Oliver Goldsmith From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article is about the

18th Century Anglo-Irish poet, author and physician. For the Canadian poet of the 19th Century, see Oliver Goldsmith (Canadian poet). For other people named Goldsmith, see Goldsmith (disambiguation). Oliver Goldsmith Portrait 1769-70 by Joshua Reynolds Born November 10, 1730 (disputed) Either Ballymahon, County Longford, Ireland or Elphin, County Roscommon, Ireland April 4, 1774 (aged 43) London, Great Britain Author, playwright, poet, apothecary's assistant, busker English Irish B.A. Trinity College, Dublin The Club The Vicar of Wakefield, "The Deserted Village", The Good-Natur'd Man, She Stoops to Conquer

Died

Resting place Temple Church, London Occupation Language Nationality Education Alma mater Literary movement Notable work(s)

Oliver Goldsmith (10 November 1730 4 April 1774) was an Anglo-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".

[edit] Biography 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. The location of his birthplace is also uncertain. 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. His tutor was Theaker Wilder. Neglecting his studies in theology and law, he fell to the bottom of his class. 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).

'A literary party at Sir Joshua Reynolds's'.

[1]

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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 [2] written by Samuel Johnson. [edit] Works See The Vicar of Wakefield, The Good-Natur'd Man, and She Stoops to Conquer. [edit] The Citizen of the World 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. [edit] The Hermit 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. [edit] The Deserted Village In the 1760s Goldsmith witnessed the demolition of an ancient village and destruction of its farms to clear [3] land to become a wealthy man's garden. His poem The Deserted Village, published in 1770, expresses a fear that the destruction of villages and the conversion of land from productive agriculture to ornamental landscape gardens would ruin the peasantry.[3] The Deserted Village gave the demolished village the pseudonym "Sweet Auburn" and Goldsmith did not disclose the real village on which he based it. However, he did indicate it was about 50 miles (80 km) from London and it is widely believed to have been Nuneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire, which Simon Harcourt, 1st Earl Harcourt had demolished and moved 1 mile (1.6 km) away to make the park for his [3] newly built Nuneham House. [edit] Other works The ironic poem, An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog was published in 1766. Goldsmith is also thought to have written the classic children's tale The History of Little Goody TwoShoes. [edit] Memorials concerning Oliver Goldsmith

A statue of Goldsmith at Trinity College, Dublin. Goldsmith lived in Kingsbury, London between 17711774 and the Oliver Goldsmith Primary School there is named after him. In the play Marx In Soho by Howard Zinn, Marx makes a reference to Goldsmiths' poem, The Deserted [4] Village. A statue of him stands at the Front Arch of Trinity College, Dublin. His name has been given to a new lecture theatre 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. Goldsmiths rise from total obscurity was a matter of only a few years. He worked as an apothecarys assistant, school usher, physician, and as a hack writerreviewing, translating, and compiling. Much of his work was for Ralph Griffithss Monthly Review. 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 possessthe 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. These essays were first published in the journal The<script

src="http://adserver.adtechus.com/addyn/3.0/5308.1/1371312/0/170/ADTECH;target=_blank;grp=863;key =false;kvqsegs=D;kvtopicid=237932;misc=1311434940180"></script> Public Ledger and 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 charmedSamuel 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.