‘Critical Reception before 1900’ presents the early history of Goldsmith’s critical reception and surveys concerns which recur in critical treatments. Two themes in particular recur. The first is that of an elegant versatility that fails to sustain its genius. A second critical theme sees apparently autobiographical episodes in Goldsmith’s works flow in to fill the gaps in his biography. Anecdotes of his character proliferated after his death in 1774, and 200 years later G. S. Rousseau would declare Goldsmith’s life to be the major obstacle to in-depth criticism of his writings. From the early nineteenth century a fondly sentimentalized authorial figure dominated responses to Goldsmith’s fiction and to the landscapes of his major poems. Some critics did consider the sociopolitical and moral arguments of Goldsmith’s works: his critiques of luxury and his comparative surveys of human happiness remained active in his familiar appeal to Victorian readers.

Prospect Poetry’ situates Goldsmith’s poem The Traveller, or A Prospect of Society (1764) at the confluence of various literary genres and show how its hybridity contributes to its innovative and influential qualities. Goldsmith’s poem modifies the prospect poem by decoupling the observer from any sense of belonging to the landscape, instead developing the figure of the wanderer that comes to inhabit many prose travelogues as well as Romantic epics. It also develops the political tendencies of its various precursor genres by exploring the relationship between individual, family, nation, and empire.

Almost immediately after its publication in 1770, writers recognized The Deserted Village as a politically radical poem. This view is reflected in several imitations published in Britain in the decades immediately following. Writers in the British colonies in North America and the early United States adapted the poem to other ends, replacing the temporal relationship between the two Auburns in Goldsmith’s poem with a spatial relationship. This substitution allowed them to read The Deserted Village as a description of England and the Auburn of old as a representation of the promise of the emerging nation. This chapter traces the afterlife of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, his only poem to have had a considerable influence on other poets, from late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century reworkings in Britain and America through to contemporary reimaginings by Irish poets.

‘Editions’ focuses on posthumous editions of Goldsmith’s works. It traces the history of editions as a reflection of a gradual shift in Goldsmith’s popularity outside of university curricula. Editions in English and in translation are surveyed. A final section on academic editions begins with the pioneering work of Sir James Prior and Austin Dobson before considering the apotheosis of textual criticism on Goldsmith in the late 1960s. The chapter concludes with some reflections on the movement of editions of Goldsmith out of the home and into the university library, and out of the popular imagination and into the academy.

Pastoral as Goldsmith’s model has been overlooked because literary historians still commonly assume that the last notable pastorals were published by Pope in 1709, and that pastoral poetry thereafter declined, or was turned into a mock form by Gay and Swift. In retrospect we see that the old genre system was breaking down, that some traditional genres (e.g., Georgic) were rising in importance and others declining, that new genres and subgenres and mixed forms were appearing. But that was not clear in 1750, when Goldsmith began his literary career and was looking about for models. This chapter surveys the models upon which Goldsmith drew and proposes that, in The Deserted Village, Goldsmith returns to Virgil and to the roots of English pastoral.

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.