Johnson and The Vicar

Last night I strayed from my usual listening home on Radio 3 to my former home, Radio 4, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the current Book at Bedtime is Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, one of those classics that these days hardly anybody actually reads – including, in this case, me, despite having taken a passing interest in the 18th-century sentimental novel. (Radio 4 has done this before, I seem to remember, with The Ingoldsby Legends and Annals of the Parish among others, and it's surely good that such titles are being kept alive. They're certainly an improvement on most of the contemporary fiction that gets broadcast on Radio 4.) Samuel Johnson played an important, even dramatic part in getting The Vicar of Wakefield published. Here is his own account:'I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and…