This chapter outlines how Goldsmith’s friendships and feuds were rooted in his professional life as a writer. Brief summaries of his relationships with Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and Joshua Reynolds are included as are his friendships with lesser known Irish figures such as John Carteret Pilkington and Edmund Purdon. The chapter also considers more fraught relationships such as those with Hugh Kelly and William Kenrick. The centrality of literary works such as She Stoops to Conquer, The Good Natur’d Man, and The Traveller to the evolution of both friendships and feuds is detailed.

The Literary Club, often simply known as ‘The Club’, was founded by Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds in 1764. The Club has been understood as the epitome of a strain of Enlightenment clubbability, modelled on earlier eighteenth-century ideals of conversation and channelling them into a new form of argument-as-sport. However, Goldsmith’s experiences of being often ridiculed at meetings can help counterbalance heroic accounts of the club by foregrounding a tendency to cruelty in this celebrated institution. This chapter provides a more balanced account of the Club than we are used to, one that insists on Goldsmith’s centrality to its activities, not only as a founding member and successful product of its cultural networking, but also as a figure who exposes the dual nature of the Club.

The sister arts, a concept linking poetry to painting, flourished during Goldsmith’s lifetime. Stemming from the ekphrasis of the ancients, the idea of the sister arts owes to the continental academies of painting during the seicento. Goldsmith became heir to the idea when he was named Professor of Ancient History in the Royal Academy of Painting. Founding president Reynolds exhibited a portrait of Goldsmith at the academy in 1770, the same year that Goldsmith published The Deserted Village. Two years later Reynolds based an allegorical character sketch called Resignation on lines from the poem. From its illustrated title page to its stirring peroration The Deserted Village reflects a continuing appeal to the mind’s eye, an appeal not lost on illustrators from Thomas Bewick and James Gillray to Francis Wheatley and William Hamilton, and many others. Their sketches of Goldsmith’s villagers remain engraved on the imagination of generations. This chapter explores the milieux that link Goldsmith to the visual arts, from his affiliation with the Royal Academy to his cosmopolitan interests.

This monograph closes with a reading of Sterne’s extra-textual collaboration with Joshua Reynolds and William Hogarth, on frontispieces for his Sermons of Mr. Yorick as well as for Tristram Shandy. These images were both free-standing as well as bookish ones bound within Sterne’s works, and served as important marketable visuals to prospective buyers. This final discussion of design elements beyond the narrative proper of Tristram Shandy demonstrates how, for Sterne, his literary project spanned print media, constructing an image of the man and the book as a print commodity.