Political history and the history of the novel

Notes towards a future essay on Fenelon, Goldsmith and Godwin, or rather Telemachus, The Vicar of Wakefield and Caleb Williams, texts which share a genealogy.

Burchell in The Vicar is a version of Fenelon's Telemachus and Mentor, a patriot king wandering around his kingdom in disguise to avoid the corrupting power of flattery and deference and court culture. Their virtues are similar, christianized civic humanism.

But The Vicar is a fictional rewriting of a life of a martyr. It is not unimportant that Goldsmith was translating The Lives of the Fathers and Martyrs for Newbery just before writing the novel. (Probably in response to the success of Alban Butler's book on the topic.) Primrose's ordeals (from the affluent domestic republic to prison) purify his Christianity, culminating in his sermon in prison, in which he rejects the world in submission to God and accepts Origen's universalism.

But this speech also has a political meaning: it makes the case that salvation evens up the division between rich and poor and compensates for the injustice of the social order.

Another important moment on this road is his Tory speech to the butler (who is impersonating his master). But that speech is odd since it presents a compact between sacred sovereignty and the people where the people are the middle ranks, or rather the independent sector within them. Much less populist than Fielding say.

And another important momement is his passive obedience speech to his flock who object to his being taken to prison.

At the end Burchall, the patriot king, puts all to rights, ambiguating the religious rejection of the world. This tension is not ironizing: it is the sign of a structural tension in the Tory theopolitics where a particular social model (a compact between a sacred sovereign and the people against the corruptive forces of oligarchism and international trade) is fused with the doctrine of passive obedience.

Caleb Williams also tells of the discrepancy between law and justice under the rule of the landed oligarchy. And Caleb is another Job figure, who at a certain point of despair is able to trigger his salvation. But this time there is no outside the corrupt system: Falkland must undo the injustice himself.