B I O G R A P H Y

G L I M P S E O F W O R K

Life Of OLIVER GOLDSMITH

Milestones and times

Chronology of Life:

Born: Ireland Nov.1730

College Dublin 1745-50

Law study: 1752

Medical study: 1752-54

Europe tour: 1755

Writer: 1757

Johnson’s club: 1764

Plays,poems:1762-1774

Died in April 1774

[at age 44]

Happenings: EVENTS:

Covent Garden opera house opens-1732

Pope, Johnson, Boswell-1732-1765

George III accession -1760

Capt. Cook voyage: 1768

American war: 1775

American independence:1776

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Oliver Goldsmith (10 November 1730 – 4 April 1774) was an Anglo-Irish novelist, playwright and poet.

He is best known for his novelThe Vicar of Wakefield (1766), his pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770), and his plays The Good-Natured Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1771).

She Stoops to Conquer was first performed in 1773.

He also wrote An History of the Earth and Animated Nature.

He is thought to have written the classic children's tale The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, the source of the phrase "goody two-shoes".

He was an original member of Dr.

Johnson’s Literary Club.

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Oliver Goldsmith, at the age

of eight, had a severe attack of smallpox

which disfigured him for life.

He received a B.A. degree in February

1749 from Trinity College Dublin,

before he left Ireland in 1752 to study

medicine in Edinburgh. He wandered

through Europe, supporting himself by

begging and by playing the flute, before

settling in London.

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o The family of Oliver‟s father, a pastor, consisted of five

sons and three daughters. Henry, the eldest, was the good

man's pride and hope, and he tasked his slender means to

the utmost in educating him for a learned and

distinguished career.

o Oliver was the second son, and seven years younger

than Henry, who was the guide and protector of his

childhood, and to whom he was most tenderly attached

throughout life.

o The expense for Oliver‟s education was borne mostly by

his uncle, the Rev. Thomas Contarine.

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o Young Oliver Goldsmith had a thoughtless

generosity extremely captivating to young hearts;

his temper was quick and sensitive, and easily

offended; but his anger was momentary, and it

was impossible for him to harbor resentment.

o He was the leader of all boyish sports and athletic

amusements, especially ball-playing, and he was

foremost in all mischievous pranks. He became a

poet-errant.

o Oliver Goldsmith had a natural indolence and a love of

convivial pleasures. "I was a lover of mirth, good humor,

and even sometimes of fun," said he, "from my childhood.”

o He was notably homely, with a protruding mouth, short

chin, and deep scars from the smallpox that afflicted him at

age seven.

o A graduate but with no distinction, he had a long way to go

before he earned his fame, credit and popularity.

o His graduate degree though gained him a respectable

position in the society; he failed to find a suitable profession

in Church or law.

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o Oliver Goldsmith was conscious of his pitted face,

his brogue, and his ungainly figure and it made

him exceedingly nervous and sensitive in society.

o He was anxious, as such people mostly are, to

cover his shyness by an appearance of ease, if

not even of swagger.

o He occasionally did and said very awkward and

blundering things.

o In 1744 Goldsmith went up to Trinity College, Dublin. His

tutor was Theaker Wilder. Neglecting his studies in

theology and law, he fell to the bottom of his class.

o In 1747, along with four other undergraduates, he was

expelled for a riot in which they attempted to storm the

Marshalsea Prison. He lost his father in the same year.

o He was graduated in 1749 as a Bachelor of Arts, but

without the discipline or distinction that might have

gained him entry to a profession in the church or the law.

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o Oliver Goldsmith was a paradoxical man: on the one

hand, a perennial outcast who suffered misfortune

throughout most of his life, on the other a sublime writer

whose works would withstand the test of time.

o A stammering, clumsy prankster, Goldsmith often willingly

humiliated himself in public, and refused to change his

rural manners or Irish brogue.

o His openness, imagination, self-mockery and scorn for

affectation were noteworthy in the European intellectual

sphere at his time.

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o He lived for a short time with his mother, tried various

professions without success, studied medicine desultorily

at the University of Edinburgh from 1752 to 1755.

o He set out on a walking tour of Flanders, France,

Switzerland and Northern Italy, living by his wits (busking

with his flute).

o His education seemed to have given him mainly a taste

for fine clothes, playing cards, singing Irish airs and

playing the flute.

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o Only when Goldsmith entered the literary world in 1757 did

his life finally take a positive turn.

o He found low quality, poorly paid work, editing for the

Monthly Review and proofreading for a printer. He penned a

successful translation and a series of articles between 1758

and 1759.

o Goldsmith quickly gained recognition, employment, and

friendship with some of the foremost literary minds of his

day.

o He produced, with equal skill, renowned novels, poetry,

dramas, criticism, essays, biographies and histories.

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o In 1759, he came with, „Enquiry into the Present

State of Polite Learning in Europe‟.

o In 1760, he started publishing „The Citizen of the

World‟ in the Public Ledger, a magazine.

o The letters provided a fictional perspective and

moralistically and ironically commented on the

British society and manners. These essays were

initially claimed to be written by a Chinese

philosopher Lien Chi

Goldsmith and Johnson

In 1765, the Traveller was published. Though part of

it was written in Switzerland, it was completed

slowly, polished and pruned. Dr. Samuel Johnson

encouraged him. Its publication changed the image

of Oliver Goldsmith from an essayist to that of a poet

of the age. Very soon after this, The Vicar of the

Wakefield appeared and his reputation established.

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o Oliver Goldsmith was a member of the Literary Club,

formed by Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1763.

o Among other members were James Boswell, Johnson‟s

biographer; Sir Joshua Reynolds, the painter; Adam Smith,

the economist; Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the playwright;

David Garrick, the actor; and Edmund Burke, the politician.

o The world that Goldsmith and his contemporaries wrote

about was a world with great mixing of socioeconomic

classes.

o The cutting edge of artistic innovation moved away from

the Court —and toward the public.

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The Club or The Literary Club

Members of the Literary Club. 6/2/2013

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Inspiration for the play ‘She Stoops to Conquer’

At age 17, Goldsmith was traveling in the Irish

countryside, and when night came asked a passerby

to recommend an inn. The passerby, who happened

to be the town‟s joker, directed Goldsmith to the

home of a squire. The squire played along with the

prank, and only when Goldsmith left special

instructions for his breakfast did his host reveal that

the house was not an inn, but a private home.

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With the production of his play, „She Stoops to

Conquer‟ in 1773, Oliver Goldsmith found himself at

the peak of his fame—yet deeply depressed and in

debt. By 1774, he was dead.

Sadly, his own generation did not fully recognize

Goldsmith‟s talents, and it was not until the mid-

twentieth century that he began to receive the full

scholarly and biographical analysis that he

deserves.

E X AM P L E O F H I S W O R K

AN E L E G AN T C O N T R I B U T I O N T O

E N G L I S H L I T E R AT U R E

Oliver Goldsmith

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"A City Night-Piece."

The clock has just struck two, the expiring taper

rises and sinks in the socket, the watchman forgets

the hour in slumber, the laborious and the happy are

at rest, and nothing wakes but meditation, guilt,

revelry, and despair. The drunkard once more fills

the destroying bowl, the robber walks his midnight

round, and the suicide lifts his guilty arm against his

own sacred person.

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Let me no longer waste the night over the page of

antiquity or the sallies of contemporary genius, but

pursue the solitary walk, where Vanity, ever

changing, but a few hours past walked before me,

where she kept up the pageant, and now, like a

froward child, seems hushed with her own

importunities.

What a gloom hangs around all!

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The dying lamp feebly emits a yellow gleam; no

sound is heard but of the chiming clock, or the

distant watch-dog. All the bustle of human pride is

forgotten; an hour like this may well display the

emptiness of human vanity. There will come a

time when this temporary solitude may be made

continual, and the city itself, like its inhabitants,

fade away, and leave a desert in its room.

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What cities, as great as this, have once triumphed

existence! Had their victories as great, joy as just and

as Unbounded, and, with short-sighted presumption

promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly

trace the situation of some; the sorrowful traveler

wanders over the lawful ruins of others; and, as he

beholds, he learns wisdom, and feels the transience of

every sublunary possession.

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“Here," he cries, "stood their

citadel, now grown over with,

weeds; there, their senate

house, but now the haunt of

every noxious, reptile; temples

and theatres stood here now

only an undistinguished heap

of ruin. They are fallen:

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for luxury and avarice first made them feeble. The

rewards of the state were conferred on amusing and

not on useful members of society. Their opulence

invited the invaders, who, though at first repulsed,

returned again, conquered by perseverance, and at

last swept the defendants into undistinguished

destruction. How few appear in those streets which,

but some few hours ago, were crowded! and those

who appear now no longer wear their daily mask, nor

attempt to hide their lewdness or their misery.

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But who are those who make the streets their couch,

and find a short repose from wretchedness at the

doors of the opulent? These are strangers,

wanderers, and orphans, whose circumstances are

too humble to expect redress, and whose distresses

are too great even for pity. Their wretchedness rather

excites horror than pity. Some are without the

covering even of rags, and others emaciated with

disease:

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the world has disclaimed them; society turns its back

upon their distress, and has given them up to

nakedness, hunger. These poor shivering females

have once seen happier days. They have been

prostituted to the gay, luxurious villain, and are now

turned out to meet the severity of Winter. Perhaps,

now lying at the doors of their betrayers, they sue to

wretches whose hearts are insensible, to

debauchees who may curse but will not relieve them.

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Why, why was I born a man, and yet see the

sufferings of wretches I cannot relieve! Poor

houseless creatures! The world will give you

reproaches, but will not give you relief. Misfortunes

of the great, the imaginary uneasinesses of the rich,

are aggravated with all the power of eloquence, and

held up to engage our attention and sympathetic

sorrow. The poor weep unheeded, persecuted by

every subordinate species of tyranny; and every law,

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which gives others security, becomes an enemy to

them. Why was this heart of mine formed with so

much sensibility! Or why was not my fortune adapted

to its impulse! Tenderness, without a capacity of

relieving, only makes the man who feels it more

wretched than the object which sues for assistance.

Adieu.

-- Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74).

Traveller 30

Traveller 31

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The Deserted Village: Goldsmith revisits Auburn, a village of

which he had fond memories, and marks the depopulation

brought about through the emigration of its peasant

community and the influx of monopolizing 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.

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The Deserted Village: Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,

Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:

Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;

A breath can make them, as a breath has made;

But a bold peasantry, their country‟s pride,

When once destroyed, can never be supplied

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Along the lawn, where scatter‟d hamlets rose,

Unwieldy wealth, and cumbrous pomp repose;

And every want to opulence allied,

And every pang that folly pays to pride.

Those gentle hours that plenty bade to bloom,

Those calm desires that ask‟d but little room,

Those healthful sports that grac‟d the peaceful scene,

Liv‟d in each look, and brighten‟d all the green;

These, far departing, seek a kinder shore,

And rural mirth and manners are no more.

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….The Deserted Village …as it was …before:

Sweet was the sound, when oft at evening‟s close

Up yonder hill the village murmur rose;

There, as I pass‟d with careless steps and slow,

The mingling notes came soften‟d from below;

The swain responsive as the milk-maid sung,

The sober herd that low‟d to meet their young;

The noisy geese that gabbled o‟er the pool,

The playful children just let loose from school;

The watchdog‟s voice that bay‟d the whisp‟ring wind,

And the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind;

He wrote like an angel-talked like poor poll… 36

Citizen of the World 37

Being of Irish birth and having traveled widely

through Europe on tour prior to 1760, he had

acquired the acumen and objectivity to comment

on English society and to compare it with others.

Oliver Goldsmith, who appeared to be the good-natured man and amiable author, was also a social critic in writing these essays.

He was a man who saw injustice and resented it.

He endeavored to unit the world through his travel and writing.

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o Goldsmith refers to Confucius who "observes that it is

the duty of the learned to unite society more closely, and

to persuade men to become citizens of the world."

o The same subject is pursued in in another Letter where

Altangi praises the benevolence of the English in raising

subscriptions for French prisoners.

o A memorable character of The Citizen papers is the

man in black, who is often associated with his creator,

Goldsmith, with a belief in universal benevolence.

o Altangi is moved only by his reason. Both are target of

satire.

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The man in black, has the ostensible purpose of

serving Altangi as a guide, represents an ideal

ethic, universal benevolence.

But it is an impractical ideal in a gross materialistic

world.

The irony of the situation is that the man in black

must violate his human compassion to be

accepted in a world where manipulation and

deception are the codes of the day.

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Like many men of his age. Goldsmith was quite interested

in politics.

A Tory, he believed in the supremacy of the monarchy and

in the existing social order; yet he was wise enough to see

that changes needed to be made within that structure.

He found many faults in the system which needed

alteration — the judicial system, the treatment of soldiers,

and British imperialism among others— but the system

itself he apparently found a workable one that was in need

of no radical change.