The Vicar of Wakefield is a Victorian novel that is narrated by Dr. Charles Primrose, the fictional Vicar of Wakefield. Specifically, it follows the Primrose family, humble and moral in spite of its material wealth and indicative of Goldsmith’s idealization of pastoral life, after they fall into poverty and subsequent dilemmas as a result, not of their own misdeeds, but of the corrupt and depraved individuals around them. One of the most highly regarded and widely read books of the eighteenth century, The Vicar of Wakefield is mentioned in several notable subsequent publications, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Charlotte Bront‘’s The Professor (1857), Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-1872), among others.