Oliver Goldsmith · CatalogOliver GoldsmithOliver Goldsmith · CatalogOliver Goldsmith (c.1728-1774) was an Irish clergyman's son who studied at Trinity College Dublin and medicine at Edinburgh and Leiden, wandered Europe on foot, and became a London hack writer.
Oliver Goldsmith (c.1728-1774) was an Irish clergyman's son who studied at Trinity College Dublin and medicine at Edinburgh and Leiden, wandered Europe on foot, and became a London hack writer. A member of Samuel Johnson's Club, he wrote in nearly every form: the novel The Vicar of Wakefield, the poem The Deserted Village and the comedy She Stoops to Conquer.
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“I love everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine;”
“I was ever of opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population.”
The Vicar of Wakefield, published in 1766, is a short novel narrated by Dr Charles Primrose, a good-hearted, learned and somewhat vain country clergyman. He lives happily with his wife Deborah, who is proud of her housekeeping and ambitious for her daughters, and their six children, including the eldest son George, the beautiful Olivia, the gentle Sophia and the simple Moses.
The Deserted Village, published in May 1770 and dedicated to the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, is a pastoral elegy in about 430 lines of heroic couplets. The speaker returns in imagination to Auburn, the loveliest village of the plain, where he spent his youth, and remembers its simple pleasures: the cottages, the church, the mill, the games on the green in the evening and the honest labour of its people.
She Stoops to Conquer, or The Mistakes of a Night, is a comedy in five acts first performed at Covent Garden on 15 March 1773. Goldsmith wrote it as a laughing comedy in opposition to the fashionable sentimental comedy of his time.