SOURCE: "The Redemption of Fatherhood in The Vicar of Wakefield" in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 23, No. 3, Summer, 1983, pp. 465-80.

In the essay below, Hilliard argues that The Vicar of Wakefield is a realistic account of fatherhood and an allegory about sin and redemption.

The Vicar's many sanguine remarks on matrimony—"I wrote several sermons to prove its happiness,"¹ he says—are contradicted by his narrative, from beginning to end an account of the troubles which beset a man who has undertaken to marry and bring up a large family. Though Dr. Primrose is given to celebrating domestic life as a "concert," his story can be read as a succession of marital disputes (over such parental concerns as the treatment accorded the suitor of a daughter) which he generally loses to Deborah, his domineering wife. As spiritual "instructor" to a family whose members are "refractory and ungovernable...