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In Our Time
Oliver Goldsmith
00:54:23
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss this influential and prolific 18th-century Irish writer.
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- [00:00]
Melvin Bragg
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- [00:06]
Helena Bonham Carter
I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4. I'm back with a brand new series.
- [00:12]
Unknown Speaker
Of History's Secret Heroes and he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent. She will work undercover and if she is caught, she's going to be shot.
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Helena Bonham Carter
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- [00:43]
Melvin Bragg
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 find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello the Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, 1728-1774, has a memorial in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner celebrating his 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 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 early 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'Shaughnessy, professor of 18th century studies at the University of Galway Judith hawley, 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?
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Michael Griffin
Well, he's very much a child of the Midlands in Ireland. He was born on 10th 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. Goldsmith 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 de Lapp, 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.
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Melvin Bragg
From the beginning, there seems to been a boisterous streak in him. Is that right?
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Michael Griffin
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. 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 Aesop dancing and he's monkey playing.
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Melvin Bragg
When did he leave Ireland and why and where did he go?
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Michael Griffin
Well, he left Ireland. This is all part of his. His education. So he was educated in Dublin and Trinity College between 1745 and 1750. He didn't have a particularly illustrious career there, but he graduated with a 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 he was sent, when everything else seems to have failed. He was sent to Edinburgh then to become a medical student. So he studied medicine in Edinburgh between 1752 and 1754.
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Melvin Bragg
Thank you very much, Judith. Judith Orley, you 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?
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Judith Hawley
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. 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 ser publishers. And both in truth and in reputation, a number of writers lived there, sometimes in the attics of the publishers houses. They were. They're writers for hire. And when Goldsmith arrived In London in 1756, aged about, was it 24, 25, 25, he was penniless. He'd been traveling around Europe. He had this extensive range of interests.
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Melvin Bragg
Whereabouts in Europe?
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Judith Hawley
Pretty much everywhere. He went to Leiden to study medicine after his time in Edinburgh, and then traipsed around most of Europe. So he' walking around, he's walking, he's on. 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, that 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.
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Melvin Bragg
When he started to write, when he started to be an active member, what did he start with?
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Judith Hawley
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 hack work 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.
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Melvin Bragg
The words of Grub street makes you think of money, not in a big way, might have been. What did he do for money? He came to make a living, that's what he came to do.
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Judith Hawley
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. He got more for a poem, and you've got. If. If it went well, you got the most money for writing a play, because if you had a third night 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.
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Melvin Bragg
Thank you, David. David O'Shaughnessy. He was prolific. Can we begin to tell the listeners about his range?
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David O'Shaughnessy
Well, as Jude 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 bee from 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 1760-61, 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, important document for a theme that pervades through his writing, his own sense of what it means to be an author on Grove 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 recognized.
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Melvin Bragg
What 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?
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David O'Shaughnessy
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 Primrose, 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, in she Stoops to Conquer is purportedly based on an incident from his youth as well. So throughout his oeuvre, we do see biographical elements.
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Melvin Bragg
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.
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David O'Shaughnessy
That came later in his career. He wrote a number of historical works, history of England in 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 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 Rapin, 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, Goldsmith is 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 will 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, in Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre 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.
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Melvin Bragg
Mike, which is very, very impressive is the way he seemed to master so many different disciplines and ideas. For instance, he became a celebrated science writer.
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Michael Griffin
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.
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Melvin Bragg
When he's in Leiden, what language do they speak?
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Michael Griffin
Dutch. But I think the medical education would have been through Latin.
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Melvin Bragg
That's what I thought, yeah.
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Michael Griffin
Leiden is one of the great centers 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 extraordinarily kind of wide panoply of everything from theories of the earth to catalogues of insects to essays on the varieties of the human race and so forth.
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Melvin Bragg
It's extraordinary, industrious, isn't it? I mean, right throughout his career he writes and writes and writes.
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Judith Hawley
Sometimes he's quite canny with his writing, isn't he? Brought in to write the prefaces to, was it to Brookes, to Brooks History of the Earth and then he's commissioned to review Brooks history and. And in his review he praises the Prefaces. He knows how to. How to churn.
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David O'Shaughnessy
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, you know, 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, you know, 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 goldsmith that's left to us through the mythology of him as a somewhat buffoonish character. He's a very disciplined writer.
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Melvin Bragg
He's a wonderful writer. I mean, we've come once, come to it now. The Deserted Village is just a wonderful piece. Mike, can you tell us about that? Why did he get. How would you describe.
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Michael Griffin
Is a wonderful piece of poetry, probably one of the best pieces of poetry of the. 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 phase is, you know, 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.
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Melvin Bragg
Is there any way you can quote a passage or two, Mike?
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Michael Griffin
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 firs 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 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.
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Melvin Bragg
Judith, do you want to take up another passage?
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Judith Hawley
Yeah. T.S. eliot said that one of the glories of Goldsmith was that he combined the. He knew I put the emphasis on combined. He combined the Augustan 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, so some of his. Some of the poem is vignettes of particular scenes and people, but a lot of it is abstract and general and uses personifications. And one wonderful couplet is, Ill fares the land to hastening ills of prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay.
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Melvin Bragg
Wasn't just that little area, was it?
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Judith Hawley
Yeah. He's thinking. He's thinking about the country as a whole. So he's saying that. That this area of land in Auburn, the fictional setting for the. For the poem, but also the land with a capital L, you know, the British Isles are.
- [16:08]
Melvin Bragg
And it goes. The. The. The poem is very well received in America. And they identify. They identify the village there, too.
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Judith Hawley
Yes. In fact, the name Auburn gets taken up and used as a name for villages in the United States.
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Michael Griffin
There's 15 or 16 Auburns in.
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Judith Hawley
Yeah. And a university and.
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Michael Griffin
Yes, the University of Auburn University is in Alabama.
- [16:28]
David O'Shaughnessy
Yeah.
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Melvin Bragg
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 ways. And then money comes in, property buying on a big scale comes in.
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Michael Griffin
In a sense, it's a tirade against trade. The trade's proud empire hastes a swift decay. This rural society, it's a trade against large land owners 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 privatization of land in the 18th century, which really begins to accelerate from about 1750 on.
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Melvin Bragg
Judith, do you want to come in now?
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Judith Hawley
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. Poor English people to great. 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 are 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 modeled on his own clerical family and his favorite brother, he's presented as very kindly, but he has to be tolerant because his parishioners are sinners. He's. He's very aware of the vices of the sinners. So this. This old world isn't perfect, that the village ale house, which is. 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.
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Melvin Bragg
It's been a gossip shop ever since in many places.
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Judith Hawley
Yes, yes, yes.
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Melvin Bragg
And that is what it is as much as a drinking beer.
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Judith Hawley
Yes. 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 sentiments to kind of counter, sort of to morally purge that sense of guilt at just how luxurious Britain had become.
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Melvin Bragg
Do you want to come in, David.
- [19:12]
David O'Shaughnessy
Just to pick up on Judith's point? I think the timing 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. It's 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.
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Melvin Bragg
Would you say his portrait of the village was too sentimental, too over ripe? Because I found lots of it had come through to the present day almost.
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David O'Shaughnessy
Well, certainly some respondents thought so. George Crabbe writes a poem in response called the Village, and that was exactly the point he made, that the village that 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. 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.
- [20:48]
Helena Bonham Carter
I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4, I'm back with a brand new series of History's Secret Heroes.
- [20:56]
Unknown Speaker
And he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent. She will work undercover, and if she is caught, she's going to be shot.
- [21:07]
Helena Bonham Carter
Join me for more stories of unsung heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage from World War II. Subscribe to History's Secret Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.
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Melvin Bragg
He's in Grub Street. What was his network and how much did he rely on it?
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David O'Shaughnessy
Well, when he came to London first in 1756. 56 even. He, like many Irish before him and many Irish since, he plugged into Irish networks. It was a challenging time, perhaps, for. For to be Irish in London in many ways. But there were, as, 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. 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, 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.
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Judith Hawley
Judith, I think one thing that's striking is that we know so little about Goldsmith's life at all. There seems to be few records, few letters. I think he was interviewed by his friend Thomas Percy, of Percy's Relics, the great ballad collector. And there's supposed to be an account there, but some of what we. The information we have comes from James Boswell's Life of Johnson, which is a very biased account of Goldsmith's. 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 sort of knocks him down, metaphorically with the 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, train the group. So he plays this role, or he performs the function rather, of the. 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.
- [23:33]
Melvin Bragg
But it's very interesting how closely Johnson sticks with him.
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Judith Hawley
Yeah.
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Melvin Bragg
How materially he helps him, quite straightforwardly. When he was stuck for money, he sent him some that day. It was a real literary attraction, and obviously church men liked each other.
- [23:47]
Judith Hawley
I think Johnson really admired Goldsmith's mind, and 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 saying, please help me. Johnson, as it was, his wand was still undressed, sent him a guinea and then rushed round 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. So 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 saintly publisher Newberry. And that really Helped him out, got 60 pounds for that.
- [24:46]
Melvin Bragg
The Vicar of Wakefield. Would you like to kick off that, Judith?
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Judith Hawley
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. 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 and 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 become increasingly swindled 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 fortunes start to turn. Miraculously. Primroses sermons kind of reformed 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. So 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 across the empire for teaching English to people who are not native speakers. So there's a. Generations of people in India grew up reading the Vicar of Wakefield because they.
- [26:52]
Melvin Bragg
Because of the terrific clarity.
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Judith Hawley
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. Bennet sermonizes and the daughters the silly wife in the Courtship. So I think Jane Austen learnt a lot from Goldsmith.
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Michael Griffin
I think the Vicar of Wakefield pops up in Emma as a text where Robert Martin, he's read the Vicar of Wakefield, he's read the Vicar. That demonstrates his qualities as a simple minded, good hearted.
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Melvin Bragg
Is he still read as much now?
- [27:44]
Judith Hawley
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, this, you know, some particular strengths of his own. This, the, this fondness for the people he's writing about. Yeah, I'm going to be teaching it next year.
- [28:06]
David O'Shaughnessy
It's also, I think a little more palatable to undergraduate reading habits these days than perhaps Fielding or Richardson.
- [28:13]
Melvin Bragg
Short, let's, let's talk to the. He's also a playwright and that we're very successful.
- [28:20]
David O'Shaughnessy
He was.
- [28:21]
Melvin Bragg
Can you talk a bit about that, David?
- [28:22]
David O'Shaughnessy
Sure.
- [28:23]
Melvin Bragg
Soups to Conquer, certainly.
- [28:24]
David O'Shaughnessy
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'd 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 did, 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 theater 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.
- [29:27]
Melvin Bragg
Can you bring the listeners into this, give us some idea of the central plot and why you think it caught on as it did.
- [29:35]
David O'Shaughnessy
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 Marlow 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 publisher. And they have encountered Tony Lumpkin, the son of Mrs. Hardcastle from their first. From her first marriage. And he's a. He's a puckish 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. 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, Marlow 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 foible 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 these. 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.
- [31:34]
Melvin Bragg
Gosh, thank goodness. I knew that already. So I'm not sorry. Yes. Was it was re. Put on again quite recently at the National Theater to great success, wasn't it?
- [31:46]
David O'Shaughnessy
That's right. That's right. It's a play that has been.
- [31:49]
Melvin Bragg
What would be. Can we talk about the highlights in his career? Can you tell us a bit more.
- [31:54]
Michael Griffin
About that, Michael Marty's highlights? Well, there's one other key poem which I think we should mention, which is the. 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 Traveler or a Prospect of society. And that's Mrs. Cholmondeley, who said that once she read that poem, she never thought Goldsmith ugly again. Now, Goldsmith knew Johnson and he knew Percy and he was beginning to acquire a circle of friends. But really after the Traveler, 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 Traveler is an important piece of writing that needs to be thought of almost alongside the deserted village.
- [32:38]
Melvin Bragg
Why hasn't it endured then as much as a deserted village?
- [32:42]
Michael Griffin
Well, Johnson actually thought that the Traveler was a superior poem. Johnson thought that the Traveler was, in his words, one of the best pieces of poetry since Pope, which was no mean praise at all. But I, I guess there's a sort of a universal quality to the deserted village which the Traveler 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.
- [33:22]
Melvin Bragg
The presence of, of politics is there too.
- [33:24]
Michael Griffin
The presence of politics.
- [33:25]
Melvin Bragg
It's a class poem as well as everything else very straightforwardly.
- [33:28]
Michael Griffin
And there are elements of anger, the.
- [33:30]
Melvin Bragg
Raging rich taking over and destroying this village and so on.
- [33:35]
Michael Griffin
Yep. And I think that's, that's part of the, that's part of his work. I think that resonates right down to the, right down to the present day.
- [33:41]
David O'Shaughnessy
Can I make a case for she Stoops to Conquer to being the, the highlight of his career coming to it.
- [33:46]
Melvin Bragg
So it's perfect. Okay, let's go back to troops to conquer them. Yes.
- [33:50]
David O'Shaughnessy
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 Garrig is managing Drury Lane Theatre, the two main Winter and Paton 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. Frances Abington, the star turn of Drury Lane. Goldsmith invited her to Covent 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 favorite actors in their well established roles in the repertory. So that, I think, really conveys the extent of how this play was, was felt and believed to be fresh and new, energizing 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 pounds 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.
- [35:38]
Judith Hawley
It's also doing something quite radical in terms of the theater 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.
- [35:53]
Melvin Bragg
That was. So the listeners know, that was subdued or stamped to a certain extent.
- [35:58]
Judith Hawley
Stamped out, yes. So the comedy that marks the reopening of the theaters 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 a hard edge to it. And people like, like Goldsmith and also Richard Brindley Sheridan, another very important Irishman in London with a really important career, they felt that it was 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 the kind of good natured, open heartedness. A warmth. Yeah, real warmth. So Tony Lumpkin, who's, you know, 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 flirts 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.
- [37:40]
Melvin Bragg
Which of his contemporaries were influenced at the time, of course, by Goldsmith?
- [37:45]
David O'Shaughnessy
I think what's of 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 attempted to dramatize the Vicar of 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. You know, 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 Stoops to Conquer, because he'd been so embarrassed and humiliated by Goldsmith's success, because people knew that he had tried to kill the play or had not helped it, hadn't recognized 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, Denis O'Brien. These are names that are mostly lost to us today. But there is this phalanx of Irish writers that come to London emboldened by. By Goldsmith's success and excited about the sorts of possibilities that he had opened up for Irish writers of that generation.
- [39:26]
Melvin Bragg
What do you. Where does Goldsmith stand now?
- [39:29]
David O'Shaughnessy
David, where does Goldsmith stand now? Well, in Ireland, I think, yes. So when you think about Goldsmith in Ireland, you know, he's initially loved, widely read, just. He is in England throughout the 19th century. But when the literary revival occurs and, you know, people start to think about a nationalist tradition of literature, Goldsmith becomes a little suspect at that point. So both Yeats, Joyce. Joyce refers to him as, you know, 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 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, you know, and it's a play that is very much part of the British tradition as much as the Irish tradition. So Judi Dench, Laurence 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.
- [41:08]
Michael Griffin
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 pastorals of Michael or the Brothers or the Ruined Cottage. There are strong echoes. We talked about, you know, American place names. But Goldsmith was very influential on a foundational generation of American post revolutionary poets, people like Philip Fresneau and Timothy Dwight. But in Ireland, I think probably the influence of the Deserted Village and its resonance is strongest. So you talked about Yeats. Yeats 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 then 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 ahistorical. But his collection the Rough Field is very influenced by the Deserted Village. You have Ivan Boland, then the late Ivan Boland wrote a poem called Re Reading Goldsmith's Deserted Village in the 21st Century. It was published back in 2011. And another fine poet, Vonor Grork, 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 the students. And that actually pops up in John McGahn's 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.
- [43:01]
Melvin Bragg
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.
- [43:11]
Judith Hawley
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [43:18]
Melvin Bragg
What would you like to say that you didn't have time to say in the program? Was it being with the Irish, was it in any way a hindrance to him?
- [43:26]
Michael Griffin
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 his brogue and his blunder. 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 du 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 thereof, as he saw, thought David, I think.
- [44:44]
David O'Shaughnessy
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, he 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 dyad? 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 natural sentiment lie?
- [45:35]
Michael Griffin
Where Auburn is or where Auburn is.
- [45:37]
David O'Shaughnessy
Exactly.
- [45:38]
Judith Hawley
I mean, he's a 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 pigeonhole because of the variety. And he's also hard to pigeonhole 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. 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 Traveler. 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 the goldsmith is not quite as. He's not Diderot. He's wonderful.
- [46:42]
Michael Griffin
Johnson had a great phrase to describe that. That aspect of his writing was that his mind was a thin but fertile soil.
- [46:49]
Judith Hawley
Yeah. Which I think is just about right.
- [46:52]
Melvin Bragg
My fault. I wish we directed it a bit. I had directed a bit more to his scientific writing. This seems just come out of the blue is certainly suddenly right. Not suddenly. He's writing books about science, on science, which are reputable.
- [47:06]
Michael Griffin
They are. 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 color 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 as a writer is to make this readable for students. And he does the Same with Buffon, who's the French natural historian. He translates his works and he translates them in such a way, Johnson described it as, you know, 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. It's just the quality and the texture.
- [48:11]
David O'Shaughnessy
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 encyclopedie 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 has achieved what he has achieved, this extraordinary volume of writings, 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 traveler, and he's dead nine years later.
- [48:59]
Judith Hawley
I was going to say, we haven't talked about the end of his life, have we? He died aged, what, 46?
- [49:03]
Michael Griffin
45.
- [49:04]
Judith Hawley
45 of kind of kidney failure. His health had become very, very bad. I mean, he was drinking a lot, he wasn't living well, and he was his active right up until the end when he died. There are 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.
- [49:22]
Michael Griffin
Retaliation comes out just a matter of weeks after he. After he dies.
- [49:26]
Melvin Bragg
What's that about?
- [49:29]
Michael Griffin
It's a great moment. So he becomes part of a club at the St. James Coffee House, a club that includes Garrick, Joshua Reynolds, a few Irish characters, Edmund Burke, Burke's brother Richard. And at some point, Garrick insults him. He says, here lies Ollie Goldsmith, for shortness, called Noll, who wrote like an angel but talked like poor Paul. And Goldsmith's accent was something that people would refer to time and again. It's not being particularly sophisticated. But then Goldsmith goes away and he thinks about this.
- [50:03]
Melvin Bragg
Does poor Paul not mean a parrot?
- [50:05]
Michael Griffin
Yes, but he's. I guess he's. His accent was something that was commented upon as well. And his retaliation, if you like, 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 his talent for repartee. So it's his last. 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.
- [50:48]
Judith Hawley
And he says things about himself, too. The poem is in the form of, you know, it's like a parlour game. If you were 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.
- [51:03]
David O'Shaughnessy
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 Goldsmith, we often just think of the deserted village and the traveler, but actually the retaliation shows his capacity for wish, for liveliness. It's a very energetic, energetic poem. And what it also does is it's a night. 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, another playwright, but we also have lots of significant Irish figures, you know, William Hill Hickey and the Bishop and so on. So we have all together in this poem a sense of this. 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.
- [52:06]
Melvin Bragg
It's been lightly touched on once or twice by HIV that he was regarded as a bit of a buffoon. Is there any purchase in that?
- [52:15]
Michael Griffin
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 kind just. He just. 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 Goldsmith's 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.
- [53:00]
Judith Hawley
And there's also a discrepancy between the way he looked physically. There's a. There's a. There's only really one image of him, and that's by Reynolds looking unprepossessing because of his disfigurement.
- [53:11]
Melvin Bragg
The disfigurement being a smallpox.
- [53:13]
Judith Hawley
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 sort of. It's always pointed because Boswell is trying to put him down. He had a new suit. Suit made out of bloom colored fabric, and he was preening himself and prancing around. Bloom color, presumably some sort of, I don't know, pinky, orangey, shot silk or something like that. And this unprepossessing man in his 40s prancing around in this suit and saying, my tailor is, you know, wonderful tailor. And they just. They tore him to shreds.
- [53:53]
Melvin Bragg
Oh, dear.
- [53:54]
Judith Hawley
It's a terrible man. But he was being foolish. But also, it might have been he was playing the gooseberry 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.
- [54:05]
David O'Shaughnessy
And he was a very kind man. Yeah, he was very kind to children. I also thought that was a lovely thing about Goldsmiths, 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 gold. Goldsmith is sometimes forgotten that 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.
- [54:33]
Melvin Bragg
He spent it as fast as he made it.
- [54:35]
Judith Hawley
Yeah.
- [54:35]
David O'Shaughnessy
Faster. But gave it away and lent it to people and enabled people to kind of operate in London.
- [54:41]
Melvin Bragg
Yeah. Well, thank you all very much.
- [54:45]
Judith Hawley
Would you like a cup of tea or coffee?
- [54:47]
Melvin Bragg
An offer easy to accept and not difficult to refuse. It's up to.
- [54:53]
Judith Hawley
Cup of tea.
- [54:54]
Michael Griffin
Cup of tea would be lovely.
- [54:55]
Melvin Bragg
Thank you.
- [54:56]
Michael Griffin
Yeah, 40s. Okay.
- [54:57]
David O'Shaughnessy
Thank you very much. Thank you. In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is.
- [55:01]
Judith Hawley
Produced by Simon Tillotson. And it's a BBC Studios audio production.
- [55:06]
Michael Griffin
I'm Nicola Coughlan and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Youngest Heroes.
- [55:12]
Judith Hawley
Rebellion, risk and the radical power of youth.
- [55:16]
Melvin Bragg
She thought, right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself.
- [55:21]
Michael Griffin
Twelve stories of extraordinary young people from across history.
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David O'Shaughnessy
There's a real sense of urgency in.
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Judith Hawley
Them that resistance has to be mounted. It has to be mounted now.
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Michael Griffin
Subscribe to History's youngest heroes on BBC Sounds.
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Helena Bonham Carter
I'm Helena Bonham Carter and for BBC Radio 4. I'm back with a brand new series of history's secret heroes.
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Unknown Speaker
And he tells her that she will be sent to France as a secret agent. She will work undercover and if she is caught, she's going to be shot.
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Helena Bonham Carter
Join me for more stories of unsung heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage from World War II. Subscribe to History's Secret Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.