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The Deserted Village and Goldsmith's Social Doctrines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Howard J. Bell Jr.
Howard J. Bell Jr.*
Affiliation:
Bradley Polytechnic Institute
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Extract

The Deserted Village is avowedly a didactic poem. Goldsmith wrote it as a solemn warning to England that the fate of Auburn was merely an example of what might happen to every other village of the land. But modern critics have touched upon this theme only very lightly, and where they have gone into it at all, their interpretations have in some cases led to a misunderstanding of the poet's analysis. On the premise that Goldsmith wrote and his contemporaries read the poem as a treatment of current social issues rather than just as a description of a simple rural community, I propose here to re-examine it as a social document. In so doing, I shall raise and attempt to answer three questions on which there seems to be no general agreement among scholars but which must be answered satisfactorily if we are to comprehend fully The Deserted Village. These questions are (1) just what message was the poet really trying to transmit to his readers? (2) how completely does the poem express his actual convictions? and (3) what inspired him to consider the condition he was describing as not merely unfortunate but fatal to the health of the nation?

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , September 1944 , pp. 747 - 772
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1944

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References

1 Only a very few of the books and articles on Goldsmith listed in The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (London, 1941; ii, 646–650) touch upon the social side of the poem, and the comments in these few are for the most part very brief. At least partly responsible for directing attention away from Goldsmith's ideas is Boswell's portrayal of the poet as shallow (see G. Birkbeck Hill, ed., Life of Johnson [London, 1887], i, 413–414, ii, 196, 215, 235, iii, 252. Another factor undoubtedly is the rather extensive borrowing that Goldsmith engaged in, leading to the assumption that he had few ideas of his own.

2 J. W. M. Gibbs, ed., The Works of Oliver Goldsmith (London, 1885–86), ii, 31–32. All references to Works in this article are to Gibbs's edition.

3 C. B. Tinker, “Figures in a Dream,” Yale Review, xvii (1928), 672.

4 R. S. Crane, “The ‘Deserted Village’ in Prose (1762),” LTLS (1927), p. 607. Historians and economists describing the agricultural revolution frequently refer to the poem as memorializing the injustices which inevitably attended the enclosure system in agriculture. See W. E. H. Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1892–93), vii, 254, and E. Lipson, The Economic History of England (London, 1931), ii, 408.

5 R. P. Boas and B. M. Hahn, Social Backgrounds of English Literature (Boston, 1931), p. 183. Goldsmith's lack of understanding of these changes, they say, makes him “valueless as a political thinker.'-

6 ll. 103–104.

7 ll. 305–308.

8 ll. 309–336 and 337–344.

9 R. S. Crane, New Essays by Oliver Goldsmith (Chicago, 1927), p. 116.

10 Figures on British trade are compiled from John M'Arthur's Financial and Political Facts of the Eighteenth and Present Century, 4th ed. (London, 1803), pp. 274–276, and George Chalmers's An Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great Britain During the Present and Four Preceding Reigns (London, 1782), p. 37.

11 See Sir William Petty, Political Arithmetick (1691) in Several Essays in Political Arithtnetick, 4th ed. (London, 1755), pp. 113, 126; Charles Davenant, Discourses on the Public Revenues, and of the Trade of England (1698) in Sir Charles Whitworth, ed., Political and Commercial Works (London, 1771), i, 345–393, ii, 1–76. This explanation perhaps oversimplifies but certainly does not misrepresent mercantilism, for the bulk of mercantilist literature rests on these premises despite variations in specific arguments concerning balance of trade, wealth, circulation, and related points. See Jacob Viner, Studies in the Theory of International Trade (New York, 1937), pp. 1–118.

12 Social England (New York, 1894–97), v, 118.

13 See Thomas Parnell, “Queen Anne's Peace,” Poetical Works, ed. G. A. Aitken, (London, 1894), p. 141 (lines not numbered); James Thomson, Seasons (“Spring,” ll. 66–76; “Summer,” ll. 137–138, 422–431, 1005–1012; “Autumn,” ll. 1130–142; “Winter,” ll. 960–988); Edward Young, “Imperium Pelagi, a Naval Lyric,” Poetical Works, ed. J. Mitford, (London, 1896), the preface and ii, 347, 351 (Unes not numbered); Alexander Pope, Windsor Forest, ll. 397–406. In this connection note C. A. Moore, “Whig Panegyric Verse, 1700–1760,” PMLA, xli (1926), 362–401 (especially pp. 368–389). This article was brought to my attention by R. S. Crane and Arthur Friedman, whose helpful suggestions on several points I wish to acknowledge.

14 Sir Esme Wingfield-Stratford, The History of British Civilization (New York, 1932), p. 683.

15 E.g., Pope's comments in Imitations of Horace, Bk. i, Eps. i, vi, and Moral Essays, Ep. iii, see also Lecky, op. cit., iii, 369, and Lord Macaulay's essay on Lord Clive.

16 This king dared even to refuse to elevate commercial leaders to the peerage; see Lecky, op. cit., vii, 185.

17 Particularly did the luxury of the Nabobs excite controversy; ibid., p. 193.

18 See Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye (Oxford, 1924), i, xcvi–xcvii and passim in the introduction; also Dr. Johnson's definition in A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755), s.v. Luxury: “Voluptuousness; addictedness to pleasure.”

19 See André Morize, L'Apologie du Luxe au XVIIIe Siècle et “Le Mondain” de Voltaire (Paris, 1909), passim.

20 E.g., Mandeville, op. cit., i, lx, 10, 18, 104–107.

21 E.g., Sir James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Œconomy (London, 1767), i, 31–34.

22 E.g., John Dennis, Vice and Luxury Public Mischiefs: or Remarks on a Book Intitul'd The Fable of the Bees (London, 1724), p. 53. Obviously, however, each such thinker had his own standard of judging temperance and luxury.

23 “The Irish Background of Goldsmith's Social and Political Thought,” PMLA, lii (1937), 405–411.

24 See Goldsmith's definition of the middle class in the words of the Vicar, Works, i, 151.

25 E.g., Malachi Postlethwayt, Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (n.p., 1766), vol. i, s.v. Colonies; and a letter from a Kentish freeholder to the editor of Gentleman's Magazine, xxxvi (1766), 522–524. (The letter is abusive in its description of the poor farmers.)

26 W. F. Gallaway, Jr., “The Sentimentalism of Goldsmith,” PMLA, xlviii (1933), 1180. Letter xi appears in Works, iii, 41–43.

27 Gibbs, Works, iii, 43, n. 1; James Prior, The Life of Oliver Goldsmith (London, 1837), ii, 247–248; John Forster, The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, 5th ed. (London, 1871), II, 116. R. S. Crane, in New Essays, p. xxxviii, states that these essays make it possible to read Letter xi “without feeling, as several commentators have done, that it is either an isolated or an insincere expression of its author's thought.”

28 A. L. Sells, Les Sources Françaises de Goldsmith (Paris, 1924), p. 120; H. N. Fairchild, The Noble Savage (New York, 1928), p. 68; R. B. Sewall, “Rousseau's Second Discourse in England from 1755 to 1762,” PQ, xvii (1938), 100.

29 “Man, while yet unreduced by laws, and struggling with the beasts of the forest for divided dominion, while yet savage and solitary, was scarce an object whose actions were worth transmitting to posterity” (Introduction to Guthrie's A General History of the World [London, 1764], in Works, v, 134); “What a poor contemptible being is the naked savage, standing on the beach of the ocean, and trembling at its tumults!” (An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature [London, 1774], i, 231). Similar statements abound in his historical and literary writings.

30 The definition is a combination of phrases from the second and third paragraphs of the Letter.

31 The Roman History, from the Foundation of the City of Rome, to the Destruction of the Western Empire (London, 1769), i, 389–390, ii, 316; and The History of England, from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II (London, 1771), ii, 107, iii, 245.

32 Works, iii, 309 (Letter lxxxii).

33 Of course, excess might reach such a point that even poetry would lose its power over men (cf. The Deserted Village, ll. 407–410); for poetry, the first art to rise in a civilized nation, was the first art to decay when a nation became too intemperate, materialistic, and corrupt (Roman History, i, 249).

34 A. L. Sells, loc. cit.; Gallaway, loc. cit., says Goldsmith used “arguments inherited from Mandeville”; R. W. Seitz compares the Letter with Lettre evi of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, in his unpublished dissertation, Goldsmith's History of England, 1771, in Relation to its Sources (Yale, 1926), p. 81; H. N. Fairchild makes the comparison with Johnson, loc. cit.

35 Works, iii, 494.

36 Mandeville, op. cit., i, 107.

37 Ibid., i, lx.

38 Ibid., i, cxiv-cxlvi; and Morize, op. cit., p. 68 f.

39 Voltaire added an apology for the libertine way of life (Le Mondain) and an argument that luxury was bad for small nations (Dictionnaire Philosophique, s.v. Luxe); Montesquieu viewed luxury as necessary to the power of the prince (Lettres Persanes, cvi); Johnson ruled out intemperate drinking and immorality (Life, ii, 170; iii, 56, i. 2, 292).

40 Though there is no direct external evidence that Goldsmith drew his ideas from Hume's essay (which was published in Edinburgh in 1752, in a volume entitled Political Discourses, while he was a student there), yet a paralleling of passages from Letter xi with passages from this essay shows a similarity of ideas, examples, and method of presentation almost too great to be accidental. Goldsmith apparently knew Hume's writings well. His chief debt, of course, he incurred while composing his histories of England with the aid of the Scottish historian's more pretentious works (History of England, 1771, i, vi–vii). But long before, he had paid tribute to Hume in The Monthly Review as a “man of taste and learning” (May, 1757; see Works iv, 253), and in The Bee had considered him as worthy of a seat in the stagecoach of fame, despite a disagreement in matters of religion (“The Fame Machine,” Works ii, 393). It is not unlikely that Goldsmith's acquaintance with Hume's works might have begun in Edinburgh when the essay appeared, for Political Discourses was the only work of Hume's that was popular from the start (T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, The Philosophical Works of David Hume [London, 1898], i, 4, “My Own Life”). I cannot make a positive statement that Hume's essay was the source for Letter xi, however, because the purposes of the two were different and because there is no exact verbal repetition.

41 Philosophical Works, iii, 300.

42 See e.g., London Magazine, xxiii (1754), 389–391, 410; xxxiii (1764), 619–621; xli (1772), 321–322; xlii (1773), 68–70.

43 See Works, iv, 273–274 (Review of Hanway's Essay on Tea), iii, 18, i, 83.

44 An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (London, 1757), p. 39. See Goldsmith's Works, iv, 62–63, iii, 263, 371–373.

45 Works, iii, 380–381; cf. History of England, ii, 204–205, 265, and An History of England, in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son (London, 1764; hereafter referred to as Letters), i, 199–200.

46 These terms appear with almost monotonous frequency in his histories, particularly those of Greece and Rome.

47 Works, iii, 121–122, 129–131, 180–181, 322–323, 325.

48 Ibid., ii, 382 (this Letter of The Bee was taken from the Encyclopédie, but Goldsmith undoubtedly agreed with the views or he would not have published them as his own [see LTLS, May 11, 1933]), iii, 87–88, 187, 263–266; New Essays, pp. 81–84.

49 Works, ii, 377, III, 326, 423; History of England, iv, 364.

50 History of England, i, 218; Letters, ii, 144, i, 75.

51 The Traveller, ll. 387–388; History of England, iv, 382.

52 Works, iii, 274.

53 Ibid., pp. 30, 102, 252, 522 n. 1; also The Collected Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. K. C. Balderston (Cambridge, Eng., 1928), pp. 16, 27–28, 37–38, 42–43, 44–46, 54, 57, 60–61, 66–67.

54 Works, ii, 387–388, 405, ii, 264.

55 The Traveller, ll. 371–376.

56 History of England, iii, 276 (cf. 216); Letters, ii, 28–29. Cf. Locke, “Of the State of Nature” in Of Civil Government, Works (London, 1812), v, 339 f.; also Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (London, 1765), i, 43.

57 Letters, ii, 29.

58 Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle, prepared for the press by G. Scott (Mount Vernon, N. Y., 1928–34), vi, 130.

59 E.g., Works, iii, 188–189, 298, iv, 24; New Essays, pp. 15–16; Letters, i, 8.

60 Works, iii, 424. Cf. pp. 428–429 and i, 198–199.

61 Animated Nature, i, 335–336, iii, 8, 375, iv, 182, vii, 56; cf. Works, iii, 338.

62 Works, iii, 134.

63 Ibid., i, 150, iii, 273, 411; Letters, ii, 196–197; History of England, iv, 339–340.

64 Letters, ii, 198. Cf. Animated Nature, v, 207.

65 Op. cit., iv, 17–19.

66 The Traveller, ll. 385–386; Works, iii, 298–299. Cf. Letters, i, 173, ii, 52; History of England, i, 143, iv, 83.

67 Works, i, 282.

68 Ibid., p. 199.

69 Ibid., iii, 429. Cf. Roman History, ii, 349; Letters, i, 139; History of England, i, 332, ii, 128.

70 The Traveller, ll. 371–372; Works, i, 261, iii, 368. Cf. R. W. Seitz's interpretation in “Some of Goldsmith's Second Thoughts on English History,” MP, xxxv (1938), 279–288.

71 Ibid., iii, 341; Animated Nature, v, 380–381, Letters, ii, 20.

72 Works, i, 151.

73 ffistory of England, iii, 248–249 (cf. i, vii–viii); Letters, i, 262, ii, 8, 16; Works, i, 151–152, iii, 190; New Essays, p. 15.

74 Works, iii, 21, i, 151–152.

75 ll. 267–268.

76 See below, pp. 764–765.

77 The Traveller, 1. 392; History of England, i, vii–viii.

78 Works, i, 149–152.

79 Letters, ii, 16; cf. p. 8.

80 History of England, i, viii, iii, 248–249.

81 E.g., Letter, i, 123–124, 208, 274, 295, 299, ii, 69; History of England, i, 375, ii, 28, 277–278, iii, 107, 153–154.

82 See New Essays, p. 87, n. 1.

83 Pp. 150–153.

84 Works, iii, 91–94.

85 See above, note 81.

86 Letters, ii, 69.

87 Works, i, 150. Cf. New Essays, pp. 121–122.

88 Letters, ii, 242.

89 Ibid., pp. 192, 228, 241–242, 254; History of England, iv, 342; Works, iii, 64–65, 94, v, 32; New Essays, pp. 93, 95.

90 Letters, iii, 234.

91 Ibid., pp. 87, 185, 201, 224; History of England, iv, 83, 347, 376; The Traveller, ll. 303–316; Works, iii, 213, 425, v, 9, 52.

92 Works, i, 150. But see also the contradictory suggestions in Animated Nature, vi, 283–284, and Works, ii, 386.

93 R. W. Seitz, “Goldsmith and The Annual Register,” MP, xxxi (1933), 190.

94 English Society in the Eighteenth Century As Influenced from Oversea (New York, 1924), p. 182.

95 See James Prior, op. cit., ii, 257.

96 New Essays, pp. 116 f.

97 Ibid., p. 120, n. 2.

98 See John Robinson, The Village Oppress'd (London, 1771), p. iv; Gentleman's Magazine xl (1771), 271 f. (a review of Goldsmith's poem in which the reviewer agrees that villages are being depopulated but blames conditions on industrial migration: the people leave the plough for the loom, he says); London Magazine, xli (1772), 481 (an agreement with qualifications); and Lipson, op. cit., ii, 395–418.

99 Works, ii, 32 (italics my own).

100 J. B. Black, The Art of History (New York, 1926), pp. 14, 21–22.

101 “The declaimers against it [luxury] have generally drawn comparisons betwixt the present times, and the declining ages of the Roman empire” (John Robinson, op. cit., p. iv).

102 New Essays, p. 123.

103 ll. 295–302.

104 ll. 283–285.

105 Sat., xiv, 140–149, 166–177. Cf. Sat., vii, 188–189, ix, 54–55, 60–62.

108 Ep., lxxxix, 20. Cf. Ep., xc, 39.

107 Ed., i, 63–77.

108 See his lives of Tiberius Gracchus and Lucullus.

109 Bell. Cat., xii, 1–5, lii, 22; Bell. Iug., xxi, 3–10, xlii, 1.

110 xviii, 7 (chap. 2).

111 Ibid., 35 (chap. 6).

112 I have brought into the discussion only the most pertinent of the classical comments. For further details, see W. E. Heitland, Agricola (Cambridge, Eng., 1921), passim; Adolf Schulten, Die römischen Grundherrschaften; eine Agrarhistorische Untersuchung (Weimar, 1896), pp. 12–13; and G. M. Butel-Dumont, Recherches Historiques et Critiques sur l'Administration publique et privée des terres chez les Romains; depuis le commencement de la République jusqu'au siècle de Jules-César (Paris, 1779), pp. 51–65, 360–367.

113 See J. W. Stubbs, The History of the University of Dublin from its Foundation to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Dublin and London, 1889), p. 205.

114 John Forster, op. cit., ii, 5, 11, 22.

115 Caroline Goad, Horace in the English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1918), pp. 5–6.

116 Boswell's Life of Johnson, i, 411.

117 I, xiii.

118 ll. 65–66.

119 ll. 57–64.

120 Tenney Frank, An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome (Baltimore, 1940), v (Rome and Italy of the Empire), 175: “We may well question whether ‘latifundia had destroyed Italy’ except in sermons.”

121 Roman History, ii, 501.

122 The Collected Letters, p. 84.

123 London Magazine, xli (1772), 481.