Explore "The Ladies of the Idyll" by Alice Meynell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Little Primrose dames of the English classic, the wife and daughters of the Vicar of Wakefield have no claim whatever to this name of lady. It is given to them in this page because Goldsmith himself gave it to them in the yet undepreciated state of the word, and for the better reason that he obviously intended them to be the equals of the men to whom he marries them, those men being, with all their faults, gentlemen.
Goldsmith, in a word, meant them to be ladies, of country breeding, but certainly fit for membership of that large class of various fortune within which the name makes a sufficient equality.