Vicar of Wakefield, The

London: John Van Voorst, 1843. Goldsmith Goes Cosway-Style
The Vicar Bound By Rivière & Son

[COSWAY-STYLE BINDING]. GOLDSMITH, Oliver. The Vicar of Wakefield. With thirty-two illustrations, by William Mulready, R.A. London: John Van Voorst, 1843.

First Mulready-illustrated edition. Octavo (8 3/16 x 5 1/2 in; 208 x 140 mm). xv, [1], 306 pp. Thirty-two black and white drawings as headpieces.

Beautifully bound ca. 1930 by Rivière & Son, (stamp-signed) in full dark red crushed morocco, spine gilt in compartments. Upper board with wide gilt-tooled frame enclosing a central gilt-decorated oval with an original miniature portrait of Goldsmith in watercolor under glass. Rear board with gilt rolled borders and corner piece. Engraved (unidentified) armorial bookplate pasted onto front doublure. Bookplate of L.B. Rossbach to front free-endpaper verso. Gilt decorated turn-ins. Green moiré silk endleaves. All edges gilt. A fine example housed in the original faux lizard, leather edged slipcase.

Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774) was an Anglo-Irish novelist, playwright and poet, who is best known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), his pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770), and his plays The Good-Natur'd Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1771, first performed in 1773). He also wrote An History of the Earth and Animated Nature. He is thought to have written the classic children's tale The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, the source of the phrase "goody two-shoes."

The Vicar of Wakefield was written 1761-1762, and published in 1766. It was one of the most popular and widely read 18th-century novels during the Victorian era, referred to in George Eliot's Middlemarch, Jane Austen's Emma, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins, Charlotte Brontë's The Professor and Villette, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther.