Quietly, in April of this year, the 250th anniversary of the death of one of Ireland’s great writers passed the world by. A son of the midlands and a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, Oliver Goldsmith died in 1774, aged just 45. In June his legacy was celebrated, as it has been in Ballymahon and its environs for the past 40 years, at the Goldsmith Literary Festival, which opened this year with a thoughtful address by Tánaiste Micheál Martin.
Goldsmith is particularly remarkable in his having composed a masterpiece across the three major literary genres in the 1760s and 1770s: The Vicar of Wakefield in prose fiction, The Deserted Village in poetry and the classic play She Stoops to Conquer. Alongside these monuments sit his extensive and celebrated body of periodical journalism, including The Bee and The Citizen of the World, as well as the historical and scientific volumes which would become schoolbooks for a century after his death. His anniversary in 2024 sees the publication of new editions of his major works, and new assessments of his writing and its contexts.
In Ireland Goldsmith is perhaps best known for The Deserted Village, a poem “beloved of Irish agriculture ministers” as the late poet John Montague once wrote. But to many readers beyond these shores, he is just as well known as a master of prose, famous for his limpid, easy style of writing. Indeed, he made his early living as a prose journalist, developing in that realm a dexterity in miniaturised storytelling which engaged with the important matters of the day: party politics, the status of the monarchy, the abuses of the rich, and the institution of marriage. His fame as an author of prose fiction came to him perhaps more haphazardly than his fame as a poet or, indeed, as a playwright, but his great fictional tales retained his commitment to these topics and themes.
Having arrived in London, in 1756, he found himself in a world full of possibility. His first brush with the literary world was his acquaintance with the famous novelist Samuel Richardson, at whose print shop he worked as a proofreader. Subsequently he would become acquainted with Ralph Griffiths, the proprietor of the Monthly Review, for whom he would commence summarising and assessing the fruits of a rapidly expanding print industry. Just embarking on a literary career, he was still ambivalent about his roots, dismissive of the intellectual possibilities of his native Longford compared to London, but equally aware of his own increasing sense of displacement as an Irishman making a precarious living in London.
Goldsmith would go on to write for several periodicals, as a reviewer and as a journalist, in the years 1759 to 61. He piloted his own periodical, The Bee, late in 1759. During this period he would become acquainted with Thomas Percy and Samuel Johnson, figures crucial to his career and to biographical posterity. He would also fall under the relatively benign influence and management of John Newbery, for whose Public Ledger, or Daily Register of Commerce and Intelligence he would write the 119 “Chinese letters” which were collected and contoured as The Citizen of the World, published in two volumes in May 1762.
[ The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith reviewOpens in new window ]
The Citizen of the World was widely read, though few knew who had composed it – Goldsmith’s name did not appear on the title page. Not a serialised novel of the later sort that we would associate with Charles Dickens, it was effectively journalism that coalesced into a fictional compendium, mingling the loosely joined narratives of family and displacement of Lien Chi Altangi, a Chinese philosopher in London, with essayistic surveys of contemporary cultural and political mores in Britain and Europe.
The letters draw upon Goldsmith’s observations as an Irish immigrant to London and the example (sometime also the raw material, which Goldsmith would directly translate) of French sources such as Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques, the Marquis d’Argens’s Lettres Chinoises, Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes, and the writings on Chinese culture of French Jesuits Louis Le Comte and Jean-Baptiste du Halde.
The Citizen includes a witty, conflictedly cosmopolitan account of life at the heart of an empire muscling against the French towards American dominance during the Seven Years’ War. In a new edition, James Watt of the University of York situates this expansive work in its intellectual, political and literary contexts, helping the present-day reader to make sense of its world, its literary antecedents and devices, and its critical heritage.
Though his reputation as an agile professional writer was increasing among the literati, Goldsmith’s works were as yet published anonymously. Nonetheless, his prose, and the esteem in which that prose was held, was such that he would be a charter member of the famous Literary Club founded in 1764 by Joshua Reynolds, which would meet at the Turk’s Head Tavern in Soho.
Edmund Burke reportedly burst into tears at the news of his passing. Joshua Reynolds remarked that the very people who would be inclined to ridicule Goldsmith for his brogue and his blunders were also keen to enjoy his company and would now miss it
While writing The Citizen of the World, Goldsmith was drafting The Vicar of Wakefield, but the crucial moment of the latter’s production occurred under duress. The manuscript was sold to Newbery in 1762 by Samuel Johnson as Goldsmith faced arrest or eviction for non-payment of rent. Johnson came to Goldsmith’s rooms at Wine Office Court near London’s Fleet Street to find his friend dejectedly self-medicating with Madeira wine. To Johnson’s inquiry whether the beleaguered author had any saleable writing, Goldsmith produced The Vicar of Wakefield. Johnson’s urgent inspection of the manuscript is depicted in a wonderful Victorian painting (circa1843) attributed to Edward Matthew Ward.
The Vicar of Wakefield would not be published until March 1766, by which time Goldsmith’s name had been made by his widely acclaimed long philosophical 1764 poem The Traveller, or a Prospect of Society, the first work to have his name appear on a title page. The Vicar’s reputation as a charming masterpiece accrued incrementally. The Vicar has never been out of print and has been translated into dozens of languages, some 19th-century editions beautifully illustrated by artists including George Cruikshank, William Mulready and Arthur Rackham.
Loved for its fluid prose and the endearing, often misdirected benevolence of its titular character (who also narrates), the book’s genre has been a source of some disagreement for readers and critics. Is this tale of an old-fashioned clergyman dealing with financial and family disasters a novel in the sense that is now generally understood? Is it in some respects a satire on the pitfalls of unworldliness? Or a pastoral romance?
How much of the Vicar’s story and that of his peripatetic son George Primrose was based upon Goldsmith’s experience and those of his clergyman father? The period was one in which there were plenty of “novels” that were not quite novels, in various languages. How to define Voltaire’s Candide or Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall, or indeed Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels?
The haziness of The Vicar’s generic identity was perhaps a product of its time. Goldsmith was in his journalism critical of the sickly sentiment found in some fictions, but seems on the face of it to have given readers something like a romance novel in The Vicar. It is a more sophisticated and slippery work than that, however, and a new edition by Aileen Douglas and Ian Campbell Ross of Trinity College Dublin navigates precisely these matters with its illuminating introductory account of the tale’s critical heritage.
Goldsmith was a writer whose personality, like his work, has divided people. In his own time, and through the 19th century, his writing was often read as aligning with a naive personality. In Ireland he has been sometimes seen as more English in his outlook than Irish. Seamus Deane could be dismissive of his seeming quietism on Anglo-Irish relations. But new scholarship, and forthcoming new editions, challenge and complicate such views, giving a fuller picture of Goldsmith’s satirical mischief, and his political scepticism.
His death 250 years ago provoked a strange mixture of heartfelt grief on the part of friends and some who might otherwise be considered ambivalent in their feelings towards him. Edmund Burke reportedly burst into tears at the news of his passing. Joshua Reynolds remarked that the very people who would be inclined to ridicule Goldsmith for his brogue and his blunders were also keen to enjoy his company and would now miss it.
James Boswell, often Goldsmith’s rival for the approval of Samuel Johnson, wrote to the actor David Garrick: “I have not been so much affected with any event that has happened in a long time.” Johnson would also write: “let not his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man”.
Johnson’s Latin epitaph for Goldsmith on the Westminster Abbey monument was translated in terms which testified to the variety of his achievement, declaring that he “left scarcely any style of writing untouched, and touched nothing that he did not adorn”. His prose works, considered alongside his poetry and plays, demonstrate that brilliant dexterity.
The Citizen of the World, edited by James Watt, The Vicar of Wakefield, edited by Aileen Douglas and Ian Campbell Ross, and a collection of 36 scholarly essays, Oliver Goldsmith in Context, edited by Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy, published by Cambridge University Press, will be launched this month. On November 6th, at 5pm, Prof Moyra Haslett of Queen’s University Belfast will give a public lecture, Remembering Goldsmith: an illustrated talk, in the Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin
