I’m in the mood for gentle comedy.  Not Netflix comedy, but the literary kind. I’ve been frazzled because I had a computer “emergency,” a broken keyboard with sticky a’s, v’s, b’s,  d’s, and x-es.  As for my 11-year-old tablet, it has lost its little electrronic mind.   It is, however, an excellent kitchen timer.

And so I decided to go semi-Luddite. I sat down and read Oliver Goldsmith’s gentle comedy, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766).  It is not hilarious, like his play, She Stooped to Conquer, but it’s sweet and funny. Some of the plot elements are over-the-top, but Goldsmith’s style is graceful, and the Vicar’s gentle voice is appealing.  And he is such a kind-hearted man that even when the villainous squire sends him to prison, he makes friends with a trickster who cheated him in the past. Goldsmith obviously influenced Dickens: In Little Dorrit, an entire family lives for years in a prison because of Mr. Dorrit’s debts.

Goldsmith’s style is polished and agile, and the characters are well-drawn and sympathetic. I love the vicar, who is also the narrator:  he is earnest, naïve, and generous, and has some eccentric views about monogamy. He believes that it is unlawful for a priest of the Church of England to remarry after the death of his first wife. The vicar has written many tracts against this practice.

He and his wife, Deborah Primrose, lead an idyllic life in Wakefield with their six well-behaved children.. They have a small inheritance they have invested, and thus are able to give away the profits of his living to widows and orphans.

But, alas, they lose their fortune. It is stolen by the merchant who invested it. He left the country to escape bankrupty, and now they are penniless. They can no longer afford to live at Wakefield. The vicar accepts a more modest living in a neighborhood of farmers. On their journey, they meet Mr. Burchell, a philanthropist who becomes a famiy friend. But Deborah and her two daughters are infatuated by the squire, the rich, charming Mr. Thornhill, who is actually a calculating seducer. The two girls are deliberately coquettish and conscious of being on the marriage market. Alas, alack! Some truly sinister things happen. Yet we know there will be a happy ending, and so it is ultimately a cozy.

The novel was published because of Samuel Johnson’s imtervention. According to James Boswell, Johnson received a note from Goldsmith saying “that he was in great distress, and… begging that I would come to him as soon as possible.” When Johnson arrived, he learned that the landady had arrested the penniless Goldsmith for rent. Johnson asked Goldsmith if he had any finished manuscript to sell, and Goldsmith handed over The Vicar of Wakefield. And so Johnson sold it to a bookseller for sixty pounds. Four years later in 1766, it was published.