In this scene from Chapter XI of The Vicar of Wakefield, painted by Charles Robert Leslie (1794-1859), the Rev. Dr Charles Primrose and his family have been playing ‘blind man’s buff’ and ‘hunt the slipper’ with great enthusiasm, as a diversion from their domestic problems. Their embarrassment when two grand acquaintances, Lady Blarney and Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs, entered and found them breathless and flushed with their innocent but rustic sport was pitiable. The two aristocrats then proceeded to gossip salaciously while Mr Burchell sat with his back to them, staring at the fire and barking ‘Fudge!’ after almost every sentence.
I RECEIVED one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible.* I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly.
I accordingly went as soon as I was drest, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me.*
I looked into it, and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return, and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds.* I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, but not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.
James Boswell does not tell us exactly when these events took place. Johnson indicated that they happened prior to the publication (or at any rate the popular success) of Goldsmith’s The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society in 1764.
The manuscript was The Vicar of Wakefield, written in 1761 or 1762 and published in 1766. It tells of a clergyman living comfortably off investments, who discovers that his financial adviser has run off with the money, throwing the vicar and his family into a series of mishaps, disappointments and frauds. As in all the best English fiction, however, everything comes right in the end — so long as one’s standards are not too particular. The title of this extract, ‘A kind and gentle heart,’ is taken from Goldsmith’s comic rhyme ‘An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog,’ which appears in Chapter XVII.
The bookseller was Francis Newbery. In later years Goldsmith liked to say (he was notorious for his fanciful recollections) that he had sold The Vicar of Wakefield for £400, but Johnson confirmed that the price was £60 (about £8,600 in today’s money) and stressed that it was a sufficient one, because the work that made Goldsmith’s reputation, The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society (1764), had not yet seized the public’s attention. “Then, to be sure,” Johnson added, “it was accidentally worth more money.” According to Washington Irving, Newbery squirrelled the manuscript away for almost two years before sending it off for publication.
_by_Oliver_Goldsmith,_by_Charles_Robert_Leslie,_England,_c._1843,_oil_on_canvas_-_California_Palace_of_the_Legion_of_Honor_-_San_Francisco,_CA_-_DSC02930.jpg){kind=link}