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The Irish Background of Goldsmith's Social and Political Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert W. Seitz
Robert W. Seitz*
Affiliation:
University of Buffalo
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Extract

It is plain to the attentive reader of Goldsmith that he was not only in the habit of repeating favorite phrases, but also that he returned again and again to a few favorite ideas. Many, if not most, of these ideas, I maintain, were, if not already formed before he left Ireland, at least predetermined by the traits of character and of mind that he developed there.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 52 , Issue 2 , June 1937 , pp. 405 - 411
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1937

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References

page 405 note 1 Cf. his advice to his brother Maurice “to quit such an unprofitable calling” as that of attempting to live like a gentleman. See Prior, Life of Oliver Goldsmith (London, 1837), ii, 224.

page 405 note 2 Professor F. A. Pottle, editor of the Private Papers of James Boswell, has communicated to me the following remark of Johnson, recorded under the date of October 22,1773 in an unpublished portion of the Tour to the Hebrides: “Goldsmith would get drunk and boast of it, if it had been with a little whore or so who had allowed him to go in a coach with her.”

page 405 note 3 Collected Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. K. C. Balderston (Cambridge, 1928), p. 53.

page 405 note 4 Weekly Magazine (December, 1759), p. 12; cf. M. P., xxxii (1935), 291 f.

page 405 note 5 Journal of the National Literary Society of Ireland, i, part ii, 104.

page 405 note 6 A Tour in Ireland, ed. Constantia Maxwell (Cambridge, 1925), p. 37. Neither Goldsmith, nor (presumably) his uncle, would have probed deeply enough to see with Burke that “‘Connivance is the relaxation of slavery, not the definition of libertyl’”

page 405 note 7 Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. J. W. M. Gibbs (1884–86), iii, 188.

page 405 note 8 Collected Letters, p. 17.

page 405 note 9 Forster, Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith (London, 1877), i, 379–381.

page 405 note 10 See ibid., ii, 70–71.

page 405 note 11 Cf. the Fiddleback adventure; Collected Letters, pp. xxiii-xxix, 170–176.

page 405 note 12 Forster, ii, 117.

page 405 note 13 See New Essays by Oliver Goldsmith, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago, 1927), pp. 116–119.

page 405 note 14 In the dedication to the Deserted Village: Works, ii, 31.

page 405 note 15 By Arthur Friedman. See M.P., xxxii, (1935), 281–299.

page 405 note 16 Weekly Magazine (December, 1759), p. 8.—This passage is reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

page 405 note 17 See New Essays, xxxix-xl, 116–124.

page 405 note 18 See, for example, Collected Letters, pp. 44–46; 61 and note 1.

page 405 note 19 Collected Letters, p. 45.

page 405 note 20 Ibid., pp. xxx-xxxiii, 50.

page 405 note 21 See Review of English Studies, v (1929), 421–422.

page 405 note 22 Works, ii, 431–432.

page 405 note 23 It should be noted that the villagers in the essay had “followed the primeval profession of agriculture for several generations.”

page 405 note 24 In an unpublished lecture delivered at Yale University about 1928. To this lecture I owe not only the original impulse towards this study, but also a number of points—particularly in connection with the Deserted Village —in my argument. Professor Balderston, however, is not to be held responsible for my conclusions.

page 405 note 25 They held, at least, that the “disorders” that the poem “laments” were imaginary. (See the dedication to the Deserted Village.)

page 405 note 26 New Essays, p. 118, note 1.

page 405 note 27 Goldsmith, doubtless recalling his rôle of Citizen of the World, writes in the same essay that “The Great, in themselves, perhaps, are not so bad as they are generally represented”; but his rancor against great rich men increased rather than diminished with the years. Cf. his remark that the wealth which the nabobs “plundered from slaves in India, they were resolved to employ in making slaves at home” (History of England [1771], iv, 382).

page 405 note 28 It should be noted that the only motive which he anywhere mentions for enclosing land occurs in this essay, where he writes of “enclosures destined for the purposes of amusement or luxury.” That there was an agrarian problem which involved change in the methods of farming and redistribution of labor he was apparently unaware. He lays the reduction of the husbandman in part also to the occupation of lands by “some general undertaker,” a typically Irish phenomenon.

page 405 note 29 See, for example, History of England (London, 1771), iii, 248–249.

page 405 note 30 Forster, ii, 204. See also History of England, ii, 131–133.

page 405 note 31 Private Papers of James Boswell (privately printed, 1928–34), vi, 130.

page 405 note 32 Goldsmith owed, I think, a good deal to the Irish peasantryfor his views on the penal laws. The argument against capital punishment for theft in the Vicar, though couched in “philosophic' language, resembles closely that of a group of peasants who, when questioned by an early nineteenth-century traveller about their failure to use the criminal laws against a thief, replied, “‘Plaze your honour, would you have us hang a man for stealing a bit of mutton?’” See Edward Wakefield, Account of Ireland (London, 1812), ii, 748. The Vicar argues (Works, i, 197–198) that natural law gives him no right to take away a man's life for stealing a horse. Edward Wakefield would doubtless have been as uncomprehending of Goldsmith's lack of regard for the sanctity of British law as he was of the peasants' attitude.