Chapter 34 - Afterlives 1: The Victorian Vicar

Summary

Goldsmith’s popularity was evident everywhere in the mid-Victorian period. He was held in great affection by many of the most important writers of the period. There were pressing contemporary reasons why references to Goldsmith’s novel can be found everywhere in the fiction of the period. The Vicar of Wakefield had by then come to be understood as a reworking of the Book of Job, and therefore an attempt to address the so-called problem of evil, which, as Jan-Melissa Shramm has persuasively argued, was one of the main intellectual problems addressed by the Victorian novel. Writers of fiction directly tackled the theological questions troubling their readers, particularly after the vexing decade of the 1840s in which the sheer extent of human suffering and natural evil was made clear to British readers through print culture in very powerful ways. This chapter will examines the vogue for the Vicar in the mid-century as a response to a diminishing providential aesthetic and argue that its failure to provide adequate solutions to the problem of evil may have contributed to Goldsmith falling out of favour by the end of the century.