Goldsmith:
Source: John A. Dussinger, ‘Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?–1774)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Oct 2007 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10924, accessed 27 May 2008]
Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?–1774), author, was born on 10 November, probably 1728, at Pallas, near Ballymahon, in the parish of Forney, co. Longford, Ireland, the second son and fifth child of Charles Goldsmith (c.1690–1747), curate at Kilkenny West, and his wife, Ann (d. 1770), daughter of the Revd Oliver Jones, master of the diocesan school at Elphin. Since his marriage, in 1718, Charles Goldsmith had supplemented his modest income as a clergyman by farming. In 1730, after the retirement or death of his predecessor, the Revd Green (his wife's uncle), he became rector of Kilkenny West and moved to a larger house, outside the neighbouring village of Lissoy. Besides their famous son, Oliver, Charles and Ann had seven other children: Margaret (b. 1719), who died in infancy; Catherine (b. 1721), who married a wealthy man, Daniel Hodson; Henry (b. 1722?), who became a clergyman and raised a family, and died in 1768; Jane, Henry's twin, who married a poor man named Johnstone; Maurice (1736–1792), who became a cabinet-maker and died, childless, in poverty; Charles (1737–1803/4), an adventurer who went off to Jamaica and died, also childless, in Somers Town, north London; and John (1740–c.1752), who died aged about twelve. Both Catherine Hodson and Jane Johnstone died in Athlone some years after their brother Oliver.
Early years and education
Goldsmith's childhood as a member of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy at Lissoy was happy enough to have inspired the nostalgic picture of Auburn in The Deserted Village; but with about 90 per cent of his father's parish consisting of Roman Catholics he also could not avoid a sense of being in a privileged minority. Unlike other protestants, however, and under the influence of his maternal uncle and eventual patron, the Revd Thomas Contarine, he took an early interest in the native Celtic language and culture, and may have witnessed performances of Carolan, the celebrated native Irish singer and poet.
Severely disfigured by smallpox at the age of eight or nine, and with a receding chin, a protuberant brow, and awkward physique, Goldsmith was painfully aware of what a correspondent (probably William Kenrick) in the London Packet of 24 March 1773 described as his ‘monkey face’ and ‘grotesque orang-outang figure’. As a child he was ridiculed for his appearance. For instance during a dancing party at his parents' house, when he joined in the gambol with his hornpipe, the violinist, a youth by the name of Cumming, loudly derided him as ‘the personification of Aesop’. After a moment he stopped dancing and retorted with the following couplet:
Our herald hath proclaimed this saying,
See Aesop dancing and his monkey playing.
Despite his reputation for being awkward in company, if this anecdote is true then sometimes, even at the age of nine or ten, he could also be lucky with repartee (Prior, 1.28–9). After the publication of The Traveller Mrs Cholomondeley is reported to have observed to Johnson: ‘I never more shall think Dr. Goldsmith ugly’ (Johnson, 2.268).
Though his relative Mrs Elizabeth Delap was literally to her very last breath proud to have been ‘the first person who had put a book into Goldsmith's hands’ she confessed that as an infant he was ‘one of the dullest boys ever placed under her charge’ (Prior, 1.22). When he was about six his father put him under the care of the village schoolmaster, Thomas Byrne, a veteran who had served in Spain during Queen Anne's reign and a lively storyteller. Fully capable of teaching the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, according to one of his pupils (the Revd Handcock) he was able to ‘translate extemporaneously Virgil's Eclogues into Irish verse, of, at least, equal elegance’ (ibid., 24). Doubtless partly under Byrne's influence Goldsmith began to write verses, but immediately afterwards he would toss them into the fire. It was apparently this glimmering of creativity that prompted his mother to the view that he was destined for greatness, which later turned into bitter disappointment and, finally, rejection of her son. After the early years with Byrne, Oliver was sent to the grammar school in Elphin, under the Revd Michael Griffin; briefly to Mr Campbell's school in Athlone; and to a school in Edgeworthstown, whose master, the Revd Patrick Hughes, was a friend of Charles Goldsmith and a very kind mentor who supervised Oliver's interest in Latin studies. Because of difficulties in financing the elder son Henry's education at Trinity College, Dublin, Charles had planned to have Oliver pursue a career in business, but with the encouragement of his brother-in-law Thomas Contarine he decided to support his entrance at Trinity in 1745 as a lowly sizar.
In contrast to Henry, who entered as a gentleman commoner, Oliver, as sizar, had to undergo the humiliation of being a waiter at the fellows' table and of wearing a red academic cap as a symbol of inferiority. Besides the social discrimination one major reason why he did not distinguish himself as a student at Trinity had to do with his hated tutor Dr Theaker Wilder, a surly, temperamental authoritarian. On one occasion, in June 1747, during a noisy party in his rooms that Goldsmith threw to celebrate a prize he had won, Wilder intervened angrily and boxed his ears. Earlier Goldsmith had been involved in a riot over the arrest of a fellow student but was fortunate enough to escape with only a public reprimand, while the ringleaders were expelled. After Wilder's brutal treatment of him Goldsmith was so depressed that he left Trinity and could only just be persuaded by Henry to return to complete his degree requirements.
Goldsmith received his BA in February 1750, almost five years after he had matriculated. His time in Dublin, a city second only to London at that time, brought him into contact with the theatre and many other activities of a cultural centre. It also brought out his fatal attraction to gambling, which haunted him to the end of his life. When the death of his kindly father, in early 1747, forced his mother and her three small sons to move from the Lissoy house to a cottage in Ballymahon, Goldsmith earned money by selling ballads during his remaining years in Dublin.
Though family custom presumed that Goldsmith would take orders and become a clergyman—and apparently he made an effort to read theology—he proved an unsuitable prospect for the established church. According to a probably apocryphal story, when he showed up for his examination wearing scarlet breeches Bishop Synge, of Elphin, rejected his candidacy. After a brief period of being a private tutor he set out to Cork with £30 and a horse with the purpose of emigrating to America. Five weeks later, having sold his horse to pay for his passage but missed his ship, he returned home penniless with a nag dubbed Fiddleback. The far-fetched explanation offered to his dismayed mother seems to have been material for the episode in chapter 12 of The Vicar of Wakefield, in which Moses trades a good horse for a gross of green spectacles. When Uncle Contarine then provided £50 for him to study law in London, at the Temple, he gambled away his money in Dublin, to the lasting despair of his mother.
Edinburgh, Leiden, and a tour of the continent, 1752–1756
The family still supported Goldsmith, however, when he decided, next, to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh, which he entered in 1752; there he admired the lectures of the distinguished anatomist Alexander Monro, and a year later became a member of the Medical Society. But though the letters that he sent to his Irish family benefactors—his earliest on record—were intended to portray an earnest, grateful student they still betray a primary indulgence in the local social life, in which he regaled his company with Irish songs and tales and squandered money on expensive clothes to gain entrance to balls and to be clown at the table of James, duke of Hamilton. If his trip to the highlands in 1753 did not result in the euphoria of later tourists, at least his two years in Scotland sharpened his awareness of the differences between the two Celtic societies—Ireland and Scotland—and anticipated his role as cultural observer in his later writings.
Having written to his uncle Contarine that he had need of further medical study in Paris and Leiden, in early 1754 Goldsmith arrived in the Netherlands, and by spring had attended lectures by Albinus, Jerome Gaubius, and others. In his May 1754 letter to his uncle he spoke favourably of the tidy Dutch houses and fine gardens in the country as well as of the clean towns, but found the people themselves sluggish and complacent. Ten years later, in The Traveller, he decried their obsessive commercial spirit as destroying their country's freedom:
Even liberty itself is barter'd here.
At gold's superior charms all freedom flies;
The needy sell it, and the rich man buys:
A land of tyrants and a den of slaves.
Well before his return to England, Goldsmith had found his poetic theme of luxury upon witnessing the new wealth from the Netherlands' maritime empire and its impact on traditional village life. Yet in his translation Memoirs of a Protestant, Condemned to the Gallies of France, for his Religion (1758), from the French of Jean Marteilhe, he rendered a factual account of a French protestant's enthusiasm for the tolerant society of the Dutch when this former galley slave arrived in Amsterdam and found it hardly a ‘den of slaves’: ‘Were I to recount all the Civilities we received in this great City, I should never have done’ (vol. 2, p. 143). Aside from this early influence on his two major poems about the economic determinism of cultures, perhaps his most valuable experience in Leiden was in meeting Gaubius (Prior, 1.168), whose De regimine mentis (1747, 1763) describes psychosomatic medical problems that Mr Burchell, in The Vicar of Wakefield, alludes to as a ‘sickly sensibility’ (chapter 3) and that Primrose displays in his behaviour throughout his ordeal, especially when he collapses upon seeing his house on fire (chapter 22).
In February 1755 Goldsmith became a ‘philosophical vagabond’ (the term used in The Vicar of Wakefield, chapter 20), travelling by foot through Flanders, France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. A detailed account of this tour sent to Doctor Radcliff, fellow of Trinity College, was unfortunately lost in a fire that destroyed Radcliff's house (Prior, 1.176). The main source of speculation about Goldsmith's experiences is in the topographical descriptions in The Traveller, which his dedication to his brother Henry states was begun while in Switzerland, and in George Primrose's narrative of his travels in The Vicar of Wakefield. How he supported himself during this sojourn remains a mystery, but if his fiction contains any truth it may have been through playing the flute, tutoring in English, and gambling. He spent six months at Padua but did not visit Rome or Naples, probably for lack of money, since his benevolent uncle had died during this time. Despite being known as Dr Goldsmith in his later years, no record exists of his having received a medical degree while abroad. In early February 1756 he reached Calais, and from there crossed over to England, destitute and at twenty-five still without any career.
Introduction to London's Grub Street, 1756–1764
After working in an apothecary's shop in London Goldsmith tried to set up a medical practice in Southwark, ‘where he had plenty of Patients, but got no Fees’ (Balderston, 15). During this time he wrote a tragedy, now lost, and asked for Samuel Richardson's assistance with it. He may also have been a proofreader in Richardson's shop. Through the influence of an Edinburgh friend he found a temporary post as schoolmaster in a Presbyterian boys' school in Peckham run by this friend's father, Dr Milner, who was ill at the time. Although Milner had arranged to find Goldsmith a post as surgeon aboard a ship with the East India Company it was this benefactor's introducing him to the bookseller Ralph Griffiths in the spring of 1757 that proved to be the turning point of his life. As the proprietor of the Monthly Review, the first periodical to be devoted entirely to book reviews, Griffiths employed Goldsmith, providing him with a room and board at his house in Paternoster Row and an income of £100 a year. Even if at first Goldsmith still had hopes of seeking his fortune as a doctor in India, and remained only about seven or eight months with Griffiths, this interval was invaluable for his development as a journalist; his long and insightful review (May 1757) of Edmund Burke's Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756) was among the most exemplary responses to this pioneering work of aesthetics. His translation of Jean Marteilhe's Mémoires d'un protestant (1758) gave him the opportunity to write a preface that concludes poignantly on what was to become his literary focus: the subject as hapless victim of tyrannical oppression, whether in one country or another. Furthermore Goldsmith transformed Marteilhe's wordy, rambling account into an effectively structured and compelling narrative. Though Griffiths and a fellow bookseller, Edward Dilly, paid Goldsmith £20 the pseudonym on the title-page is James Wellington, the name of a student at Trinity College during the years that Goldsmith studied there.
After a quarrel with Griffiths, Goldsmith took lodgings for a few months in late 1757 near Salisbury Square, just south of Fleet Street, the location of Richardson's printing business. Following a brief stay in Peckham to assist in Milner's school he moved in 1758 into a room with one broken chair and a bed at Green Arbour Court, off the Old Bailey. Having received an appointment with the East India Company in 1758 he failed the examination to be qualified as a ship's surgeon. From that point on he became wholly dependent on his Grub Street quill to eke out a living. In 1759 he began writing for Archibald Hamilton's and Tobias Smollett's tory-oriented Critical Review, which first appeared in 1756, seven years after the founding of Griffiths's whiggish Monthly Review, its major rival. While still planning a career in India, Goldsmith agreed with Robert and James Dodsley of the Tully's Head bookshop, in the West End, to write an account of contemporary European culture, which was published in April 1759 as An Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe. Early in the same year he also completed for Griffiths a life of Voltaire, which did not appear until 1761, when it came out in instalments in the Lady's Magazine as ‘Memoirs of M. de Voltaire’.