Everything about Oliver Goldsmith totally explained
Oliver Goldsmith (
November 10,
1730 or
1728 –
April 4,
1774) was an
Anglo-Irish writer,
poet, and
physician known for his
novel The Vicar of Wakefield (
1766), his pastoral poem
The Deserted Village (
1770) (written in memory of his brother), and his plays
The Good-natur'd Man (
1768) and
She Stoops to Conquer (
1771, first performed in
1773). (He is also thought to have written the classic children's tale,
The History of Little Goody Two Shoes, giving the world that familiar phrase.)
Biography
He was either born in the townland of Pallas, near
Ballymahon,
County Longford,
Ireland where his father was
Anglican curate of the parish of
Forgney, or at the residence of his maternal grandparents,
Smith Hill House in the diocese of
Elphin, County Roscommon where his Grandfather Oliver Jones was a clergyman and master of the Elphin diocesan school. When he was aged two, Goldsmith's father was appointed
rector of the parish of
Kilkenny West in
County Westmeath. The family moved to the
parsonage at Lissoy, between
Athlone and Ballymahon, and continued to live there until his father's death in
1747.
Goldsmith earned his Bachelor of Arts in
1749 at
Trinity College, Dublin, studying
theology and
law but never getting as far as ordination. His tutor was
Theaker Wilder. His name has been given to a new lecture theatre and student accommodation on the Trinity College campus, Goldsmith Hall. He later studied
medicine at the
University of Edinburgh and the
University of Leiden, then toured Europe, living on his wits. He also studied at the
University of Padua in 1755 and 1757.
Image:JoshuaReynoldsParty.jpg|A literary party at Sir Joshua Reynolds - 1781. The painting shows the friends of Reynolds - many of whom were members of "The Club" - use cursor to identify. |180px|thumb
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On his return, he settled in
London, where he worked as an
apothecary's assistant. Perennially in debt and addicted to gambling, Goldsmith had a massive output as a
hack writer for the publishers of London, but his few painstaking works earned him the company of
Samuel Johnson, along with whom he was a founding member of "
The Club". The combination of his literary work and his dissolute lifestyle led
Horace Walpole to giving him the much quoted epithet of
Inspired Idiot. During this period he used the pseudonym "James Willington" (the name of a fellow student at Trinity) to publish his
1758 translation of the autobiography of the
Huguenot Jean Marteilhe.
Goldsmith is recorded as being a highly jealous man, a likable but disorganised character who once failed to emigrate to
America because he missed the ferry.
He was buried in
Temple Church; his death in 1774 may have been partly caused by his own misdiagnosis of his
kidney infection. His inscription reads; "HERE LIES/OLIVER GOLDSMITH". There is a monument to him in the centre of
Ballymahon, also in
Westminster Abbey with an
epitaph written by Samuel Johnson.
Goldsmith's birth date isn't known for certain. According to the Library of Congress authority file, he told a biographer that he was born on
November 29,
1731 or perhaps
1730. Other sources have indicated
November 10, on any year from
1727 to
1731.
November 10,
1730 is now the most commonly accepted birth date.
Works
The Deserted Village
In the poem
"The Deserted Village" (1770), Goldsmith revisits Auburn, a village of which he'd fond memories, and marks the depopulation brought about through the emigration of its peasant community and the influx of monopolising riches. He mourns over the state of a society where
"wealth accumulates and men decay". Using images pertaining to the land in his poem, he gives to his readers a sense of what it was like to live in the countryside during modernization and how it has destroyed the land the former inhabitants worked so hard to maintain.
At the time in which this poem was written, it was true that the labouring class was in a dire situation. Changes in land ownership led to shortages in labour, and poverty became a common problem. Small farmers were forced out of the countryside. Alongside this problem came the new zest for luxuries and possessions. Poets became enamoured by each situation, and accordingly much poetry of the time uses the labouring class and the growth of the luxury as a key theme. Thus, it's equally possible that Oliver Goldsmith’s Deserted Village is a critique of luxury, or alternatively, an engagement with the realities of labouring-class poverty.
In the book's dedication to Joshua Reynolds, Goldsmith attempts to convey his reasons for writing a poem about the depopulation of the countryside. He is sure that the poetic community will disagree with his picture of the countryside as a poor place of misfortune, desolation and poverty and thus justifies it here. He writes:
"I know you'll object (and indeed several of our best and wisest friend concur in the opinion) that the depopulation it deplores is no where to be seen, and the disorders it laments are only to be found in the poet’s own imagination. To this I can scarce make any other answer than that I sincerely believe what I've written; that I've taken all possible pains, in my country excursions, for these four or five years past, to be certain of what I allege, and that all my views and enquiries have led me to believe those miseries real, which I here attempt to display."
This assertion indicates Goldsmith’s attachment to the people of the countryside; he believes it's vital that their lives are portrayed truthfully and lucidly, perhaps without the typical frills of pastoral poetry. However, in the same letter, Goldsmith goes on to write,
"In regretting the depopulation of the country, I inveigh against the increase of our luxuries.. For twenty of thirty years past, it has been the fashion to consider luxury as one of the greatest national advantages... Still however, I...continue to think those luxuries prejudicial to states, by which so many vices are introduced, and so many kingdoms have been undone."
This second and perhaps, more strongly worded argument indicates that Goldsmith is further angered by the effect of the luxury on Britain at this time. He finishes the letter on this note, and doesn't return to the situation of the labouring class, and this emphasises his strength of feeling on this matter.
According to
James Boswell it was
Dr. Johnson who wrote the last four lines of the poem.
Goldsmith's grand-nephew, also named Oliver, wrote a response to his uncle's poem entitled
The Rising Village, in which he details the rise of communities in
Acadia (now
Nova Scotia and
New Brunswick,
Canada). The response to his uncle seems to suggest that the peasants who couldn't survive in
The Deserted Village would have found opportunities in the new world.
The Rising Village was published in 1825. It has become a staple of the Canadian literary canon and has been heavily anthologized. (See, for example,
Canadian Poetry: From the Beginnings Through the First World War, edited by Carole Gerson and Gwendolyn Davies. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994.)
The Hermit
Goldsmith wrote this romantic ballad of precisely 160 lines in 1765. The hero and heroine are Edwin, a youth without wealth or power, and Angelina, the daughter of a lord "beside the Tyne." Angelina spurns many wooers, but refuses to make plain her love for young Edwin. "Quite dejected with my scorn," Edwin disappears and becomes a hermit. One day, Angelina turns up at his cell in boy's clothes and, not recognizing him, tells him her story. Edwin then reveals his true identity, and the lovers never part again. The poem is notable for its interesting portrayal of a hermit, who is fond of the natural world and his wilderness solitude but maintains a gentle, sympathetic demeanor toward other people. In keeping with eremitical tradition, however, Edwin the Hermit claims to "spurn the [opposite] sex." This poem appears under the title of "A Ballad" sung by the character of Mr. Burchell in Chapter 8 of Goldsmith's novel,
The Vicar of Wakefield.
The Citizen of the World
In 1760, Goldsmith began to publish a series of letters in the
Public Ledger under the title
The Citizen of the World. Purportedly written by a Chinese traveler in England named Lien Chi, they used this fictional outsider's perspective to comment ironically and at times moralistically on British society and manners.
The ironic poem,
An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog was published in 1766.
Trivia
There is a school named after him in London called Oliver Goldsmith Primary School.
In the play Marx In Soho by
Howard Zinn, Marx makes a reference to
The Deserted Village.
A statue of him stands at the Front Arch of Trinity College in Dublin.
Somerset Maugham used the last line from
An Elegy On The Death Of A Mad Dog in his novel
The Painted Veil (1925). The character Walter Fane's last words are
The dog it was that died.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Oliver Goldsmith'.
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