The Vicar of Wakefield.

GOLDSMITH, Oliver.

$225.00

Item Number: 138984

London: J.M. Dent & Co, 1904.

First Series of English Idylls Deluxe vellum edition of one of the most popular and widely read novels among Victorians. Octavo, original publisher’s full cream vellum elaborately decorated in gilt, top edge gilt with others untrimmed, pictorial endpapers, tissue-guarded frontispiece and pictorial title page, illustrated with twenty-five color illustrations by C.E. Brock. In near fine condition. A very attractive binding.

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.