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This first modern scholarly edition of the letters of Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) sets the author of The Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village, and She Stoops to Conquer in a rich context, showing how Goldsmith's Irish identity was marked and complicated by cosmopolitan ambition. He was at the very heart of Grub Street culture and the Georgian theatre, and was a founding member of Dr Johnson's Literary Club; his circle included Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, George Colman and Hester Piozzi. Containing a detailed introduction and extensive notes, this edition is essential to those wishing to know more about Goldsmith the man and the writer, and provides a rich and suggestive nexus for understanding the cultural cross-currents of the literary Enlightenment in eighteenth-century London.
Oliver Goldsmith has a claim to be the only eighteenth-century author who wrote canonical works in prose fiction, poetry, and drama. An Irish writer working at the centre of the British and Irish Enlightenments, with all the rich complications of identity this entailed, he authored The Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village, and She Stoops to Conquer, works that number among the greatest literary productions of the century. He was also a major historian, biographer, journalist, and translator operating at the heart of literary London. Through four sections covering Goldsmith's Life and Career; Social, Cultural, and Intellectual Contexts; Literary Contexts; and Critical Fortunes and Afterlives, this volume engages with a wide range of illuminating topics that will allow both new and experienced readers of Goldsmith to understand more deeply the impact he had on his times and the powerful influence he exerted on subsequent literary culture.
The correspondence of authors became increasingly recognized as a form of literary output throughout the eighteenth century. Compared to the output of other significant writers of the eighteenth century such as associates Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, only a small corpus of Goldsmith’s letters remains. This chapter gives an overview of Goldsmith’s extant correspondence, places it into discrete clusters, and considers why so few letters remain. The chapter suggests that the brevity of Goldsmith’s life prevented him from developing an equivalent epistolary vocation to his peers.