This chapter shows how ‘Liberty’ gained an ideological colouring in the eighteenth century largely due to its capacity to embrace a number of artistic/political perspectives, from an opposition to the legacy of anti-Walpole sentiments derived from centralising governmental influence, to an aesthetic reversal of taste away from generic prescription to a specific association with Whiggish denial of some inherited property rights. Goldsmith is rarely regarded as a deep political thinker, yet he mixed with several who could be thought to be polemicists for Liberty. This chapter shows how his poetry (The Traveller and The Deserted Village), plays (The Good Natur’d Man and She Stoops to Conquer) and his prose (The Citizen of the World) gave voice to his interrogation of English libertarian myths.

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.