The Vicar of Wakefield.

GOLDSMITH, Oliver. With Prefatory Memoir by George Saintsbury.

$1,500.00

Item Number: 139375

London: John C. Nimmo, 1886.

Finely bound example of one of the most popular and widely read novels among Victorians. Octavo, bound in full crushed levant morocco by Bayntun Bindery, gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, elaborate gilt ruling to the front an rear panels, central morocco onlay to the front panel, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt, ribbon bound in, illustrated with one hundred and fourteen colored illustrations. With a prefatory memoir by George Saintsbury. From the library of Eugene Field with his bookplate to the pastedown. Often referred to as “the poet of childhood” American author Eugene Field began publishing poetry in 1879, when his poem “Christmas Treasures” appeared in A Little Book of Western Verse. Over a dozen volumes of poetry followed and he became well known for his light-hearted poems for children, among the most famous of which are “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” and “The Duel.” Equally famous is his poem about the death of a child, “Little Boy Blue.” In very good condition.

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.