Goldsmith, Oliver
Goldsmith, Oliver (1728–74). Man of letters. Born in Ireland, the son of an Anglican clergyman, Goldsmith attended Trinity College, Dublin, before briefly studying medicine in Edinburgh and Leyden. On settling in London from 1756, he supported himself partly as a physician, partly as a hack-writer, and partly by borrowing from friends. But he gradually pulled himself out of Grub Street and began to acquire a reputation. His poem The Traveller (1764) was well received; a novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) has remained a minor classic; The Good-Natured Man, a comedy (1768), had a respectable stage run; The Deserted Village (1770) touched the chord of nostalgia and was much admired; the History of England (1771), though derivative, sold well; She Stoops to Conquer (1773), which Goldsmith claimed was based upon personal experience, was a great success. Goldsmith was a strange man, feckless, naïve, unworldly, generous. Boswell, a fellow-member of the Club, treated him as a butt and buffoon, but Johnson admired him as ‘a very great man’. He died heavily in debt, and Horace Walpole wrote of him, not unfairly, that ‘he had sometimes parts, though never common sense’.
June Cochrane
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Goldsmith, Oliver