Oliver Goldsmith: an 18th-century Irish exile writer

Oliver Goldsmith was an 18^th-century writer who is best known for one novel, one poem and one play. Had he had a longer life, and/or been more energetic as a writer, he would probably have become one of English Literature’s greatest figures instead of merely a middle-ranking one.

Oliver Goldsmith was born on 10^th November 1728.  He grew up in the village of Lissoy in County Westmeath, Ireland, the son of a Protestant clergyman.

He was educated locally and appears to have been fortunate in that his teachers were enlightened men who were able to handle his difficult temperament, encouraged him to read widely and developed his interest in classical languages.

He was less fortunate in that he caught smallpox as a child and this left him with a severely pockmarked face about which he was acutely sensitive in later life.

He went to Trinity College, Dublin, which gave him a degree but very little intellectual satisfaction, and he was not particularly interested in following in his father’s footsteps as a country vicar. An uncle gave him £50 which he should have used to fund training in the law in England, but he managed to lose this money and instead went to Edinburgh to study medicine. He never set foot in Ireland again.

He spent several years in Europe, partly for study but mostly in travelling around on a poor man’s Grand Tour, mainly on foot. He eventually ended up in London where he took jobs that were related to medicine, but these soon took second place to writing as a means of earning a living.

18^th century London had a huge appetite for the printed word, with publishers springing up who produced a large number of journals that needed people to write for them. Many such writers lived a hand-to-mouth existence by taking cheap lodgings and churning out copy as a sort of cottage industry. The Moorfields area of London was noted as a hotbed of hack writing, and particularly one street that gave its name to this trade, this being Grub Street.

Oliver Goldsmith’s learning and experience made him well qualified as a Grub Street writer, and he found work as a reviewer and copywriter for “The Monthly Review” from which he branched out into translating and essay writing.

He started his own journal, “The Bee”, in which he published the work of other hack writers as well as his own contributions, some of which attracted the attention of luminaries such as Samuel Johnson and Tobias Smollett, the latter of whom recruited Goldsmith to write for his own “British Magazine”.

With a tolerable income now coming his way Goldsmith discovered the delights of spending it, leading him to dress extravagantly and live in accommodation that he could only just afford. This meant that he was always having to take on fresh hack work, be it in biography, translation or even compiling an English grammar.

However, the qualities of lucidity and elegance always came through in whatever task he undertook.

Goldsmith’s first long poem of note was “The Traveller”, which he had begun before his Grub Street days and completed in 1764. Written in the Augustan style of Alexander Pope it was much admired by Dr Johnson, who declared it to be the best poem written since Pope had died (which was in 1744).  The poem went through nine editions during Goldsmith’s lifetime.

The Vicar of Wakefield

Oliver Goldsmith’s sole novel appeared in two volumes in 1766. Modern readers will find it to be far too sentimental for their taste, and it was not overwhelmingly popular even in Goldsmith’s time. It did, however, become almost required reading in Victorian homes in that it was far less shocking that the works of Fielding or Smollett.

The story concerns Dr Primrose, the Vicar of Wakefield, who combines learning with innocence and is thus open to the machinations of others. He loses his fortune, his elder daughter is apparently “ruined” by the local squire, and he finds himself in jail alongside his son, who is accused of wounding a man in a duel.

Dr Primrose responds with fortitude and gentle resignation to fate, and even repents for the curses he utters against those who have caused his misfortune.

All comes right in the end, due to some improbable plot contrivances, with the vicar’s fortune restored and the daughter apparently being legitimately married to the squire (who remains a villain all the same). This is therefore a somewhat anodyne latter-day version of the Book of Job.

The novel lacked the virility of Fielding or the artistry of Jane Austen, and failed to draw any of its characters in a particularly interesting way. It may well be that later novelists – such as Austen – were inspired by Goldsmith’s novel in the sense that they were determined to produce something that was a lot better.

The Deserted Village

Goldsmith’s best-known poem, generally regarded as his masterpiece, was published in May 1770 and ran through five editions within the year.

The mid-18^th century was a time of great change in the countryside, with the medieval pattern of subsistence farming giving way to larger farms, many of which were owned by wealthy aristocrats who were keen to adopt more scientific methods of food production. This led to the practice of “enclosures”, which meant the creation of relatively large fields, surrounded by hedges, that were devoted to the production of a single crop rather than the strip system practised on the old open fields.

One consequence of this new approach was that many small villages were forcibly destroyed or were abandoned, with the population being concentrated in larger communities. For many people, including Oliver Goldsmith, the loss of these villages was a matter of regret, and nostalgia for a lost way of life is the theme of “The Deserted Village”. The village in question, named “Auburn” in the poem, is fictional but may well be based on Goldsmith’s former home village of Lissoy in central Ireland – most of rural Ireland was owned by wealthy English landowners who rarely if ever visited their Irish estates.

The poem paints a picture of a rural idyll that is lost for ever, with past perfections replaced by present horrors. It is written in the standard Augustan form of the heroic couplet, which Goldsmith handled with a considerable degree of skill, especially in his descriptions of village “worthies” who were almost certainly based on real people. However, to a modern ear the poem descends into melodrama and sentimentality, although Goldsmith was far from being the worst offender among his contemporaries.

She Stoops to Conquer

It is possible that Oliver Goldsmith might have had a more successful life as a writer had he turned to drama earlier than he did. His first play, “The Good-Natured Man”, was staged in 1768 and was a considerable success. However, his second and much more highly-regarded comedy, “She Stoops to Conquer” did not appear until 1773, shortly before his death.

Despite the lapses into sentimentality apparent in his novel and poems, Goldsmith was highly critical of “sentimental comedy” and saw no reason why audiences should not respond to comedy with laughter. “She Stoops to Conquer” is therefore a full-on farce, based on misunderstandings arising from mistaken identities. It is an early example of “situation comedy” that used conventions adopted by comedy writers down to the present day.

The play was a huge success, but its author was not able to enjoy his fame for long. Oliver Goldsmith died on 4^th April 1774, probably from undiagnosed kidney disease, aged only 45. Dr Johnson wrote a generous epitaph stating that Goldsmith “touched nothing that he did not adorn”.

© John Welford