The lovable and innocent Dr. Primrose has lost his fortune. Forced into reduced circumstances, he takes his family on a journey to a new parish. Soon, they are all thrown into a tale of love, deceit, abduction, betrayal and humour. By turns comic and sentimental, Oliver Goldsmith's story of the rise and fall of the Primrose family is a classic, satirical depiction of domestic life in the 1700s. The hugely successful "The Vicar of Wakefield" from 1766 became one of the most popular novels of Victorian England, with direct references to it in the work of Austen, Dickens, Shelley, Eliot, Brontë, Goethe, Schopenhauer and many others.