iron Lady. He also features as Horatio in Kenneth Branagh’s
film of Hamlet and can be seen in Trevor Nunn’s Twelfth Night as
Antonio. At the RSC and elsewhere in London he has appeared
frequently in classical drama, including Cymbeline, The Merchant of Venice and
Julius Caesar, as well as Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters. On
television he is best known for his roles in The Jury, Spooks, The Riff Raff Element,
Folye’s War, Torchwood and The Jewel in the Crown. For Naxos AudioBooks he
has read Plutarch: Greek Lives and has played the part of Buckingham in King
Richard III; he can be heard regularly on radio.

Visit us online at naxosaudiobooks.com