Oliver Goldsmith turned to the stage relatively late in a precarious career. Most of his major works did bring Goldsmith money and success but he was as prodigal with his earnings as he was with his gifts, never managing to balance his books. Unlike Charlotte Lennox, he did manage to secure lasting patronage; from 1764, his earnings from publication were enlarged by support from Sir Robert Nugent, Member of Parliament and fellow Irishman. Goldsmith's first play, The Good Natur’d Man, held its opening night at Covent Garden Theatre on Friday 29 January 1768, just over a decade after he began writing periodical essays and translations for Grub Street. It was also his first work for the stage after the runaway success of his short novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), which went into five editions within a year of publication. The story Samuel Johnson told, of rushing to secure a sixty pound payment from the bookseller John Newberry for the manuscript of the novel so that Goldsmith could meet his rental obligations to a furious landlady, indicates the hand-to-mouth existence Goldsmith led as an author. And a version of the story Goldsmith knew so well of the author's struggle to earn money through literature, letters and the patronage of others is given to George Primrose, the Vicar's son in The Vicar of Wakefield who sets off to try and repair the family's fortune when his engagement to Arabella Wilmot is called off because of their sudden poverty. George is reunited with his father and still-devoted fiancee when they find him working as a strolling player in a barn performance of Nicholas Rowe's pathetic she-tragedy, The Fair Penitent.

The title of chapter 21 (George Primrose's story) is ‘The history of a philosophic vagabond, pursuing novelty, but losing content’. The title invites us to recognise the hidden ‘novel’ in ‘novelty’, a term poised in the mid-century between an open association with anything that was new and apparently did not conform to the narrative expectations of established genres, and the more modern denotation as a form of short prose narrative. George's story is an inset novel within the larger one of his family.