BIOGRAPHY
Nov. 10, 1730, Kilkenny West, County Westmeath, Ire. d. April 4, 1774, London English essayist, poet, novelist, dramatist, and eccentric, made famous by such works as the series of essays The Citizen of the World, or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher (1762), the poem The Deserted Village (1770), the novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and the play She Stoops to Conquer (1773)
Life:Goldsmith was the son of an Anglo-Irish clergyman, the Rev.
Charles Goldsmith, curate in charge of Kilkenny West, County
Westmeath. At about the time of his birth, the family moved into
a substantial house at nearby Lissoy, where Oliver spent his
childhood. Much has been recorded concerning his youth, his
unhappy years as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin,
where he received the B.A. degree in February 1749, and his many
misadventures before he left Ireland in the autumn of 1752 to
study in the medical school at Edinburgh.
His father was now dead, but several of his relations had
undertaken to support him in his pursuit of a medical degree.
Later on, in London, he came to be known as Dr. Goldsmith--Doctor
being the courtesy title for one who held the Bachelor of
Medicine--but he took no degree while at Edinburgh nor, so far as
anyone knows, during the two-year period when, despite his meagre
funds, which were eventually exhausted, he somehow managed to
make his way through Europe. The first period of his life ended
with his arrival in London, bedraggled and penniless, early in
1756.
Goldsmith's rise from total obscurity was a matter of only a few
years. He worked as an apothecary's assistant, school usher,
physician, and as a hack writer--reviewing, translating, and
compiling. It remains amazing that this young Irish vagabond,
unknown, uncouth, unlearned, and unreliable, was yet able within
a few years to climb from obscurity to mix with aristocrats and
the intellectual elite of London. Such a rise was possible
because Goldsmith had one quality, soon noticed by booksellers
and the public, that his fellow literary hacks did not possess--the
gift of a graceful, lively, and readable style. His rise began
with the Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in
Europe (1759), a minor work.
Soon he emerged as an essayist, in The Bee and other periodicals,
and above all in his Chinese Letters, the essays of which were
collected as The Citizen of the World in 1762.
The same year brought his Life of Richard Nash, of Bath, Esq.
Already Goldsmith was acquiring those distinguished and often
helpful friends whom he alternately annoyed and amused, shocked
and charmed--Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Percy,
David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and James Boswell. The obscure
drudge of 1759 became in 1764 one of the nine founder-members of
the famous Club, a select body, including Reynolds, Johnson, and
Burke, which met weekly for supper and talk. Goldsmith could now
afford to live more comfortably, but his extravagance continually
ran him into debt, and he was forced to undertake more hack work.
He thus produced histories of England and of ancient Rome and
Greece, biographies, verse anthologies, translations, and works
of popular science. These were mainly compilations of works by
other authors, which Goldsmith then distilled and enlivened by
his own gift for fine writing. Some of these makeshift
compilations went on being reprinted well into the 19th century,
however.
By 1762 Goldsmith had established himself as an essayist with his
Citizen of the World, in which he used the device of satirizing
Western society through the eyes of an Oriental visitor to London.
By 1764 he had won a reputation as a poet with The Traveller,
whose verses embodied both his memories of tramping through
Europe and his political ideas.
In 1770 he confirmed that reputation with the more famous
Deserted Village, which contains charming vignettes of rural life
while denouncing the evictions of the country poor at the hands
of wealthy landowners. In 1766 Goldsmith revealed himself as a
novelist with The Vicar of Wakefield (completed 1762), a portrait
of village life whose idealization of rural life, sentimental
moralizing, and melodramatic incidents are nevertheless underlain
by a sharp but good-natured irony.
In 1768 Goldsmith turned to the theatre with The Good Natur'd Man,
which was followed in 1773 by the much more effective She Stoops
to Conquer. This play has outlived almost all other English
comedies from the early 18th to the late 19th century by virtue
of its broadly farcical horseplay and vivid, humorous
characterizations. During his last decade Goldsmith's
conversational encounters with Johnson and others, his
foolishness, and his wit were preserved in Boswell's Life of
Samuel Johnson. Goldsmith eventually became deeply embroiled in
mounting debts despite his considerable earnings as an author,
though, and after a short illness in the spring of 1774 he died.
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