There is a critical tendency to see Goldsmith now as a dramatist, a novelist, perhaps an essayist – with seldom more than a nod to the actual format in which much of his work was done, and without which he quite possibly would have starved. Goldsmith wrote, willingly, in both forms simultaneously, while apparently fending off personal ambivalence about both. Goldsmith’s wide-ranging periodical and reviewing work is accepted as helpful to the Goldsmith scholar, in that it allows us to theorize the development of his interest in the stage, in French literature, in aesthetic theory, in orientalized subjects, and, though in more indirect ways, in fiction as well. This chapter demonstrates that his career is an exceptional window into the importance of periodical writing to individual authors as well as the culture of reviewing writ large.

This chapter gives an account of Goldsmith’s relationship with the book trade in general, but more specifically with the booksellers who assisted, and sometimes troubled, his access to the republic of letters. It traces his ascent in the business of writing from his work for Ralph Griffiths as an anonymous writer of reviews through to his later, acclaimed works and his relationship, sometimes conflictual, with the ‘fame machine’ powered by the eighteenth-century book trade.