The Vicar of Wakefield
Lot 64

The Vicar of Wakefield

Oliver Goldsmith, 1766

Closed14 September 2021

Price Realised

USD 3,250

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The Vicar of Wakefield
Oliver Goldsmith, 1766
[GOLDSMITH, Oliver (1728-1774).] The Vicar of Wakefield. A Tale Supposed to be written by Himself. Salisbury: B. Collins for F. Newberry, 1766.

First edition of Goldsmith's celebrated work, present here in Rothschild's variant 2. One of the most popular novels of the century, it is referred to in several classic novels of the later 18th and 19th centuries, including Jane Austen's Emma, Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Charlotte Brontë's The Professor and Villette, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. Rothschild 1028.

Two volumes, 12mo (167 x 98 mm). Advertisement leaf in vol. 1 (a few spots, a little toning at gutter). Contemporary mottled calf (rebacked with original spines laid down). Provenance: James Frothingham Hunnewell (1832-1910; bookplate) – Richard Manney (his sale, Sotheby's New York, 11 October, 1991, lot 151).