The Vicar of Wakefield

THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. OLIVER GOLDSMITH. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Signed and numbered edition. Published by: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd,: London. 1929. Quarto. Publisher's original vellum boards, gilt title to spine and front board, triple rule to front board, pictorial endpapers, top edge gilt, others untrimmed. A bright clean copy with a couple of light marks to the spine and a small crack at the head of the spine that has been professionally repaired. Mild and light foxing to prelims. The vellum binding has a natural discolouring due to the quality and natural selection of the skin. An excellent copy. Colour frontispiece and 12 colour plates, black and white illustrations in the text, by Rackham. Number 243 of 575 copies for England, signed by Arthur Rackham. "In the England of jazz and Noel Coward, the whimsical and fantastic had grown increasingly out of fashion. With 'The Vicar of Wakefield' of 1929, Rackham played it safe by turning to historical costume, in which he had long been supremely accomplished and successful" (Latimore and Haskell p.65., Riall p. 170). "The Vicar of Wakefield is a novel by Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith. It was written in 1761 and 1762, and published in 1766, and was one of the most popular and widely read 18th-century novels among Victorians. The novel is mentioned 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', as well as his 'Dichtung und Wahrheit" (Hudson, p. 126).