Though written between 1761 and 1762, Oliver Goldsmith’s single novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, was not published until several years following its completion. As the story goes, Goldsmith, a hack writer ever in peril of imprisonment due to debts, pleaded… Read More ›
Most critics note that Samuel Johnson’s History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia is as much essay, parable, and cautionary tale as novel. Johnson sought to counter the popular optimistic philosophy supported by the French Rousseau and German Leibnitz, which held… Read More ›
Henry Mackenzie’s A Man of Feeling owed a debt to Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748). Like Smollett’s protagonist, the good-hearted Harley of Mackenzie’s tale is a naive traveler in a too-sophisticated world, sacrificed to professional cardsharps. A narrator that readers… Read More ›
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