The Vicar of Wakefield, written in 1761 and 1762, was published in 1766, and was one of the most popular and widely read 18th-century novels among Victorians, cited in a number of major works of that time, including George Eliot's Middlemarch, Jane Austen's Emma, Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins, Charlotte Brontë's The Professor and Villette, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, as well as his Dichtung und Wahrheit.
The novel, narrated by the title character, describes the trials and tribulations of his family and himself. It is often described as a sentimental novel, displaying belief in the innate goodness of human beings. But it can also be read as a satire on the sentimental novel and its values.