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Oliver Goldsmith (10 November 1730 – 4 April 1774) was an Irish writer, poet, and physician known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), his pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770) (written in memory of his brother), and his plays The Good - Natur'd Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1771, 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". Goldsmith's birth date and year are not known with certainty. According to the Library of Congress authority file, he told a biographer that he was born on 29 November 1731, or perhaps in 1730. Other sources have indicated 10 November, on any year from 1727 to 1731. 10 November 1730 is now the most commonly accepted birth date. Neither is the location of his birthplace certain. He was born either in the townland of Pallas, near Ballymahon, County Longford, Ireland, where his father was the Anglican curate of the parish of Forgney, or at the residence of his maternal grandparents, at the Smith Hill House in the diocese of Elphin, County Roscommon, where his grandfather Oliver Jones was a clergyman and master of the Elphin diocesan school. When he was two years old, Goldsmith's father was appointed the rector of the parish of "Kilkenny West" in County Westmeath. The family moved to the parsonage at Lissoy, between Athlone and Ballymahon, and continued to live there until his father's death in 1747. In 1744
Goldsmith went up to Trinity
College, Dublin. Neglecting his studies in theology and law, he
fell to the bottom of his class. His tutor was Theaker Wilder.
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; his education seemed to have given
him mainly a taste for fine clothes, playing cards, singing Irish airs
and playing the flute. He lived for a short time with his mother, tried
various professions without success, studied medicine
desultorily at the University of
Edinburgh and the University of
Leiden, and set out on a walking tour of Flanders, France, Switzerland and Northern Italy,
living by his wits (busking with his flute). He
settled in London in 1756, where he briefly held various jobs,
including an apothecary's
assistant and an usher of a school. Perennially in debt and addicted to
gambling, Goldsmith produced a massive output as a hack writer for the publishers of
London, but his few painstaking works earned him the company of Samuel Johnson,
with whom he was a founding member of "The Club".
The combination of his literary work and his dissolute lifestyle led Horace Walpole to give him the epithet inspired idiot.
During this period he used the pseudonym "James Willington" (the name
of a fellow student at Trinity) to publish his 1758 translation of the
autobiography of the Huguenot Jean Marteilhe. Goldsmith
was described by contemporaries as prone to envy, a congenial but
impetuous and disorganised personality who once planned to emigrate to
America but failed because he missed his ship. His
premature death in 1774 may have been partly due to his own
misdiagnosis of his kidney infection. Goldsmith was buried in Temple Church.
The inscription reads; "HERE LIES/OLIVER GOLDSMITH". There is a
monument to him in the center of Ballymahon,
also in Westminster
Abbey with an epitaph written by Samuel Johnson. Goldsmith
wrote this romantic ballad of precisely 160 lines in 1765. The hero and
heroine are Edwin, a youth without wealth or power, and Angelina, the
daughter of a lord "beside the Tyne." Angelina spurns many wooers, but
refuses to make plain her love for young Edwin. "Quite dejected with my
scorn," Edwin disappears and becomes a hermit. One day, Angelina turns
up at his cell in boy's clothes and, not recognizing him, tells him her
story. Edwin then reveals his true identity, and the lovers never part
again. The poem is notable for its interesting portrayal of a hermit,
who is fond of the natural world and his wilderness solitude but
maintains a gentle, sympathetic demeanor toward other people. In
keeping with eremitical tradition, however, Edwin the Hermit claims to
"spurn the [opposite] sex." This poem appears under the title of "A
Ballad" sung by the character of Mr. Burchell in Chapter 8 of
Goldsmith's novel, The Vicar of
Wakefield. In 1760,
Goldsmith began to publish a series of letters in the Public Ledger under the title The Citizen of the World.
Purportedly written by a Chinese traveler in England named Lien Chi,
they used this fictional outsider's perspective to comment ironically
and at times moralistically on British society and manners. It was
inspired by the earlier essay series Persian Letters by Charles de
Secondat, baron de Montesquieu. The
ironic poem, An
Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog was
published in 1766. He is also thought to have written the classic
children's tale The History of
Little Goody Two-Shoes. Goldsmith
lived in Kingsbury,
London, between 1771 – 1774 and there is a school named after him there
called the Oliver Goldsmith Primary School. In the play Marx In Soho by Howard Zinn,
Marx makes a reference to Goldsmiths' poem, The Deserted Village.
A statue of him stands at the Front Arch of Trinity
College, Dublin. His name has been given to a new lecture
theater and student accommodation on the Trinity College campus,
Goldsmith Hall. Somerset
Maugham used the
last line from An
Elegy On The Death Of A Mad Dog in
his novel The
Painted Veil (1925).
The character Walter Fane's last words are The dog it was that died.
Auburn,
Alabama and Auburn University were named for the first line in
Goldsmith's poem: "Sweet Auburn, loveliest village on the plain."
Auburn is still referred to as the 'loveliest village on the plains.'
There is a statue in Ballymahon County Longford. London
Underground locomotive number 16 (used on the Metropolitan
line of the London
Underground until
1962) was named Oliver
Goldsmith. |