The Vicar and the Sovereign: Monarchism in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield

Abstract

Abstract:This essay reevaluates the narrative failings of Oliver Goldsmith's only novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), through its idiosyncratic defense of monarchism. I argue that the text's grim scene of abandonment—flagged in the very meaning of "vicar" as substitute or stand-in—returns us to the collapse of commonwealth in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) and its signature world without a sovereign. Through a comparative textual analysis that also draws on contemporary and Enlightenment political theories, I argue that the rupture of civil society envisioned by the two writers takes place not between subjects and their ruler but among subjects themselves—a crucial distinction under-recognized in recent theorizations of sovereign power. A century after Leviathan, Goldsmith re-engages Hobbes's claims that "[t]o make Covenant with God, is impossible" and exposes how a broken social compact, especially between the rich and the poor, creates systemic injustice: mass incarceration, bloated legal institutions, and a culture of avarice. In pairing the eighteenth-century writer with the early-modern philosopher, I draw out their shared concerns over the tenuousness of social relations in a competitive market society and the inescapability of human corruption in any form of the state. This essay's return to Hobbes contributes to an ongoing reevaluation of sentimental literature's dubious constructions of sympathy emergent from the English civil war. It also explores the persistence of allegory in novelistic characterization.