BI OGRAPHY

A CI TY NI GHT- PI ECE



Life and Work
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
Johnsons 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.
Johnsons Literary Club.

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o The family of Olivers 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 Olivers 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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Now there can be no question that Goldsmith,
conscious of his pitted face, his brogue, and his
ungainly figure, was exceedingly nervous and
sensitive in society, and was anxious, as such people
mostly are, to cover his shyness by an appearance of
ease, if not even of swagger; and there can be as
little question that 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. 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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"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 forward child,
seems hushed with her own importunities.
17
What a gloom hangs all around! 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.
18
What cities, as great as this, have once triumphed in
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.
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They are fallen: 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 riches and 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.
23
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;
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and every law, 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).
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Inspiration for 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 towns 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 She Stoops to Conquer in
1773, Oliver Goldsmith found himself at the peak of
his fameyet deeply depressed and in debt. By
1774, he was dead.
Sadly, his own generation did not fully recognize
Goldsmiths talents, and it was not until the mid-
twentieth century that he began to receive the full
scholarly and biographical analysis that he
deserves.
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The Club or The Literary Club
Members of the Literary Club.
6/2/2013
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She Stoops to Conquer playwright Oliver Goldsmith was a
member of the Literary Club, formed by Dr. Samuel Johnson
in 1763. Among other members were James Boswell,
Johnsons biographer; Sir Joshua Reynolds, the painter;
Adam Smith, the economist; Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the
playwright; David Garrick, the actor; and Edmund Burke, the
politician. The world that Goldsmith and his contemporaries
wrote about was a world with great mixing of socioeconomic
classes. The cutting edge of artistic innovation moved away
from the Courtwhere it had been during the Restoration
and toward the public.