A short life of the author
Oliver Goldsmith (c. 1728–1774) was born in Pallas, County Longford, Ireland (or possibly Elphin, Roscommon — the details are characteristically uncertain), and grew up in the village of Lissoy, which he later idealised as “Sweet Auburn” in The Deserted Village. He became one of the most gifted and least classifiable writers of the eighteenth century: a novelist, poet, dramatist, essayist, historian, and hack journalist of genius whose work — warm, humane, ironic, and effortlessly readable — transcends the formidable categories of his age.
Life and Career
Goldsmith’s early life was a picaresque comedy that he might have written himself. He studied at Trinity College Dublin (badly), wandered through Europe (penniless, playing the flute for lodgings), studied medicine at Edinburgh and Leiden (inconclusively), and arrived in London in 1756 without a degree, without money, and without prospects.
He survived by hack writing of every description — reviews, histories, translations, compilations — and gradually established himself through the quality of his periodical essays, particularly The Citizen of the World (1762), a series of fictional letters by a Chinese visitor to London that satirise English manners with the lightness of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters.
The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) was his first great success — a novel about a clergyman and his family beset by misfortunes that manages to be simultaneously sentimental and ironic, naive and knowing. Johnson famously sold the manuscript on Goldsmith’s behalf to pay his landlady. The Deserted Village (1770) — an elegy for a rural community destroyed by enclosure — is one of the finest English poems of the century. She Stoops to Conquer (1773) is the greatest English comedy between Sheridan and Wilde.
Goldsmith was a member of Johnson’s Literary Club alongside Reynolds, Burke, Garrick, and Boswell. He was notoriously awkward in company — Johnson said he “talked like an angel and wrote like poor Poll” (though Johnson also wrote the epitaph: “he touched nothing that he did not adorn”). He died on 4 April 1774, probably of kidney failure, aged about forty-five, heavily in debt.
Major Works and Themes
Goldsmith’s charm — and it is an enormous charm — lies in his ability to be simultaneously simple and sophisticated, tender and ironic, moralistic and worldly. The Vicar of Wakefield is about goodness surviving in a world of rogues; The Deserted Village is about the destruction of community by wealth; She Stoops to Conquer is about the comedy of social pretension.
Goldsmith and the Art of the Minor Key
Goldsmith’s critical problem is one of scale. He wrote short — The Vicar of Wakefield is a novella by modern standards; The Deserted Village is 430 lines; She Stoops to Conquer is a single evening’s entertainment. He never attempted the epic, the multi-volume novel, or the philosophical treatise. His ambition was to charm and to move, not to overwhelm. This modesty of scale has cost him prestige in a literary culture that rewards ambition, scope, and difficulty.
Yet the modesty is deceptive. The Deserted Village is one of the great political poems in English — a lament for the enclosure of common lands and the destruction of rural communities that anticipates the Romantics’ critique of industrial capitalism by thirty years. Its opening (“Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain”) and its conclusion (“In all my wanderings round this world of care”) have the quality of folk memory: they feel as if they have always existed. The poem’s argument — that wealth produces luxury, and luxury produces depopulation and moral decay — was economically naive but emotionally prophetic: the world Goldsmith mourned was indeed being destroyed, and the grief is real.
She Stoops to Conquer is the last great English comedy before Wilde — a judgment that covers a gap of 120 years. Its central joke — young Marlow, paralysed with shyness before ladies of quality but easy and confident with barmaids, mistakes the Hardcastle country house for an inn — is one of the most fertile comic premises in the language, and Goldsmith extracts from it an entire play about the English class system, the comedy of manners, and the gap between social performance and authentic feeling.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Goldsmith was beloved in his lifetime and has remained so. His works are among the most continuously read of any eighteenth-century author. Goethe admired him; Dickens was influenced by The Vicar of Wakefield; Washington Irving wrote his biography. Johnson’s epitaph — “he touched nothing that he did not adorn” — remains the most accurate critical judgment ever delivered on an English writer.
Key Works
- The Citizen of the World (1762)
- The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)
- The Good-Natur’d Man (1768)
- The Deserted Village (1770)
- She Stoops to Conquer (1773)
Collecting Goldsmith
The Vicar of Wakefield (1766, B. Collins for F. Newbery, Salisbury) was published in two volumes. First editions are identified by the Salisbury imprint (the London edition followed). Complete two-volume sets in contemporary calf bring $3,000–$15,000; the book has been continuously in print for over 250 years.
The Deserted Village (1770, W. Griffin, London) is a slim quarto. First editions bring $1,000–$5,000.
She Stoops to Conquer (1773, F. Newbery, London) first editions bring $500–$3,000.
Goldsmith’s autograph material is rare — he died young and in debt — and commands high prices when it surfaces. Letters bring $5,000–$20,000.