Posted by Steven
on 15/9/2009, 13:29:15
76.187.110.226
Since our schedule has been a bit scrambled, I've lost track of who has read this and who may still be planning to, but it seems that most have finished it (some many weeks ago), so I'll go ahead and post my thoughts.
I enjoyed the novel. It was brisk (at the cost of some needed character development that we would have seen in later and larger novels), humorous, and delivered its moral with a light hand.
Scenes like that of the vicar enjoying his ale or wine while watching the young folks dancing remind me how much more welcoming the fun-loving 18th century would have been to me than the prudish 19th century (or the prudish 21st century).
What interests me most about the novel, however, is how much of it may have been literary satire.
There is obvious satire of the church, where its scholars seem to be mostly absorbed in the dispute over whether widowed clergy may remarry (when has the subject of its clergy's sex lives ever NOT been Christianity's chief source of internal debate?). There is also some social satire about class differences and the superficiality of social superiority, as well as the very direct call for prison reform.
But to what extent are the plot elements a satire of popular literary works of the recent past? Is the picaresque there in imitation or ridicule of works like Tom Jones? Is the female abduction there to poke fun at Pamela? Goldsmith was a professional writer whose background, from what I read in the introduction, would lead him to think more along literary than moral lines. It's hard to judge this from a remove of more than two centuries. His readership would have been much more familiar with the mass of contemporary works and would have more easily seen where Goldsmith's intent was to parody a cliche.
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