In Our Time - Oliver Goldsmith

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the renowned and versatile Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith (1728 - 1774). There is a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner written by Dr Johnson, celebrating Goldsmith's life as a poet, natural philosopher and historian. To this could be added ‘playwright’ and ‘novelist’ and ‘science writer’ and ‘pamphleteer’ and much besides, as Goldsmith explored so many different outlets for his talents. While he began on Grub Street in London, the centre for jobbing writers scrambling for paid work, he became a great populariser and compiler of new ideas and knowledge and achieved notable successes with poems such as The Deserted Village, his play She Stoops to Conquer and his short novel The Vicar of Wakefield. WithDavid O’Shaughnessy Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of GalwayJudith Hawley Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonAnd Michael Griffin Professor of English at the University of LimerickProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Norma Clarke, Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street (Harvard University Press, 2016)Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age (Yale University Press, 2019)Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Aileen Douglas and Ian Campbell Ross), The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale, Supposed to Be Written by Himself (first published 1766; Cambridge University Press, 2024)Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Arthur Friedman), The Vicar of Wakefield (first published 1766; Oxford University Press, 2008)Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Arthur Friedman), The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 5 vols (Clarendon Press, 1966) Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Robert L. Mack), Oliver Goldsmith: Everyman’s Poetry, No. 30 (Phoenix, 1997)Oliver Goldsmith (ed. James Ogden), She Stoops to Conquer (first performed 1773; Methuen Drama, 2003)Oliver Goldsmith (ed. James Watt), The Citizen of the World (first published 1762; Cambridge University Press, 2024)Oliver Goldsmith (ed. Nigel Wood), She Stoops to Conquer and Other Comedies (first performed 1773; Oxford University Press, 2007)Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy (eds.), Oliver Goldsmith in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2024)Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy (eds.), The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith (Cambridge University Press, 2018)Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith (Longmans, 1969)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, the Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, 1728 to 1774,

has a memorial in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner, celebrating his life as a poet, natural philosopher and his sauren. To this could be added playwright, a novelist, and science writer, and pamphleteer, and much besides, as Goldsmith began on Grub Street, where writers for hire were jacks of all trades and masters of just a few.

Yet while much of Goldsmith's earlier work was ephemeral, his lasting triumphs include his poem, The Deserted Village, play, she stoops to conquer, and book the vicar of Wakefield. We need to discuss Oliver Goldsmith at David O'Shawnessie, Professor of 18th century studies at the University of Galway Judy Holney, Professor of 18th century literature at Royal Holloway, University of London and Michael Griffin, Professor of English at the University of Limerick. Mike Griffin, what should we know of Goldsmith's early life?

Well, he's very much a child of the Midlands in Ireland. He was born on the 10th of November 1728. His father was the Reverend Charles Goldsmith. His mother was Anne Jones, whose father was Oliver Jones, who was an Anglican priest in the Diocese of El Finn. Goldsman himself was the second son and the fifth child of eight. So it was a large family. And there was plenty of clerical activity

and clerical culture, I suppose you'd say, in the family. He was not a particularly promising child. This was referred to by a number of people. He was somewhat wayward. His first teacher was a woman by the name of Elizabeth Delap, who thought that he showed some promise in verse but failed to apply himself in much of his study. But then as his childhood went on,

he was exposed to a few other teachers who I think cultivated in him a love of learning, particularly in poetry and the arts. He was badly damaged. This is actually an important part of his life story, I suppose, is that he was badly damaged by smallpox at the age of eight or nine, which left marks on his face

and would lead to a number of people remarking over the course of his life that he was pretty ugly. That's something that was a source of unkind remarks throughout. But he was in the school of Thomas Byrne at the time when he was struck by smallpox. Thomas Byrne was a very influential figure in his life because he was a returned soldier. The figure of the returned soldier is a figure that recurs in Goldsmith's writing. And he taught him aspects of the classics, was good with ballads. And he, I think, cultivated in the young Goldsmith, a greater and greater love of poetry.

From the beginning there seems to have been a boisterous streak in him. Is that right? That's true, yeah, quite a rebellious streak. He didn't take well to instruction. and when he was insulted he liked to insult back. And there was a sense in which he demonstrated at a very early age a talent for repartee. So if somebody referred to him as Aesop, referring to his ugliness,

I think it was a musician referred to him as Aesop while he was dancing. And he said, well, see Aesb dancing and he's monkey playing. When did he leave Ireland and why? And where did he go? Well, he left Ireland. This is all part of his education. He was educated in Dublin and Trinity College between 1745 and 1715.

He didn't have a particularly illustrious career there, but he graduated with the BA in 1750, and that's when he leaves Ireland. He goes after a couple of false starts, if you like. First of all, he tries to emigrate to America from Cork, but he literally missed the boat. And then he was, the design was that he was going to be a lawyer, and there were plenty of Irish people training to be lawyers in London at that time,

and he gambled away his money in Dublin before he went over. So he had to go back with his tail between his legs, and that then is when everything else seems to have failed he was sent to Edinburgh then to become a medical student so we studied medicine in Edinburgh between 1752 and 1754 Thank you very much Judith Judith only He came to London as we've just heard and you worked on what was called Grub Street

Can you tell those few people who don't know what Grub Street is and what he did Grub Street is a real street The name Grub means ditch And it was a kind of ditch on the outskirts of London just on the edge outside the sort of city jurisdiction. And it gained a reputation as basically a kind of literary sweatshop. A number of publishers were located there. And they often, the ephemeral publishers, publishing satirical pamphlets,

some pornography, but also some quite serious publishers. And both in truth and in reputation, a number of writers lived there, sometimes in the attics of the publisher's houses. They were, there are writers for hire. and when Goldsmith arrived in London in 1756, aged about, was it 24 or 25, 25 who's penniless, he'd been travelling around Europe. He had this extensive range of interest. Whereabouts in Europe? Pretty much everywhere.

He went to Leiden to study medicine after his time in Edinburgh and then traipsed around most of Europe. So he's walking around Europe? He's walking. He's on foot, earning a living, some say, partly by playing the flute and singing songs, but also by being a kind of debater for hire. The university examinations were conducted by debate, and they always needed someone who's like the invigilator or something, who would answer back.

And Mike has already given this idea of him as somebody who's very good with the rebuttal and the repartee. And so he could have honed his wits in debate, but didn't settle to any kind of profession. When he started to write, when he started to be an active member, what did he start with? He started working for a man called Ralph Griffiths, who edited a really important,

journal called the Monthly Review, which is the beginning of book reviewing in Britain. So he had access to a lot of books, and it was a kind of, in a way, it was hackwork, and it was just churning out reviews, and he felt it was a drudgery. But on the other hand, he had access to all sorts of the best latest books.

For example, he wrote a very good and perceptive review of Edmund Burke's inquiry into the nature of the sublime and beautiful. So he resented it because he was pinned down and living in poverty, and he eventually left and worked for a rival publisher, Smollett's Critical Review. The words Grub Street makes you think of money, not in a big way. What did he do for money?

He came to make a living. That's what he came to do. He was paid for everything that he wrote, and writers could be quite canny about what they took on, and he knew what he would get for a pamphlet, what he would get for a poem. You got more for a poem. You got more for a poem.

And if it went well, you got the most money for a writing. writing a play, because if you had a third night of performance for the play, you got all the box office takings for that, what's called the Benefit Night. So eventually he wrote for the theatre, but not for a long time. Thank you. David, David O'Shaughnessy, he was prolific. Can we begin to tell the listeners about his range? Well, as Judith said, he wrote, he began reviewing books, and from that process, he began to engage and think about writing periodicals himself. So one is the B, 1759, that went on for a few issues. But most substantially, I think, from that period, is his book, The Citizen of the World.

So the Citizen of the World was published initially as a series of letters in the public ledger from 1760 to 61. And it covers a full range of topics, looks at London from all sorts of different perspectives, its politics, its cultures, its fads, its fashions. And I think just to pick up on what Judith was saying about his life and his experience, in Grub Street, this is also a very important document for a theme that pervades through his writing, his own sense of what it means to be an author on Grub Street, the difficulties that one encounters, the struggles, the ignominy of that process.

For Goldsmith, I think he saw himself as a writer with something to say, but the difficulty he had was trying to extricate himself from the morass of people for that genius to be recognised. Well, did he draw from his own background? Any sort of early schooling he had? Do we see that immediately or does that percolate slowly through his life? It percolates slowly through the work.

I mean, Judith was talking about his travels around Europe. So this translates very naturally into a passage in the vicar of Wakefield, for instance, where George Pimrose, the son of the vicar, goes off to Europe on his travels. And we understand that as being a strongly biographical part of Goldsmith's writing. And similarly, and she stoops to conquer, is purportedly based on an incident from his youth as well. So throughout his Uvra we see, we do see biographical elements.

We're talking about a person who wrote history books. He wrote the history of this city, that city, the other city. Enough for one man's lifetime, really. That came later in his career. He wrote a number of historical works. History of England and a series of letters from a nobleman to his son

in 1764. And he follows that up with histories of Greece and Rome and another history of England. So he The historical writing is a fundamental facet of Enlightenment thinking. Goldsmith wasn't a profoundly original historian, I think it's fair to say, but he is extremely significant as a mediator and disseminator of historical knowledge. So he goes to Hume, he goes to Rappin, Smollett, Voltaire,

and he disseminates that writing in a way that is much more long-lasting than those original writers. This is what Johnson says. So Boswell says, you know, Goldsmiths, there's no historian and Johnson says, well, nobody's going to go back to Robertson to read that again. But to the plain narrative of Goldsmith, they'll return time and time again. So this is his significance,

and he becomes one of the most reprinted historians into the 19th century. He's mentioned in Jane Eyre. Jane Eyne-Air refers to him, a novel that's published in 1847. So this gives us some sense of how Goldsmith's histories stay in the public consciousness. Mike, which is very, very impressive. the way he seemed to master so many different disciplines and ideas,

for instance, he became a celebrated science writer. Yeah, he writes pretty prolifically in the realm of science. I mean, he starts again to go back to the start of his career. He reviews some important works such as Brooks' works of natural history. And going back to his medical training in Edinburgh and Leiden, science is an abiding interest with him.

When is in Leiden? What language do they speak? Dutch. But I think the medical education would have been through Latin. largely. Yeah, that's what I thought. Leiden is one of the great centres

of medical education. And Edinburgh is as well because Edinburgh is very much modelled on the Leiden school. So between Edinburgh and Leiden, he has a pretty extensive exposure to some of the best scientific thinking in Europe at the time.

And he translates all of his knowledge and all of his reading into an eight-volume history of the earth and animated nature towards the end of his career, which is actually the piece of work that he earned the most money he earned for anything at all.

So he earned £840 for that. And it's an extraordinary kind of wide panoply of everything from theories of the earth to catalogs of insects to, you know, essays on the varieties of the human race and so forth. It's extraordinary industrious, isn't it? I mean, throughout his career, he writes and writes and writes. Sometimes he's quite canny with his writing. Isn't he brought in to write the prefaces to, is it to Brooks' history of Earth?

And then he's commissioned to review Brooks history. And in his review, he praises the prefaces. So he really knows how to churn. To play the market. But I think it's also worth saying that this is the discipline that that early Grub Street experience gave him. So we know that when he was writing his histories later on in his career, he would get up in the morning, he would read Hume,

then he'd go out about his day, and then he'd retire to bed, and he'd spend his evening in bed writing a chapter. So it was that capacity of work and the discipline is important to remember when we think about the good. gullsmut that's left to us through the mythology of him as a somewhat buffoonish character. He's a very disciplined writer. He's a wonderful writer. I mean,

we've come, well, it's come to it now. The deserted village is just a wonderful piece. Mike, can you tell us about that? Why did he get that? How would you describe it? It is a wonderful piece of poetry, probably one of the best pieces of poetry of the century. It's 430 lines long, and it's written in heroic couplets. And it is a game of two halves, if you like.

It's partially pastoral remembrance. and a kind of a gorgeous backward look at a society which once existed, which supposedly produced the poet himself. And intermixed with that, then you have an argument against the economic forces which have rendered that form of village life no longer viable. So it goes through a number of phases. The first phases describing the landscape in a very bucolic style, but then he goes on to say that these were thy charms,

but all these charms are fled. And then from there on, there's another. few kind of pastoral moments where you have these characters described that maybe, there may be an element of autobiographical writing in this to go back to that point, where you encounter the village preacher. And teacher. The village teacher and the broken soldier who's returned from foreign wars. And they're considered to be extraordinarily kind of successful pieces of pastoral writing.

Is there any way you can quote a passage or two, Mike? One of the most quoted passages, I think, from the poem is the description of the village schoolmaster. And I'll just give you a short few lines from there. beyond yon straggling fence that skirts the way with blossomed furs unprofitably gay there in his noisy mansion skilled to rule the village master taught his little school a man severe he was and stern to view

I knew him well and every truant knew well had the boding tremblers learned to trace the day's disasters in his morning face so that's one of the most loved passages I think from the poem and that I mean, there was criticism of the economic argument, but I think in the first wave of responses to the poem, people loved that.

They loved the village schoolmaster. They loved the preacher. They loved the description of the population of the village. But then once you go past that, it becomes a sustained critique of economic. Modernity, I suppose you'd say, all of the forces which have resulted in the breakup of rural life and the breaking of kind of social affections.

Judith, do you want to take up another passage? T.S. Eliot said that one of the glories of Goldsmith was that he combined, I put the emphasis on combined. He combined the Augustine and the sentimental. So there's an element of Alexander Pope's clever balance in his use of heroic couplets, but then there's also feeling. Another very famous line is, some of the poem is vignettes of particular scenes and people,

but a lot of it is abstract in general and uses personification. and one wonderful couple it is, ill fares the land to hastening ills of prey where wealth accumulates and men decay. Wasn't just that little area, was it? Yes. Yeah, he's thinking about the country as a whole. So he's saying that this area of land in Auburn,

the fictional setting for the poem, but also the land with a capital L, you know, the British Isles are... And the poem is very well received in America and they identify the village there too. Yes. In fact, the name Auburn gets taken up and used as a name for villages in the United States. There's 15 or 16 Auburns in America. Yes, the University of Auburn University is in Alabama, I think. He gives a convincing idea of what could have been a merely sentimental recollection, doesn't he?

He anatomizes this village, this imaginary village, people who work there, how they work there. Why working there gives them dignity and strength in all sorts of. of ways, and then money comes in, property buying on a big scale comes in. In a sense, it's a to raid against trade. The trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay, this rural society. It's a trade against large landowners taking over tracts of land that would have been the scene of village life, and they're now becoming private gardens. And it's also a complaint against the widespread phenomenon of enclosure,

which effectively is the privatisation of land in the 18th. century, which really begins to accelerate from about 1750 on. Judith, you're going to come in now? Yes, it was a controversial poem, and I think Goldsmith knew, even as he was writing it, that not everybody would believe him. And even in his preface, he says that people might object that this rural depopulation just isn't happening. And he says, in my travels around Britain, I have noticed this. And it is the case that Irish people were emigrating to the Americas, and there's a movement to encourage people to pull English people to emigrate to Georgia.

But it's, I think some of his, it's exaggerated, the extent to which Britain is becoming a ghostland is exaggerated. And there also, I think, some tensions both in his depiction of what life was like before and in his analysis of what's going on. So I'm always struck by how the wonderful preacher, who is possibly modelled on his own clerical family and his, his favourite brother, he's presented us very kindly, but he has to be tolerant because his parishioners are sinners. He's very aware. He's very aware. of the vices of the sinners. So this old world isn't perfect. The village ale house, which is kind of this wonderful place where people sat around drinking beer. It's kind of a bit of a gossip shop. I mean, I'm not sure that I'd want to. It's been a gossip shop

ever since in any places. And that is what it is as much as a drinking place. So that centre of community is gone. But his analysis of what has changed it is also, I think, controversial that we have enclosure. We have landowners creating landscape parks. But then this idea of the new money, he's a bit vague about how these different

things interact. I think there's a kind of a Tory politics against trade. And there's a moment at which Britain was becoming incredibly rich after the seven years war. And there's a rise of sentiment to kind of counter, sort of to morally purge that sense of guilt, just how luxurious Britain had become. Do you want to come in, David? Just to pick up on Judith's point, I think the time of it in the wake of the Seven Years' War is really important. And it's important to think about that geopolitical context. Britain has emerged triumphant from a very long and damaging war. And in many sense, I think the poem is a provocation to say, is this the direction of travel for England? Is this where we have got now after this point? Another important element of the poem, I think, is the

contrast between the city and the village. So London features a brief but very significant passage in the middle of the poem. And it's interesting to look at the language of that. We get an image of London that is all about spectacle, about gaudiness, showy, but also very seductive. And London is, as I think we're coming to find,

a theme throughout Goldsmiths. It's a character in his oeuvre that appears in many different forms. Would you say his portrait of the village was too sentimental, was too over-ripe? Because I found lots of it had come through to the present day, almost.

Well, certainly, Some respondents thought so. George Crabb writes a poem in response called the village, and that was exactly the point he made, that the village that the Goldsman presents is too soft, is too sentimental. An important aspect of the poem is, you know, the location of this village has been hotly contested in the critical debate. A couple of locations suggested around England,

but of course many people see this as a pay-end to Ireland, an exercise in nostalgia for a land that he never went back to after he left it. But he found himself always drawn back to Ireland, in his thoughts and the connections that he'd made there. He's in Grub Street. What was his network? And how much did he rely on it? Well, when he came to London first in 1756 even,

he, like many Irish before him and many Irish since, he plugged into Irish networks. It was a challenging time perhaps to be Irish in London in many ways. But there were, as Michael and Judith have said, lots of Irish in London at the time, particularly the legal networks, but there were also Irish bankers, merchants. There was a very aspirational Irish middling class there. But it would do him a disservice, I think, to kind of picture him as just operating those parochial terms. Certainly as his career advanced through connections with Ralph Griffiths and Tobias Smollett and people like that, he connects

with Johnson in 1762. Johnson takes a great shine to Goldsmith. He's extraordinary admiring of Goldsmith's writing. He's also friendly with Joshua Reynolds and knows. I won't say that he was a great friend of David Garrick and George Coleman, but he certainly makes these kinds of major connections. Judith? I think one thing that's striking is that we know so little about Goldsmith's life at all. There seem to be few records, few letters. I think he was interviewed by his friend Thomas Percy, Percy's Relics, the great ballad collector and there's supposed to be an account there. But some of what the information we have comes from James Boswell's life of Johnson, which is a very biased account of Goldsmiths, I think, that Goldsmith got to know Johnson

before Boswell did. And I think Boswell, a fellow outsider and somebody who's a little bit unable to find his way and place in London, is quite jealous. And he loves to report sparring matches between Johnson and Goldsmiths in which Goldsmith says something a bit foolish. Or he talks without thinking. And Johnson, which sort of knocks him down, metaphorically with with a butt of his gun and sort of obliterates and destroys Goldsmith again and again and again. So he seems like a sort of like a parrot or a monkey who's there to entertain the group. So he plays this role or he performs the function rather of the comic Irishman in James Boswell's life of Johnson. But we can't be sure that that's what he was really like, I think.

But it's very interesting how closely Johnson sticks with him, how materially he helps him quite straightforwarder. when he was stuck for money, he sent him some that day. There was a real literary attraction, and obviously two chab men liked each other. I think Johnson really admired Goldsmith's mind. They had similar experiences of both being severely disfigured by childhood illnesses and being burdened by all sorts of tics and verbal mannerisms and difficulty getting on in polite society.

And there is this extraordinary story of when Goldsmith had been arrested for debt by his landlady. He hadn't paid his money, and he wrote to Johnson's, and saying, please help me. Johnson, as it was his wand, was still undressed, sent him a guinea and then rushed around to help him out. And by the time Johnson had got to the house, Goldsmith is supposed to have spent the guinea on a bottle of Madeira and was drinking away. Johnson came in, put a cork in the bottle and said, look, have you got anything you can sell and found a manuscript? I've got this tale somewhere. And Johnson is supposed to have found the manuscript of what became the Vicar of Wakefield, which he promptly sold to the really wonderful, Saintley publisher Newbury and that really helped him out got a £60 pounds for that The Vicar of Wakefield Would you like to kick off that?

The Vicar of Wakefield is a really interesting book I wouldn't call it a novel exactly I think Goldsmith referred to it as a tale It's got an aspect of kind of moral fable to it It's got a story which is Some ways like that of a novel It's also like the setting of the deserted village Goldsmith is really good at looking at a small

community of people. And in this case, we have the Primrose family headed by the Reverend Mr. Primrose. And it's a tale about his attempt to control his many, many children and how fortune does not smile on him. He's almost like Job in the Bible. First, his fortune is taken away from him so his eldest son can't marry and he gets sent off to London. Then they have to move house. One of his daughters is preyed upon by the local squire. Another daughter seems to be falling for a penniless man. There's a whole series of disasters which have become increasingly ridiculous.

Swindled again and again and again. Swindled. All sorts of amusing incidents with the swindling. And the whole family ends up in prison. You would think that they couldn't get any lower than that. And at the lowest point, their fortune starts to turn. Miraculously, Primroses, sermons, kind of reform the prisoners, including the man who had swindled him

and who now works on his side. And it turns out that the penniless suitor for one of his daughters is actually the uncle of the evil. The plot is just ridiculous. But again, it's very warm-hearted. Everybody's accommodated in a happy ending. People get their just desserts. And a moral message is conveyed.

And it's got a great, I think, real touchstone of Goldsmith's strengths as a writer. It's great clarity of style. It communicates very effectively. And it became hugely influential in a number of ways. And the first is it became a set text. It became a set-text. texts across the empire for teaching English to people who are not native speakers.

So there's generations of people in India grew up reading the Vicar of Wakefield because they're using the terrific clarity. Yes, the clarity of style and also this affectionate portrait of the life of a small family in the countryside, which is very much the setting of the deserted village. But it also has another very important influence, and that is on Jane Austen. I think the vicar of Wakefield is sort of the bridge between the more robust novels of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen's tales of five or six families in a country village. In fact, Primrose is very like Mr Bennett, who sermonises and the daughters and the silly wife and the courtship. So I think Jane Austen learned a lot from Goldsmith.

I think the vicar of Wakefield pops up in Emma as a text where Robert Martin, he's read the vicar of Wakefield. That demonstrates his qualities as a... Yeah, as a simple-minded, good-hearted. Do you still read as much now? Not so much. I'm just about to start teaching it again because I think because of the way it is this bridge, he is this bridge between the Augustine era

and the romantic and the regency, but he also has this, you know, some particular strengths of his own, this fondness for the people he's writing about. Yeah, I'm going to be teaching it next year. It's also, I think, a little more palatable to undergraduate living habits these days than perhaps fielding or Richardson.

Short. Let's talk to the He's also a playwright and that were very successful. He was. Can you talk a bit about that, David? Sure. She stooped to conquer. Certainly. So she stoops to conquer is the play that we all know, the one that we remember today first performed in 1773.

It wasn't his first play. He had a couple of minor efforts written and a play called The Good Natured Man in 1768, which had been disappointing. It did okay, it did reasonably well, but had been completely outshone by a rival Irish playwright Hugh Kelly, whose false delicacy was being performed at Drury Lane. So he was a little chastened after that experience, but he was determined, and it's easy to understand why, as Judith has mentioned, playwriting was, if it went well, could be extraordinarily lucrative.

But it was also, I think, a means to celebrity, on a level that poetry and the novel couldn't quite match. And also for Goldsmith, if we think about this as a sort of psychodrama, to sit in a crowded theatre and to hear people cheer and huzzah your name, would have been something that a rather diffident persona like his would have deeply loved, I think, and craved. Can you bring the listeners into this about some idea of the central plot and why you think it caught on as it did?

The plot is convoluted, so I'll give a high-level version of that if that's okay. We open the play in the country house of the Hardcastles, Mr and Mrs. Hardcastle, and they're awaiting the arrival of Marlowe and Hastings, two gentlemen from London.

So Marlowe is intended to marry Kate, their daughter, and Kate is intrigued, but not entirely impressed when she hears that Mr. Marlowe is a very diffident, bashful and modest young man. She wants something a little bit more spirited. but on their way to the house Marlowe and Hastings have been waylaid in the pub

and they have encountered Tony Lumpkin the son of Mrs. Hardcastle from her first marriage and he's a pockish character full of mischief and he decides to trick them and he tells them he directs them to the house but he tells them it is a local inn

that he tells them that the house that they're determined to get to is miles away and they should stay at this inn So they arrive at the house Marlowe and Hastings. They believe it's an inn. They proceed to treat Mr. Hardcastle as an innkeeper. But Marlowe also suffers from the English malady, and that is an inability to talk to women of his own class in a way that is respectful or engaging in any way whatsoever.

But towards women of a lower class, he's highly capable of being extremely lascivious and forward. As well as that, Kate has her foibious. that she dresses in her London finery and fashion during the day, but to please her father, she dresses plainly in the evening. So from Kate's alternate dressing and from Marlowe's different way of approaching women of different classes, they have a series of comic encounters and misrecognitions. There are a couple of other subplots, but you'll be shocked to hear Melvin,

I'm sure that at the end of the play, everything is resolved and there are people get married. Gosh, thank goodness I knew that already, so I'm not so... Yes, it was put on again quite recently at the National Theatre to great success, wasn't it? That's right, that's right, it's a play that has been... What would be, can we talk about the highlights in his career? Can you tell us a bit more about that, Michael? About these highlights? Well, there's one other key poem, which I think we should mention,

which is the poem really that made his name. and some people have said that the deserted village is sort of a sequel to this poem but in 1764 he wrote a poem called The Traveller or A Prospect of Society and that's Mrs. Chalmandele who said that once she read that poem she never thought Goldsmith's ugly again.

Now Goldsmith knew Johnson and he knew Percy and he was beginning to acquire a circle of friends but really after the traveller his career takes off in all sorts of ways Joshua Reynolds wants to know him a great number of society the great and the good want to

make his acquaintance So I think the traveller is an important piece of writing that needs to be thought of almost alongside the deserted village. Why hasn't it endured then as much as a deserted village? Well, Johnson actually thought that the traveller was a superior poem. Johnson thought that the traveller was, in his words, one of the best pieces of poetry since Pope,

which was no mean praise at all. But I guess there's a sort of a universal quality to the deserted village which the traveller doesn't, have. It's a philosophical prospect poem which is very much of its time whereas I think the deserted village is seen almost as a poem which anticipates, almost anticipates what's to come.

That it's written in Popian heroic couplets, but there's almost, there are elements of romanticism that begin to feed into it. I think the presence of politics is there too. The presence of politics. It's a class poem as well as everything else. Very straightforwardly. And there are elements of anger. The raging rich, taking over and destroying this village and so on.

Yep. And I think that's part of his work, I think, that resonates right down to the present day. Can I make a case for She Stoops to Conquer to being the highlight of his career? We're coming to it, so it's perfectly. Let's go back to Stoops to Conquer. Yes. The context for She Stoops to Conquer makes its success, I think, even more spectacular. So George Coleman is effectively forced by Johnson to stage the play.

both he and David Garrick have been lukewarm. So George Coleman is managing Covent Garden Theatre, David Garrag is managing Drury Lane Theatre, the two main winter and patent theatres in London. So Goldsmith submits the play. Neither of them are particularly keen on it, and eventually Johnson turns the screws on Coleman, and he agrees to stage it.

But he refuses to pay for scenery, he refuses to pay for costumes, the two leading actors turn down the role. Francis Abington, the star turn of the role. Drury Lane. Goldsmith invited her to Common Garden to play the role of Mrs. Hardcastle. She turns it down. So it's really

not looking good. And to add insult to injury, Coleman puts the play on in mid-March. So this is smack bang in the middle of the benefit part of the season where, as Judith has mentioned, actors and other non-performing employees of theatres would get nights

to the theatre. So this is not a good time for a new play to put on. Audiences want to see their favourite actors, in their well-established roles in the repertory. So that, I think, really conveys the extent of how this play was felt and believed to be fresh and new, energising the London theatre in a way that hadn't been seen in quite some time. Goldsmith made a lot of money from it. He made over £500 from three benefit nights.

4,000 copies of the first edition were printed and sold in the first couple of weeks after publication. There are reports of performances in Paris and New York very quickly it's performed in Dublin It is this extraordinary success It's also doing something quite radical in terms of the theatre at that time Like his poetry which goes backwards and looks forwards as well He's going back to the witty cynical comedies of restoration drama

He's reviving that mode of That was subdued or stamped to a certain extent stumped out. Yes, so the comedy that marked the reopening of the theatres in the 1660s was often quite libertine in character and very witty, rather cynical and it's about marriages,

marriages for money a lot of the time. Really funny and clever, but with the hard edge to it. And people like Goldsmith and also Richard Brindley Sheridan, another very important Irishman in London with a really important career, they felt

that the time was right to go back. to that sharper edge comedy and to move away from the sort of the soupy sentimental. But he manages to combine, I wouldn't say, sentimental is a word we've been using quite a lot, but maybe a more appropriate word is to borrow the title from his other less successful play,

he was good-natured. So he combined the wittiness of the restoration drama with a kind of good-natured open-heartedness. A warmth. Yeah, a real warmth. So Tony Lumpkin, who's a puckish figure, but he's also a bit of a buffoon, he's a bit of an idiot. He makes a lot of mistakes, but then he's allowed to make good on those mistakes. I find Charles Marlowe's inability to speak to women kind of a bit, makes me feel a bit queasy.

And even the recent production at the National Theatre, when he flirted with Kate thinking that she's the barmaid and then, you know, is tongue-tied. that's all a bit difficult. But the basic thing is that people get along with each other and no one destroys anyone in this play. They somehow come to an accommodation. Whereas in restoration comedy, somebody gets written out in some way. Which of these contemporaries were influenced at the time, of course, by Goldsmith?

I think what's a particular interest to me here is Goldsmith's influence on a new generation of Irish playwrights and dramatists that come to London at that time. Goldsmith offers himself as a touchstone, both literally in the sense that we have correspondence from people coming from Ireland that look to Goldsmith, just as he had plugged into Irish networks when he came over first, he provided that entry point for other writers and playwrights. And we can see in a number of playwrights from that period,

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, for instance, who attempts to dramatise the Vicar Wakefield as a young man, John O'Keefe, I think, the most significant playwright in Covent Garden in the 1780s and 1790s, at least in commercial terms. He makes his entry to London Theatre by invitation from George Coleman. He writes a sequel based on Tony Lumpkin in Dublin Coleman, who had been run out of London, I forgot to say, on the success of she stooped to conquer because he'd been so embarrassed and humiliated by Goldsman's again. but people knew that he had tried to kill the play or had not helped it, hadn't recognised its quality. So he wasn't going to make that same mistake twice, and he provides a conduit for John O'Keefe to come to London.

But there are others, Leonard McNally, Dennis O'Brien's. These are names that are mostly lost to us today, but there is this phalanx of Irish writers that come to London, emboldened by Goldsman's success and excited about the sorts of possibilities that he had opened up. for Irish writers of that generation. Where does Goldsmith stand now, David? Where does Goldsmith stand now? Well, in Ireland, I think... Yes.

So when you think about Goldsmith in Ireland, he's initially loved, widely read, just he is in England throughout the 19th century. But when the literary revival occurs and people start to think about a nationalist tradition of literature, Goldsmith becomes a little suspect at that point. So both Yates, Joyce, Joyce refers to him as court jester to the English, along with

Wilde and Sheridan and so on. So there's a skepticism about whether Goldsmith can be seen within an Irish tradition. But more recently, we've come to terms with Goldsmith, I think it's fair to say. And we look at the deserted village. we think about, we think about him as a writer who helps negotiate those kinds of cultural differences, to think about relationships between Britain and Ireland, recent productions of She Stoops to Conquer, for instance, locate them often in Ireland. And so it becomes, I think, that play, I think, becomes a text for reflection on the changing dynamics of British and Irish relationships. And it's a play that is very much part of the British tradition

as much as the Irish tradition. So Judy Dench, Lawrence Olivier, Derek Jacoby, Paul Schofield. They've all acted in She Stoops to Conquer. So it is this play that features significantly in both theatrical traditions. The afterlife of the deserted village, David touched on its importance in Ireland. I think it's important to point out as well that there are strong echoes of the deserted village in Wordsworth. in sort of the tragic pastoral of Michael or the brothers

or the ruined cottage. There are strong echoes. We talked about American place names, but Goldsmith was very influential on a foundational generation of American post-revolutionary poets, people like Philip Fresno and Timothy Dwight.

But in Ireland, I think, probably the influence of the deserted village and its resonance is strongest. So you talked about Yates. Yates didn't, Yates thought Goldsmith was too English to begin with,

but then later in life he wants to create this kind of Protestant tradition of Irish writing so he includes the deserted village and Goldsmith in that in his poem The Seven Sages. And I think from the mid-century on then you have a number of Irish poets that are very, very influenced by Goldsmith. Chief amongst them would probably be John Montague, who did a doctorate on Goldsmith but didn't pass because he compared Goldsmith to T.S. Eliot. And that was seen as being grossly a-historical. But his collection, the rough field, is very influential. by the deserted village.

You have Ivan Boland then, the late Ivan Boland wrote a poem called rereading Goldsmith's deserted village in the 21st century, which was published back in 2011. And another fine poet, Voner Gourke,

did a new edition of the deserted village. And there's a wonderful introduction to it where she talks about its importance in an Irish context, which is that it's read on the hustings, it's read at weddings, teachers always use those lines

about the teacher in order to instill a sense of respect in students, and that actually pops up in John McGarharns, the Rockingham shoot as well. It's a TV play in which the opening scene is all about the teacher getting the students to know their goldsmith. So that will teach them how to respect the teacher, but it will also make them good citizens. Well, thank you all very much.

Thanks to Judith Hawley. Michael Griffin and David O'Shaughnessy. Next week, the Hindu goddess Kali. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What would you like to say,

Mangarific, that you didn't have time to say in the programme? Was it being, with the Irish, in any way, a hindrance to him? Well, I don't think he's, not in material terms, in terms of his, the reviews, nobody alluded to it. At the very beginning of his London career, in late 1757 December, he writes a letter home in which he complains about the fact that he's brought

out of Ireland, nothing but he's brogue and he's blunders. So he feels very, I think when he initially arrives in London, he does feel quite awkward. And he does feel, he says that being an Irishman in London at this time is something that's going to hinder his employment. And he expresses what he calls an unaccountable malady to pay, which is a kind of a homesickness. You know, he's sort of keen, I think, at that phase to,

even talks about, you know, almost kind of a suicidal feeling that he has around about this time. but he quickly embeds himself in this literary marketplace. And I think once he begins to establish himself, his irishness is not a major impediment. It's remarked upon amongst a closer group of friends, but it's not something that the reviews refer to. There is one enemy that he seems to acquire over the course of his career,

which is a character called William Kenrick, who would refer to him in very negative terms in the reviews, but not necessarily in relation to his nationality, but more to do with the quality of his writing or the lack there, as he saw it. David? I think that one aspect of Goldsmith, perhaps, that we could have talked about a little bit more, was his engagement with French writing and French thought. I mentioned Voltaire briefly, I think, but the French aspect of his writing,

the French does a lot of translation, and again, it's this idea of him being a mediator and disseminator and conduit of enlightenment ideals from the continent. I think one of the dangers of Goldsmith is that we get caught up in an unhelpful binary about thinking about him in English or Irish. Where does he sit in that? Diad. But actually, he's a more interesting character than that. He is a cosmopolitan. He does draw heavily on his time in Europe throughout his career. And I think it is important to think about him in those terms as a true enlightened figure and not simply one that we tussle over in terms of where does his national sentiment lie. Where Auburn is. Or where Auburn is, exactly. I mean, he's a, he's a,

He's cosmopolitan writer, he's an enlightenment thinker. He's greatly varied thinker. And he's turning his hand at popular science, poetry, all sorts of things. But I think there's always that way in which he's hard to pitch and hold because of the variety. And he's also hard to pitch and hold because in most of the fields he works in, he isn't absolutely originating something. And he often leaves gaps for people to infiltrate. And there were criticisms of him.

So, for example, his inquiry into the present state of polite learning in Europe, which is this amazing survey. He loves to survey things like his poem, The Traveller. He wandered around Europe on foot, and he gives you an account of kind of subject by subject what's going on. And it's amazingly capacious, but it's also a little bit thin. And so when he's criticized for it by William Kendrick in this absolutely hideous review, he's got a little bit of purchase there.

You know, that Goldsmith is not quite a... he's not Diderot. Yeah. But he's wonderful. Johnson had a great phrase to describe that that aspect of his writing was that his mind was a thin but fertile soil. Yeah. Yeah.

That's about right. I wish we'd directed it a bit. I had directed a bit more to his scientific writing. This seems to come out of the blue. He's suddenly, suddenly, right, not suddenly, he's writing books about science, on science, which are reputable.

I mean, they become textbooks for people. to use throughout the 19th century, and there's some gorgeous editions of the history of the Earth and animated nature. They're fairly rudimentary images in the first edition of 1774, but throughout the 19th century, then you have these really wonderfully, gorgeously illustrated colour images. So they're clearly meant for education. But it also, that aspect of his career is a really important part of his status as an enlightenment, a purveyor of enlightenment knowledge. So, I mean, the fact that he draws upon Linnaeus as a natural historian, and he makes Linnaeus palatable in a way

which he doesn't find Linnaeus that palatable himself but he thinks my task task as a writer is to make this readable for students and he does the same with Buffon who's the French naturalist story and he translates his works and he translates them in such a way

Johnson described it as he he's writing a history of the earth and animated nature and he will make it as entertaining as a Persian tale so again it's just that we return to this point time and again is the is just the quality and the texture of the writing. But it's also, I think, an indication of his ambition as a writer.

You know, at the end of his life, he had plans to do an Irish version of The Spectator, Addison and Steele. He had ambitions for an encyclopedia project of that magnitude. So this gives us some sense of the ambition that he had. And again, this kind of discipline and energy that he was able to tap into. And we have to remember that he is a... achieved what he has achieved, this extraordinary volume of writings, this extraordinary, this extraordinary achievement in prose fiction, in poetry, in drama, the three major literary genres, all within

a very brief period of time. You know, he makes his name in 1764 with the traveller and he's dead nine years later. I was going to say, we haven't talked about the end of his life, have we? He died aged, what, 46? 45. 45 of kind of kidney failure. His health. His health had become very, very bad. I mean, he was drinking a lot, he wasn't living well. And he was active right up until the end. When he died, there were quite a lot of unfinished work. Some of his major histories came out after his death, didn't they?

And also that extraordinary poem, the retaliation. Retaliation comes out just a matter of weeks after he dies. What's that about? It's a great moment. So he becomes part of a club at the St. James's Coffee House, a club that includes Garek, Joshua Reynolds, a few Irish characters, Edmund Burke, Burke's brother, Richard. And at some point, Garrick insults him.

Here lies Ollie Goldsmith, for shortness, called Nall, who wrote like an angel but talked like poor Paul. And Goldsmith's accent was something that people would refer to time and again as not being particularly sophisticated. But then Goldsmith goes away and he thinks about this. There's poor Paul, no minute parrot. Yes. but I guess his

his accent was something that was commented upon as well and his retaliation if you like is he goes through each character that's in this club and he insults them back basically and it goes back to this point that I started with was he's talent for repartee so it's his last piece of work but he gets in some zingers

so he says about Garrick on stage he was natural simple affecting it was only when he was off he was acting and his other great line about Burke, which was that he was born for the universe, narrowed his mind, and to party gave up what was meant for mankind. So these were really tight couplets

that he managed to get very, very clever. And he says things about himself too. The poem is in the form of, you know, it's like a parlour game. If you're a food, what kind of food would you be? And he said if he were a pudding, he would be a gooseberry fool. So he's aware that he is himself,

you know, the object of ridicule. Yeah. I think what I like about that poem, it's an important, it gives us a sense of his poetic range. You know, when we think of a goals, we often just think of the deserted village and the traveller. But actually the retaliation shows us capacity for wit, for liveliness. It's a very energetic, energetic poem. And what it also does is that it nicely brings together our sense of where he was and what he had achieved by the end of his career.

So in the kind of range of people that he's mentioned, as Mike has already said, we have Reynolds and Garrick and Richard Cumberland and another playwright. But we also have lots of significant Irish figures, you know, William Hickey and the bishop and so on. So we have all together in this poem a sense of this cohesive network that Goldsmith has not only plugged into, but has the capacity to write back to kind of stand up for himself finally. And that's what's really attractive about thinking about that poem as a kind of conclusion to Goldsmith's life and career. It's been likely touched on once or twice by each of you that he was regarded as a bit of a buffoon.

Is there any purchase in that? Well, I think Boswell described him, the first time he met him, he described him as a curious, odd pedantic fellow with some genius. And that, he didn't behave like everyone else behaved. He got involved in conversations,

without necessarily knowing, this one remark that was often made was that he didn't really know how to finish his point when he started. He would always try to interject in conversations and didn't quite carry it off. So, you know, you're in this kind of high-end group of people that are, you know, they're sparking off each other all the time. And a lot of goalsmiths lines in conversation turned out to be duds. So there's a kind of a discrepancy between the way that he carried himself in conversation and the way that he wrote. And people always remarked upon that. And there's also a discrepancy between the way he looked physically. There's only really one image of him, and that's by Reynolds, looking unprepossessing because of his disfigurement. The disfigurement being a smallpox. Smallpox and recessive chin and other things that don't come across as very attractive. But he spent a lot of money on clothes. He loved to have parties and spend money on clothes.

And there's one anecdote that Boswell records. Again, it's always pointed because, Boswell is trying to put him down. He had a new suit made out of bloom-coloured fabric, and he was preening himself and prancing around. Bloom-coloured presumably some sort of, I don't know, pinky, orangey, shot silk or something like that. And this unprepossessing man in his forties

prancing around in this suit and saying, my tailor is wonderful tailor. And they just, they tore him to shreds. Oh, dear. But it's a terrible man. But he was being foolish, but also it might have been he was playing the Gisbury Fool, trying to entertain them. He knew that there was time on their hands.

They had to kill time until whatever the next thing was. And he was a very kind man. He was very kind to children. I always thought that was a lovely thing about Goldsmith. You know, even to George Coleman, George Coleman, the younger was, who also went on to be a playwright. He recalls goldsmith coming and playing

and doing magic tricks for him in his youth. And, you know, that's, you know, that quality of Goldsmith is sometimes forgotten. He was a very nice person, very generous, spent a lot of money. died penniless, but largely because he spent a lot of money on other people. He spent it as fast as he made it. Yeah, faster. But gave it away and lent it to people

and enabled people to kind of operate in London. Well, thank you all very much. So, do we like a cup of tea or coffee? And all that easy to accept and not difficult to refuse. It's up to... I don't know about that. A cup of tea.

A cup of tea. A cup of tea. It would be lovely. Tea. Tea. Yeah, four teas. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson, and it's a BBC Studios audio production. I'm Nicola Cochlin, and for BBC Radio 4, this is history's youngest heroes. Rebellion, risk, and the radical power of youth. She thought, right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself. Twelve stories of extraordinary young people from across history. There's a real sense of urgency in them, that resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now. Subscribe to History's Youngest Heroes on BBC Sounds.