The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale. [Fore-edge Painting].

GOLDSMITH, Oliver.

$975.00

Item Number: 138744

London: Bickers and Son, 1880.

Finely bound example of one of the most popular and widely read novels among Victorians. Octavo, bound in full pebbled morocco with gilt titles and tooling to the spine and panels, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt, decorated with a fore-edge painting of Squire Thornhill visiting the Primrose family, illustrated. In very good condition with the fore-edge painting exceptionally bright.

Written between 1761 to 1762 and published in 1766, Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield was one of the most popular and widely read 18th-century novels among Victorians. Considered both a sentimental and satirical novel, the book is mentioned in George Eliot's Middlemarch, Stendhal's The Life of Henry Brulard, Arthur Schopenhauer's "The Art of Being Right", Jane Austen's Emma, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins, Charlotte Brontë's The Professor and Villette, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, as well as his Dichtung und Wahrheit.