A gentle country parson watches misfortune strip away his family's fortune, home, and honor before providence relents.
Books mentioned in The Vicar of Wakefield (2)
Religious Courtship by Daniel Defoe: “I have read the disputes between Thwackum and Square; the controversy between Robinson Crusoe and Friday the savage, and I am now employed in reading the controversy in Religious courtship'”
The Fair Penitent by Nicholas Rowe: “I mentioned before, who was come to dispose of tickets for the Fair Penitent, which was to be acted that evening, the part of Horatio by a young gentleman who had never appeared on any stage.”
Books that mention The Vicar of Wakefield (10)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: “…I believe I left him incredulous to the last, for his constant answer to my unwearied entreaties was the same as that of the Dutch schoolmaster in The Vicar of Wakefield: 'I have ten thousand florins a year without Greek, I eat heartily without Greek.”
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: “She never finds herself very soon, so the minute her cap began to bob like a top-heavy dahlia, I whipped the _Vicar of Wakefield_ out of my pocket, and read away, with one eye on him and one on Aunt.”
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens: “From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company.”
Emma by Jane Austen: “And I know he has read the Vicar of Wakefield.”
Middlemarch by George Eliot: “I never liked any clergyman except the Vicar of Wakefield and Mr.”
Villette by Charlotte Bronte: “In English, they had been under my own charge, and hard work it was to get them to translate rationally a page of _The Vicar of Wakefield_.”
The Professor by Charlotte Bronte: “The "livre de lecture" was the "Vicar of Wakefield," much used in foreign schools because it is supposed to contain prime samples of conversational English; it might, however, have been a Runic scroll for any resemblance the words, as enunciated by Jules, bore to the language in ordinary use…”
The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin: “Aboard ship, they read aloud from Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield and the collected poems of Coleridge and Shelley in preparation for their visit to the English countryside.”
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “I endeavoured to conceal the emotion which these words occasioned, but it was of slight avail; for, when she had expressed so truly her opinion of "The Vicar of Wakefield," and of other works, the names of which I omit”
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: “253. V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield.”